JiliK's Blog

Steam Autumn Sale 2011 Pick-ups

2012-01-09T14:14:00.000-08:00

With a big backlog already, especially of Steam games and the big Holiday Sale coming up, the last thing I needed around Thanksgiving time was a third fully-fledged Steam sale this year. Gabe though, obviously thought otherwise. Who was I to argue?

Day 1: Wednesday, 23 November 2011

Critical Mass €1.12
Cthulhu Saves the World & Breath of Death VII Pack €0.68
I-Fluid €1.25
Insecticide: Part 1 €0.74
Madballs in... Babo:Invasion €2.24
Musaic Box €1.24
The Oddbox €3.74
Roogoo €0.74
Turba €2.25

Day one's purchases were mostly heavily discounted indie games I've had my eye on for a while. I know the conventinal wisdom is to wait for daily deals, but if these were dalies later the savings would only be a matter of cents. I'm particullary interested in trying out Cthulhu Saves the World here. Any coverage I seen of it makes it look awesome, though I can't help feeling that I should get around to playing FFVI and chrono Trigger first for a bit of context. Not too difficult as they've both been languishing in my backlog for about a year.

The only daily I bought on day one was The Oddbox. Last I heard Stranger's Wrath still wasn't fully patched, but for that price, I'm willing to take a chance on on, in the hope they'll get it running properly at some stage. Am I crazy or is the plan to update the Oddbox version to HD version from PSN at some stage too? If so, this could work out pretty well for me in the end.

Day 3: Friday, 25 November 2011

Eversion €1.00
Garry's Mod €2.49
The Mawesome Pack €2.99
Serious Sam HD: Gold Edition €3.99

After skipping day two, I went on to grab the Serious Sam pack from the day three's deals. I've actually had the original versions of both games for a few years now. Quite enjoyed the couple of hours I put into The First Encounter, but now do I pick back up from where I left off there or switch over to the HD version instead? Ah, First World problems.

Eversion looks like a fun, little retro throwback for €1, though I hear it gets kind of weird later on.

I'm not sure I'll get a whole lot out of Garry's Mod - fiddling around with level editor-type stuff isn't really my thing, but €2.50 was certainly the cheapest I've ever seen it going for, so I decided to give it a go. It'll stop me mulling over it's purchase every Steam sale, if nothing else.

The Maw, I've heard mixed things about and I'm not really as big a fan of Twisted Pixel as most people, but €3 for the game and all the DLC seemed like the right price to try it out at.

Day 5: Sunday, 27 November 2011

Doc Clock: Toasted Sandwich of Time €1.25
Red Faction II €1.69
SiN + SiN Episodes: Emergence €3.00
Unreal Gold €2.49

I rounded off my Autumn Sale purchases with Doc Clock: an interesting-looking little puzzle game and a trio of old-ish first person shooters.

I bought the original Red Faction in the 2009 Holiday Sale, only playing it at last a few weeks ago. For the most part, I enjoyed it. It's a pretty competent shooter, taking a lot of inspiration from the original Half-Life. Of course the big gimmick is the G-Mod stuff and whenever I busted through a wall with explosives it never failed to feel a little magical, even ten years after the game came out. Whoever came up with that sequence with the bomb at the ending though can fuck right off though - easily the most frustrating bit of gaming I've had to force myself through in recent years.

Red Faction 2 fared a bit less well critically, but with most of the criticism seemingly levelled at the its short play time, I don't think I have too much to worry about after paying less than €2 for it.

The SiN + SiN: Episodes pack seemed like pretty a good deal at €3. I really don't know much about either game. I remember seeing SiN in a feature on upcoming shooters in an issue of Arcade once and I've often heard Sin Episodes tossed around as an example of the failure of episodic content, but that's about it. I'm having a bit of trouble getting SiN to run at the moment, so maybe that's the way things are going to stay. :D

The original Unreal is something I've wanted to pick up since I first laid my hands on a PC in 1998. I remember reading an article at the time on the gaming section of RTE's teletext service raving about the graphics, which got me quite excited about it at the time, but running it on an outdated 486 with no graphics acceleration wasn't really going to fly.

Sale Total: €32.90

If I did my maths right, the total of all that comes to €32.90 - certainly more than I've spent in past Thanksgiving sales, but this is the first really conventional one they've done with store-wide discounts as well as daily deals. I thought they really delivered a nice selection of deals this time, especially on older stuff like SiN, Insecticide, The Maw etc., stuff I've been interested in for a while, but that never seemed to drop much at sale time. Overall, I'm pretty happy with my haul to Euro ratio, my ever-increasing tower of a backlog: less so.

Archive Raiding: On a WAV of Mutilation

2012-01-07T18:21:00.000-08:00

Last month, I waded into the sewers of my PC-abusing past and dredged up a bunch of really dumb, early photoshops for all to see. Having done that though, it'd be a dereliction of duty on my part if I didn't go back and do the same to set of WAV files I made around the same time.

We're going to start off with a bunch of mostly uh, "comedy" skits, made in 1999 with sound clips from the couple of PC games I had at the time. After that we're moving onto my year 2000 output, mostly made up of of unused samples for later inclusion in horrible dance music, one even featuring a rare vocal appearance by a certain JiliK (doing what's meant to be a Scottish accent).

Only heard by about two other people ever, the following represents pretty much the entirety of my adventures in sound editing. Lister discretion is advised.

Siren Fest

Last Modified: 15 August 1999, 15:32:42 | Download

A cacophonous little ditty made up entirely of siren sound effects from SimCity 2000. Kind of ambitious for a first effort, I guess, but the shareware version of Cool Edit 2000 I was rocking at the time certainly made things easier. Man, remember Cool Edit? Ah, the 90's.

School Explosion

Last Modified: 20 June 1999, 17:53:16 | Download

Another wav constructed entirely of SimCity sound effects, this was my interpretation of a school being blown to smithereens. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to leave the country before the anti-terrorist squad find me.

Army Dude

Last Modified: 11 August 1999, 18:27:06 | Download

Constructed using sound files from Atomic Games' Close Combat, this is some 4chan-level shit, the exact details of which I'll leave to your imagination.:D

Sheep Gets it From Army Dude

Last Modified: 20 July 1999, 15:34:04 | Download

Can love bloom, even on a battlefield? Not when it's of the ovine variety I'm afraid.

Super Mario Bros. Theme...Remix?

Last Modified: 11 July 2000, 15:35:24 | Download

Starting off with a wav file ripped from a SMB ROM, this may be the worst, laziest bit of remixing known to man. Why I haven't been offered to helm a current day Ministry of Sound compilation remains a mystery.

Haemorrhoids

Last Modified: 25 November 2000, 17:47:12 | Download

This is a live recording (on an over-sized karaoke microphone) of me and a mate goofing around, making a sample to be incorporated in some terrible dance tune at a later date. Prior to this, I had taken a recording he made previously and danceified it, which he was quite into, so here we were going for round two. The dialogue here was all his idea. I've got a feeling it might be referencing something, but I still have no clue what.

Sadly, I never got around to using this in anything. Well, apart from...

Hemorrhoids (Remixed)

Last Modified: 26 October 2000, 19:07:16 | Download

...this, I guess.

Mr. Mackey

Last Modified: 08 August 2000, 22:20:06 | Download

Another slightly remixed, unused sample. This one's derived from a sound clip that was available on the South Park web site in 2000.

Tata for Now

Last Modified: 16 June 2000, 17:29:46 | Download

I've mentioned before that I started listening to Limp Bizkit in 2000. Well, here's a sample of the man responsible for said unpleasantness, then Radio Kerry DJ, Kieran Horan. I was really into his show at the time and every night he'd sign off with "TTFN - tata for now and, of course, YTYTK - you're to young to know", which I thought was pretty damn cool.

I was determined to record that sign-off somehow, to use in the basic-ass music mixing program I was toying around with at the time. Much to my dismay, I didn't have a whole lot of opportunity to do so as he was moving shortly to another station, one that I wouldn't be able to pick up. After several failed attempts, I finally managed to grab the only half of the sign-off he did, on what may have been his last RK show, by pushing my ridiculous karaoke microphone against my Walkman headphones and cranking the volume to the max.

After all that effort, this is the first time I've used this recording anywhere, for anything.
---
And that's it, at least for now. Just like my Protoshops (TM), all this stuff kind of came to an end in mid-late 2000 as I got more and more invested into my crappy little web site. I will get back to that shitty dance music I've mentioned several times at some stage, but that's going to take a little more preparation and a lot more of this. Till then this is DJ JiliK signing off. R-r-r-r-r-r-r-rewind!

Halloween Treats 2011

2011-12-14T19:05:00.000-08:00

Just in time for Christmas, let's take a look at some of the Halloween treats currently filling up a trolley-based bargain bin next to your local supermarket checkouts. Sadly, I didn't get the chance to pick up a bunch of candy this year, but I did manage to grab a few new Halloween-themed treats, as well as some genuinely terrifying pop merchandise. It is indeed "time for scary cake", so let's get munching.

Smarties Jack-o'-lantern

The loneliest Halloween candy in the world, here we have a pumpkin-shaped chocolate shell filled with mini Smarties. I quite like the presentation of this, and the Smarties inside are as good as ever, but the fairly thin, bland shell doesn't really add much to them. Buy yourself a tube of Smarties instead. 2/5

Mr. Kipling Demon Slices

Texture-wise, I quite like these; The sponge is nice and springy and the frosting is soft and smooth - perfectly engineered for rapid cake ingestion. Taste-wise though, they're awful. The raspberry filling is fine, but the sponge is far too sweet and the chocolate and raspberry flavoured frosting is just nasty. 1/5

Cadbury Cinder Toffee Flavoured Cake Bars

As much as I like Cadbury's chocolate, their cake offshoots rarely hit the spot for me. Like all of those, the chocolate coating here has the same watered-down Cadbury's taste. The sponge isn't nearly spongy enough either, with a slightly dry, slight powdery texture. What redeems these cake bars completely though is the filling, which is a deliciously rich, toffee-favoured affair. If you find these hanging around anywhere still, I heartily recommend them. 4/5

Cadbury Scary Orange Flavoured Cake Bars

Basically the same bars as above, but with a similarly rich orange jelly filling. Decent enough, but the filling isn't nearly orangey enough for my liking though. Also, not that scary. 3/5

Jedward Popping Chocolate Bars

Not a Halloween treat, but horrifying nonetheless, pop dimwits Jedward now have a licensed chocolate bar. But, O-M-G, like, a plain chocolate bar would be like, soooooo boring, so they threw a couple of pop rocks in there too; At last, everyone can experience the taste sensation of Jedward exploding in their mouths. To be fair, this is actually a pretty decent quality chocolate bar. The popping action is kind of weak, but Jedward aside, you could definitely do worse. 3/5

Feel free to use my promo code; I don't need it.

Archive Raiding: Protoshops

2011-12-04T15:48:00.000-08:00

(sigh) I have a feeling I'm going to regret this. :D

Back in 1998 and 1999, in between bouts of playing Doom II, I took my first tenuous steps into the world of Photoshopping. Actually, that's not even quite right; I'd never even heard of Photoshop at the time, or of anyone screwing with photos for comedic effect. Hell, I didn't even have the internet at the time. Somehow I arrived at the idea independently, taking taking a bunch of lo-res images and trying to weave them into (mostly offensive) comedy gold with the crudest instrument imaginable: Microsoft Paint.

These shocking(ly bad) images have never been seen on-line, until now:

White House and Durty Nellys
Last Modified: ‎11 ‎August ‎1999, ‏‎19:54:16

This, my friends, is the very first 'shop I ever made. Not very funny, but I think the photo editing is actually fairly decent for a first attempt. Even my Dad was kind of amused by the results. I was pretty proud at the time too, printing this out and sticking it on my bedroom wall afterwards.

For those wondering, Durty Nellys is a semi-famous pub in Co. Clare, one that we visited a couple of years previously while in the area. Both the White House pic and the Durty Nellys one were taken from Mindscape's World Atlas 6.0, which we'd picked up for our then still-new PC in October of 1998.

Satellite on Collision Course
Last Modified: ‎11 ‎August ‎1999, ‏‎19:51:54

In the wake of what's happened since, a satellite crashing into the middle of a city doesn't seem quite that chortle-worthy any more. But I never thought this was really that funny; It was just something seemingly easy to throw together on an idle Sunday morning. I still managed to balls it up though. I couldn't even manage to spell "footage" right. :D

Sadam and Adolf Movie
Last Modified: ‎11 ‎August ‎1999, ‏‎19:49:00

Because nothing says "funny" like crazy-ass dictators. (You can definitely tell I was a big South Park fan at the time.) Having said that, I'd still probably go and see this, mostly just to see what the hell it actually was. I have to imagine the English/Russian/German hybrid language it's apparently in provides a lofty linguistic barrier to get over though.

Stalin Scandal
Last Modified: ‎15 ‎August ‎1999, ‏‎16:25:28

You know what's funnier than dictators in space? Implied bestiality.

I remember throwing this together one Saturday afternoon, showing off to a mate I had over. Man, erasing backgrounds, pixel-by-pixel in Paint - He must have been bored out of his fucking mind. Mind you, this was the same mate I made sit through the whole Ocarina of Time ending. He was probably used to it at that point.

Eiffel Tower
‎Last Modified: 01 ‎January ‎2000, ‏‎15:42:38

Sorry, France. I was just kind of pissed off at being forced to learn French at school at the time. Wrecking your national monument with some crude airbrushing certainly showed those teachers a thing or two though.

If you press your face right up against your monitor, you might be able to see that I copied and pasted several of the people in front of the tower multiple times. I'm not really sure why. I guess I was drunk on photo manipulating power at the time. And why wouldn't I be with a cover-mounted version of Ulead Photo Express now at my disposal?
---
And just like that, we're done. Not too long after I made this, my whole focus shifted over to birthing my atrocious web site on some newly acquired web space and churning out dodgy content for said site. My Protoshopping days were over.

I do remember two more of these that existed at one point though. One was a statement proclaiming the shitiness of the school I was going to at the time, with all the teachers signatures 'shopped in from a sick note I had at the time. The other, which I'm not sure if I actually ever saved, was the Mona Lisa with a Hitler moustache and Nazi armband. Yep, real highbrow stuff; The world will never know what it missed out on.

Great (Cheesy) Moments in Marketing

2011-11-22T16:55:00.000-08:00

So, every now and then the dairy companies here put out an ad to remind people that cheese still exists. Last year they did just that and came out with this...thing:

Now, I wouldn't say I hate children, but the combination of these four photos of this gurning, little ~~bastard~~ angel never fail to send me into a page-eviscerating rage.You know what would be a more effective ad for cheese than pictures of a mugging, little cretin's "cheesy moments"? Anything!

That's not even my only problem with the ad. "Packed in my lunchbox, in a tasty sandwich, or just as a snack - it tastes great any time of the day!" This kid really spun that obvious line of marketing bullshit when they asked him about cheese? And what does that mean anyway? "It tastes great any time of the day" - His favourite thing about cheese is that its flavour isn't time-dependant? That it doesn't taste like poop between six o'clock and seven thirty and scorched pubes after eight?

Looking at just the ad, the "what's yours?" also seems to stick out as a bit of weird grammar, given the fact that the kid has multiple cheesy, irritating moments shown here. What's actually happening here is that the ad is doing an really poor job of asking people to submit their own photos, to a contest running on the website at the very bottom. They really expected people to decipher this on their own?

I guess a few people must have though; It's still up at the moment, with a page of genuine-looking, winning pictures on it. I would have entered myself too, but it's actually damn hard to hold a camera steady with a brie wedge squelching around in your ass crack. (Now that's a cheesy moment.)

Oh, and also,

Hey, How About Some Random DKC 2 Screens?

2011-11-03T17:28:00.000-07:00

Being a bit short on space, I've had my SNES hooked up to my PC via a TV card and an RF cable for a few years now. I was never really happy with the picture quality though, so I decided to get a composite cable to hook it up instead back in August. I managed to find a cheap, knock-off version of the original cable on eBay for a few Euros and while I was testing it out, I took a few snaps of Donkey Kong Country 2 running through it. To be honest, I don't think the cable made huge improvement, but it did eliminate the need to fine tune the SNES channel's frequency to fix the picture all the time - a huge improvement in itself.

So anyway, let's check out those screenshots:

(Sigh) Never forget.

It was 1998 by the time I got around to playing this, but I still thought it looked incredible at the time. These beehive levels were easily amoung the prettiest.

Ferrying the Kongs around as Squaks was a pretty cool mechanic, but man,...

Fuck those zingers!

And finally, here's Dixie bolting towards the roller coaster in Target Terror. Is it just me or does Dixie not get nearly the recognition she deserves? That helicopter ponytail was pretty much the best thing in the game, and DKC 2 was a freaking awesome game. (Screw the haters.)

Dos Title Screens - The Final Chapter

2011-10-20T16:43:00.000-07:00

Besides the freeware games I had in 2008, I also screencapped the title screens from the handful of retail and demo DOS games I had at the time to use as folder pictures. What can I say? I didn't have a whole lot going on at the time. :D I present these images to you now, with links to the game's demo underneath if there is one:

Command & Conquer

While you can hit up the link above for the DOS demo, I should probably mention here that EA have actually released the Windows versions of the first three Command & Conquer games as freeware in the last few years. You can get those from the following links:

Command & Conquer
Command & Conquer: Red Alert (Soviet Disc | Allied Disc)
Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun

Cannon Fodder

Cannon Fodder 2

Championship Manager 2: 97/98

Commander Keen: Invasion of the Vorticons

Doom II

Hit the jump for more.

Duke Nukem 3D

FX Fighter

Quake

Tomb Raider

World Rally Fever

Worms

Worms United

Missed the first three parts? Check them out here, here and here.

Video: Outback Boogie in Malebrawonga

2011-10-20T15:49:00.000-07:00

Over the past few weeks I've been on a crazy campaign of sorting out and tidying up all my old stuff. During the course of that, I decided to dig out try my hand at digitizing a cassette copy of Outback Boogie in Malebrawonga, a long out of print Zig and Zag single, released in Ireland in 1992. After two nights of fiddling around with a hi-fi, an extra long audio cable and Audacity, this is what I came up with.Yeah, not great and I don't have the artwork either, sadly.

Man, are RTÉ ever going to re-issue this stuff? If they put out a collector's edition of Never Mind the Zogabongs for Christmas, with the non-album singles included, I don't see any way it wouldn't do well for them. If they actually put in a bit of effort, maybe added a DVD with the music videos and a bit of a making of documentary or better yet, the also long out of print Nothing to Do with Toast video, they could have a Christmas No. 1 on their hands.

Hell, if the released that version of Never Mind The Zogabongs digitally, we could make The Christmas No. 1 live up to it's name once again, wiping the smiles off the faces of thousands of X Factor-loving children (and idiots) the country over, and in the end, isn't that what Christmas is all about?

Retromags Non-Release: Total Game Boy Color Issue 2

2011-10-20T14:55:00.000-07:00

Damn it! That'll teach me to have a look through the Retromags downloads section before embarking on a new mag. Assuming it was too obscure for anyone to have, I ploughed into the process of scanning in this old Game Boy Color-focused magazine from 1999, digitizing about twenty pages and cleaning up two, before I discovered that wonderman had beaten me to the punch by a few months back in June. Not that I'm mad or anything; I just wish I'd checked first so I'd be further along with my next scan now. Well, seeing as I put a bit of work into it I thought I'd share the two almost-finished pages here for your viewing pleasure.

The magazine itself, I don't remember being particularly good. I didn't get that far into it scanning-wise, but the first few pages feature a entirely fabricated story on the nature of the Super Game Boy 2, as well as the repeated use of a promo shot featuring the most 1999-looking kid of indeterminable gender you're likely to see today. So, basically a mixed bag then.

Like most gaming magazines I ended up picking up in the late 90's, this randomly appeared in my local supermarket for a few issues and with no internet access or a decent newsagent anywhere around, I eagerly snapped them up and spent weeks pouring over them. The result of which, in this case, was me coming to the conclusion that I absolutley needed to get a Game Boy Colour. Looking back, I'm damn glad I held off until the Game Boy Advance rolled around. The GBC didn't really last candlelight and I'm struggling to come up with even ten games worth owning on it. I've got to admit it: did look pretty cool though.

(That lime green one was pure sex.)

deviantArt Updates 20/10/11

2011-10-20T14:10:00.000-07:00

Man, has it really been almost a month since I posted anything on deviantArt? Well, never mind, today I'm making up for it with probably the most deviations I've put up in one day since I joined.

On the older side of things today we have Flowers, a wallpaper I made in 2000 of some of my (bad) secondary school art work; Doodles 3, a set of doodles from about 2008 that I recently scanned in from a few old sketch book pages; and Core, one final image I made with Peter Blaškovič's Flame program in 2010.

Based on a crappy photo I took in September, Roller Tray brings things a little more up to date in a nice, trippy fashion. While Negadoodles comes from a sheet of doodles I drew only last Wednesday to test out some old biros and highlighter pens. The original version I quite liked, but turning it negative gave it a really cool look, I think.

Also: Westlife breaking up; The Stone Roses getting back together. Final proof that there is some justice in the world after all. :D

Video: Wossie Pimps Office XP

2011-09-26T15:27:00.000-07:00

It occurred to me, as I was watching Microsoft's terrible gaming promos on the Microsoft Football disc a few weeks ago, that there was another Microsoft promo in my possession that needed to find it's way to YouTube. On a U2 sampler given away with the Sunday Times in 2001 was an extensive, multimedia extravaganza touting the merits of the upcoming, at the time, Office XP. The big draws of this presentation were undoubtedly the two videos featuring British TV's Jonathan Ross.

The first one serves as the intro to the whole thing, as Wossie tells us why he needs the miracle that is Office XP to organise his busy showbiz life. In the second, he poses questions about the new wonder software to the disembodied voice of Tom Baker, before signing off with the most cringe-worthy, self-congratulatory (on Microsoft's part) line imaginable.

I'll take that bet, Jonathan. Believe me, I will. :D

Screamer (PC) Save File

2011-09-26T15:03:00.000-07:00

I think I may have hit a brick wall with my conquest of World Rally Fever at this stage. Literally, there's a series of fucking walls in the middle of one of the Pro Cup tracks that I can't for the life of me avoid. :D I did, however, beat another hard, old-ass PC racing game called Screamer the other week, unlocking the rocket car and the Afterburner difficulty in the process.

If you want to check out this game-breaking ride, or indeed the everyone-has-a-rocket-car mode without the soul-crushing difficulty that would otherwise entail, I've put up a copy of my save file (with instructions on how to use it) here. Enjoy!

Free Stuff - Freeware DOS Games Part 3

2011-09-26T14:01:00.000-07:00

SkyRoads

A neat little game where you pilot a spacecaft on a series of gap-filled, obstacle-ridden space roads by moving from left to right, jumping and adjusting your acceleration as necessary. This is one of the few games here that I actually put some decent time into and I'd definitely recommend it. Not a huge fan of the music though - sounds like they re-purposed some tunes from a scrapped adventure game or something.

SkyRoads Xmas Special

A holiday-themed version of SkyRoads. The levels seem to be completely different here and you get an added dose of festive cheer.

Kosmonaut

The original SkyRoads game. It's looks quite a bit more dated than the others, having been released in 1990, but it plays identically and it's just as fun.

Snarf

This is sort of like Pac-Man, if Pac-Man could shoot at ghosts and had about thirty hits before he bit it. You'd think that'd make this way easier, but the plentiful, aggressive enemies, clunky controls and the pitiful rate at which you haul your ass across the maze make this pretty frustrating to play (at least from the little I've played of it anyway).

Squarez Deluxe!

A sort-of upside down Tetris where you move shapes from a box at the bottom of the screen and try to from 3x3 squares with them. Playing it now, I screwed myself within minutes, blocking the box off and preventing myself from moving any shapes onto the play area. Seems alright.

Stargunner

A horizontal shooter that straight-up starts up with a Star Wars opening crawl. It looks like you might need to tinker with the DosBox configuration file to get this one running properly as everything's running way too fast under my usual settings. From what I played though, this seems hard as balls.

Supaplex

A puzzle game quite similar to Heartlight PC from Part 2 of this feature, except that you now play as a red Pac-Man, chewing through circuit boards. This seems quite a bit more polished than Heartlight, with a more manageable difficulty level too.

Supernova

An Apogee text adventure set on a mining colony on a planet called Barre-An, where you mine barre-an. I guess the message they're trying to get across is that the planet you're on is a lush, green paradise or something.

Taking Care of Business

A puzzle-platformer that seems to mainly revolve around moving boxes (Soul Reaver fans should love it then). The controls seem a bit wonky and even from the first level, I can tell that this'll get insanely difficult later on. Thankfully you can choose to play any level you want right from the start.

Troll's Tale

A text adventure for kids by Al Lowe. It's very similar to several Leisuresoft games they had at my primary school in the mid 90's. I actually started to do a Let's Play of this a few years ago. It's embarrassingly bad, but knowing me I'm sure it'll find it's way on here eventually. :D

Xenophage: Alien Bloodsport

A 2D fighter from Apogee. Graphics look great, but not sure there's a whole lot of depth to the fighting.

And with that, I can finally put my free-game-downloading, title-screen-capturing follies to rest and if steered some of you guys in the direction of some neat DOS games in the process, all the better. :D

If you've missed out on the first two parts from back in August, you can check them out here and here.

Retromags Release: When I'm Sixty-Four Issue 01

2011-09-26T13:03:00.000-07:00

Having been a registered member of the Retromags forum for almost four years without either downloading or uploading a single magazine or indeed, posting on said forum, I thought it was about time I changed that a few days ago and started unleasing a few of the old magazines I have in my small collection for the benefit of all. :D

I'm starting off with a pretty obscure one: the first issue of When I'm Sixty-Four, an Irish N64 fanzine made by a chap called Gearoid Reidy from Co. Offaly. I sent away for a copy of it in the Summer of 1998 after hearing about it on RTÉ's teletext service. I wasn't too thrilled by the bundle of photocopied A4 sheets I got in the post at the time, but looking at it now, I'm really impressed by the amount of work that must have gone into writing, laying out and illustrating this thing. This issue issue alone features lengthy reviews of Banjo-Kazooie, Quake, Snowboard Kids and Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon; retro reviews of Secret of Mana and Donkey Kong Country and even finishes up with first part of an original Legend of Zelda comic drawn by the author.

Sadly I don't know what became of the fanzine after this; maybe this was the only issue. Who knows? After thirteen years, this may well be the only copy of the fanzine in existence. :D Whatever the case may be, you can check out the first issue right now over at Retromags.

deviantArt Updates 26/09/11

2011-09-26T12:49:00.001-07:00

A bumper crop of deviations this week. First up is Doodles 2, a collage of some more college-drawn doodles from 2006/2007 that I came across recently, some of which I forgot I even did. RoboGuy is a slightly more recent drawing from 2009, featuring robot that looks like it may have well been drawn by a ten year old, indulging their fantasies of arm-based mass destruction. :D Finally this week we have Vanishing Point and Highway, two more huge, kaleidoscope images I made while fiddling around with Spooky Guy a few months ago. (Ew!)

Microsoft Trailer Dump

2011-09-16T16:55:00.000-07:00

Tuesday last week I got an odd urge to get the copy of Microsoft Football that came with our first PC and give it a go with a 360 controller. Despite it being one of the only two PC games we had in 1998, I never played it much because I could never get the hang of the keyboard controls. Thanks to that, I never really figured out if it was any good or not. I guess I haven't put in the time yet to access it's quality, but I can definitely say that the dozen or so terrace chants that loop endlessly throughout the game make playing with the sound on bloody unbearable. :D

Picking the MS Football disc up again reminded me that there were several awesome, and by that I mean really cheesy and terrible, trailers on there for various games and accessories that Microsoft were producing or publishing at the time. Several of them were on YouTube already, but I though the world needed to experience the magic of the others, so I spent the rest of the night capturing and uploading these masterpieces of mid 90s video game advertising. Uh, enjoy?

First up, this woman tells about her husband's fantasies.

Check out this rotating handle!

Like no other b-ball game!

(That's what the kids call it, right?)

"Video Game Character of the Year"

deviantArt Updates 16/09/11

2011-09-16T15:24:00.000-07:00

More wallpaper this week, I'm afraid. :D Fuzzy and Tubes are both bits of abstract wallpaper, both originating from a Paint Shop Pro doodling session back in January and both given a bit of a touch-up last month. Meanwhile over in scrap land, I've uploaded the original, unmodified version of Link's Serenade. Fans of bad Zelda fan art rejoice! :D

deviantArt Updates 02/09/11

2011-09-02T16:04:00.000-07:00

For this week's new stuff, I'm taking a trip back to my trusty old sketch pad. To kick things off I've got a double helping of Zelda fan art. Link is a cartoon I drew around Spring 2009 of a slightly cheesed-off Link from the Zelda series. Stretching way further back in time is Link's Serenade, a spruced-up version of a rough drawing I did in 1999 or 2000 of Link trying to win over Princess Ruto's heart with song. (Why Ruto, I don't know; I'd have taken Malon over her or Zelda any day of the week. :D). Lastly is Nerd Rage, another cartoon from 2009, this time of a nerd seething with fury, probably about that Ruto diss.

Backlog Assault: 'Splosion Man

2011-08-29T15:51:00.000-07:00

In the last few years I've built up a pretty crazy gaming backlog. This year, I've decided it's high time I do something about it. Join me as I begin to regret more than ever all those impulse Steam buys and 99 cent PS2 bargains:

Title: 'Splosion Man
Platform: XBLA

Bought: 26 November 2010
From: Xbox Live Arcade
Price: 160 points
Beaten: 14 July 2010

Backloggery Dump:

20/06/11 - I'm up to level 3-10 now. Really enjoying it so far.
21/06/11 - Beat the last nine levels tonight. Cool game, bosses were a bit annoying though.

Thoughts:

A really solid, lengthy platformer, so much so that I feel slightly guilty for having paid so little for it. :D In it, you play as the titular 'Splosion Man, a mass of burning embers, whose only ability is to explode, which allows him to jump, bounce off walls and kill enemies. You can only explode three times in a row before needing to recharge though.This limitation, along with the rather excellent level design calls for some satisfyingly high-level platforming skill and ingenuity to get through the game's fifty or so levels. The game does get quite difficult as you get further into it, but the levels are pretty well-checkpointed and deaths rarely feel unfair, which both help to keep frustration to a minimum.

On the other end of the rage-o-meter though are the handful of boss battles you run into at the end of each set of levels. The zoomed-out camera and the dark surroundings during these stages make it pretty hard to keep track of where you are, making it harder to avoid getting hit boss patterns you've yet to learn.Get hit once and you die, forcing you to replay the boss fight from the start - not fun, especially when you're doing it for the tenth or twelfth time.

Boss battles aside, the only other thing that really didn't do it for me here, despite how much it's been talked up, was the game's humour. Maybe I didn't give it a fair chance, but the bibble coming from both Splosion Man and the bosses immediately turned me off and It wasn't long until I headed to the options menu and issued gagging orders all round. The ending FMV and the credits songs are the parts that seem to draw the most praise though and frankly, all that stuff had me staring blankly at the screen and thinking "that's it?"; Tastes differ I guess. None of that stopped me from enjoying the game itself though, which I did quite a lot.

Site Updates

2011-08-26T16:40:00.000-07:00

deviantArt isn't the only thing I've been beavering away at for the last couple of months; I've also found the time to add a few new bits and pieces to my web site, and by "new" I mean old crap I dug out of a zip file somewhere. (I do spoil you people.)

Mario 64 Wallpaper

First up is a revamped version of a Mario 64 WP I first put together in the Summer of 2000. Working only with images scanned in from the game's box and manual, the original ended up a bit on the rough side, despite the hours I must have poured into cleaning up that fucking logo. :D

I always liked the basic design though and a few weeks ago, thanks to Paint Shop Pro and two official renders I uh, borrowed from Boo Mansion and Super Mario Wiki, I was finally able to make the wallpaper I wanted to eleven years ago. Go, me!

Video Game History Slides

In 2003, I had to do a presentation for a communications class in college. Being a bit hazy on the pre-NES era of gaming, I decided to take that as my subject in an effort to broaden my gaming knowledge. I don't think the class were exactly enthralled by tales of the Odyssey and the awfulness of E.T., but I still passed and learned a thing or two about video game history in the process.

The script I used on the day has been up on the archives page of the site for a few years, but I only got around to putting the slides up (in PDF form) a few days ago. They're nothing too extravagant (I wasn't exactly taking the class I made them for too seriously :D), but they do feature a damn sexy picture of Nolan Bushnell; surely worth a passing grade all on its own.

Pick-Ups 2008

Finally, I've bulked out the rather barebones features page with links to several amazing pieces of blog content from the last couple of years, as well as links to a trio of long, rambling Listal lists detailing my music, DVD and game purchases from 2008 - Lists that were meant to be a quick look back at the year in December, but ended up stretching out all the way until February, 2011.:D

deviantArt Updates 23/08/11

2011-08-23T18:10:00.000-07:00

Things have taken a decidedly strange turn this week with two trippy, holiday-themed deviations dropping into my gallery before we've even hit September.

Trippin' on the Moon is a modified, negative version of Santa, a photo of a window-mounted Christmas decoration I took in 2008; After reducing it down into a wallpaper-sized image for my own use, I started screwing around with it and this is what I ended up with.

Slightly more timely is Jack-o'-lantern Funtime, a set of four images derived from the same crappy jack-'o-lantern snaps as Evil Glow, available in both single and collage form.

deviantArt Updates 19/08/11

2011-08-21T13:24:00.000-07:00

I'm a few days late posting about these, but better late than never I guess. First up this week we have Softly, another wallpaper, this time featuring some airbrush experimentation I did earlier in the year. There isn't much to it really, but I quite like the colours.

Bloom is one of several cool images I made with the kaleidoscope effect in Paint Shop Pro in a continuing effort to find something to do with one of this week's scraps: Spooky Guy. Much like Spray Guy a few years ago, I finally conceded defeat in this endeavour and uploaded this little doodle as as it was on Friday.

The second scrap I put up this week is 8-bit, an early version of the right side of Retro, which I uploaded a few weeks ago. While it didn't have the 8-bit computer game look I was going for at the time, I really liked the character I'd drawn for it and later incorporated it into Paint Doodles 2.

World Rally Fever Save File - Pro Cup Unlocked

2011-08-21T12:43:00.000-07:00

Given that it's ten years since I bought it, I decided to dig out World Rally Fever again a few weeks ago and have a go at finally beating it. I managed to clear the rookie cup back in 2001, but never got any further. Playing it now, I can see that that's mainly because it's bloody hard.

I've got a bunch of videos recorded and a little bit of a write-up planned for later, but having finally unlocked the pro cup within the last hour, I thought I'd upload a copy of my save file so anyone who wants to check out the final cup can do so without enduring the keyboard-flinging frustration this would otherwise involve.

Get your copy here, you filthy cheater (full instructions included).

Free Stuff - Freeware DOS Games Part 2

2011-08-19T17:02:00.000-07:00

We covered ten of the freeware DOS games languishing on my hard drive last week, how about we cover another ten now?

The Adventures of Maddog Williams in the Dungeons of Duridian

A text adventure with graphics and a movable character on screen. Seems pretty promising from what I've played and it's definitely got a decent sense of humour. I guess sticky keys weren't around when they decided to map attack to the shift key though. :D

Electro Man

Another platformer starring a guy with a gun, a gun you can only fire while it has enough juice from the batteries you pick up. The graphics look really nice, but this doesn't look like the easiest of games to get through.

God of Thunder

A really enjoyable action/puzzle game from what I've played of it. As you might have guessed from the title, you play as Thor as he attempts to thwart Loki's naughty schemes by er, collecting gems and tossing hammers at small animals. Seems to be influenced quite a bit by the overhead Zelda games.

Heartlight PC

A puzzle platformer with some similarities to Dig Dug. Here you need to burrow through levels, collecting all the hearts while clearing spaces in such a way that you don't get crushed by falling rocks or block your own path with them. I love the sort of dark electronic soundtrack, even though it seems completely out of place here. :D

Heros I: The Sanguine Seven

A pretty rough-looking platformer with quite a grating soundtrack. The ability to choose from a set of seven different playable characters seems kind of neat, though I've never spent any serious time playing this and I don't think I really want to either.

Jetpack

A fun single-screen platformer that has you navigating ladders and flying around with a jetpack as you attempt to collect every gem in each level while avoiding being eviscerated by nasty robots.

Major Stryker

A vertically scrolling shooter from Apogee. Some pretty nice graphics, especially in the intro and I quite like the framing device they have going, even though it seems to be disguising the game's inability to run in fullscreen. I'm not terribly good at shooters, but the short distance you can see ahead of you here makes this extra hard, despite the fairly slow pace.

One Must Fall 2097

The game that alerted me to the existence of freeware DOS games in the first place. I've hardly even played this, but it seems like a fairly decent fighter. The music's certainly good though and I really like the anime-influenced presentation.

Overkill

Another vertically scrolling shooter, this time from Epic. Looks promising and it's certainly more playable than Major Stryker thanks to it's longer play field.

And that wraps it up for this instalment. More to come soon.

Getting the FMV to Play in Tomb Raider II

2011-08-19T15:00:00.000-07:00

A few days ago I snagged the Sold-Out version of Tomb Raider II on eBay for the tidy sum of €3.68. Despite the seller randomly deciding to add "Antrim" to my address, today it dropped through my letterbox. Being an older Windows game I was expecting some problems running it on (the admittedly outdated itself) Windows XP SP3. The game itself I managed to get going easily enough by running it in compatibility mode for Windows 98. The problem was the FMVs, which all froze after playing for about a second.

As all members of the PC gaming master race know, getting the game running is half the fun, so pulling up Google, I proceeded to trawl through long abandoned forum topics and Tomb Raider fan sites looking for some solutions to my problem. After a while I came across and old freeware program Eidos apparently released called ESCAPEplay, a video player for their FMV file format at the time.

One forum poster had managed to get the FMVs playing after copying all the DLL files from ESCAPEplay's folder and pasting them into the Tomb Raider II folder. This sounded like it might be worth a try, though I suspected that only a few of the DLL files installed would actually be needed. Sure enough, Tomb Raider II's intro movie finally played after I copied the files to its directory and after a quick bit of experimentation I found that the only DLL file the game actually needed to play FMVs was winplay.dll

This isn't however a perfect solution to the problem; The intro still froze on me once and about half the time a Windows XP window appears around the video. Still, it's definitely better than nothing.

So, to sum up here's what you need to do:

Download ESCAPEplay.You can find it on Tomb Raider Hub here.
Open the ESCAPEplay zip file and unzip winplay.dll to the directory Tomb Raider II is installed in.

Remember, I'm running the Sold-Out version of the game on Windows XP Service Pack 3 . Depending on which version of the game you have and your hardware and software setup, your milage may vary with this method. Good luck!

Free Stuff - Freeware DOS Games Part 1

2011-08-11T19:45:00.000-07:00

One day back in 2007, when I should have been doing something far more important, I made the discovery that there were a bunch of DOS games legally available on the internet, games that had been officially declared as freeware by their owners. Not one to turn down the chance of some gaming on the cheap, I spent several hours tracking down and downloading many of them. Throughout 2007 and 2008 I continued to stay on the lookout for more freebies and by May 2008, goodness knows how many hours I'd put into finding, installing and troubleshooting these games. I'd even gone to the trouble of capturing each game's title screen so I could set it as the preview image for the game's folder.

The problem was, of course, that I barley put any time into actually playing these games. I can't have spent more than an hour playing most of them; Some of them I never even touched and I'm not likely to at this stage.

Having wasted all that time and effort though, I might as well put it to some positive use. The other day I was thinking that I should put the screencaps I took up here, give a little synopsis of each game (or at least what I've played of it) and point everyone in the direction of some pretty interesting games of yore. Well, I've got nothing better to do right now, so let's get started.

(Click on the screenshots to go to the full-sized ones on Picasa.)

Adventures of Robbo

I haven't even taken the time to figure out how to get past the first level of this one. It's seems to be a puzzle game in a similar vein to Adventures of Lolo, where you control a robot who must "collect all bolts" as the charmingly amateurish voice work tells you at the start of the level.

Alien Carnage

A 2D platformer/shooter from Apogee where you start off equipped with a jetpack and a flamethrower. How can you go wrong there? Some really nice looking graphics for the time, though the controls feel a bit sluggish.

Antix

A Qix-type game developed by Dmitry Pavlovsky, one of the original tetris developers. Simple, but fun.

Loading it up now, I see that the hight scores are dominated by one A2M. Stay classy, JiliK.

Bio Menace

I actually played this a decent amount in 2007. It's a fun, but tough shooter/platformer from Apogee. Gotta love those EGA graphics.

Caves of Thor

A top down ASCII game where you collect treasure and shoot guys or at least it seems to be from the thirty seconds I've played of it. :D

Chex Quest

A Doom mod for kids that came free with Chex breakfast cereal at one point. From what I played of Chex Quest 1, this is a really solid, fun shooter with an impressive amount of work put into it. The link above is for Chex Quest 3, a 2008 continuation of the series by one of the original devs. It includes both Chex Quest 1 & 2 and runs independently of DOSBox.

Clyde's Revenge

I've barley touched this, but it seems like an okay platformer. It's certainly more playable than Clyde's Adventure, the previous entry in the series that had you loosing health every time you walked or jumped. In a platformer?! Who thought that was a good idea? :D

Cybersphere

This would probably be a pretty enjoyable Arkanoid clone if the ball didn't move so damn slowly. Even cranking the CPU cycles way up in DOSBox doesn't entirely fix the problem. Pity.

Cybersphere Plus

The sequel to Cybersphere. Sadly, the ball's still moving in slow motion here.

The Elder Scrolls: Arena

I haven't played a whole lot of this, but I did manage to make my way out of the initial dungeon and into the first town, leaving a trail or rats in my wake. It seems playable enough, but the thought of navigating randomly generated dungeons throughout the game makes this a far more daunting prospect than Morrowind ever was.

Although it wasn't freeware when I took these screenshots, The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall has also been released gratis by Bethesda. You can grab it from the official site here.

Well, that's it for today. More to come soon.

Accidental Screenshots: Half Life Lost Coast / Opposing Force

2011-08-11T17:02:00.000-07:00

I may have missed last week, but that doesn't mean I'm out of screenshots from my wandering quicksave finger just yet. Today, we're heading back to the world of Half Life with a collection of snaps from the HL1 add-on, Opposing Force and the HL2 one level tech demo, Lost Coast.

You know, out of the Half Life games I've played so far, OP4 was the only one I didn't really enjoy. I found it pretty damn tough compared to the original, really struggling to get through most of it. I guess they made harder on the assumption that you'd have a few AI characters helping a lot of the time. I could never seem to keep any of those morons alive for more than a few minutes though, at least without tearing my hair out and quicksaving and loading like a madman. And there was quite enough of that going on as it was. :D

But enough talk, let's get going with those screenshots. First up, Lost Coast:

Is it just me, or does saving during a one level demo seem a little bit pathetic? :D

And now, for some Opposing Force:

This is pretty early on in the game, I think. Probably taken during the Steam Holiday Sale I bought this in.

Clearly, Adrian Shephard is not worthy to wield the tool of The One Free Man.

Some dead headcrabs to the left. That screech never fails to freak me out.

Holy crap, I spent so much time wandering around this area trying to figure out what to do. It turned out that one of the doors (maybe this one) that was supposed to open just wouldn't in my game. I had to pull up the console in the end and punch in a no clipping code to get past it.

More to come after the jump.

I think I had resorted to using the shockroach so much at this stage because I was otherwise super low on ammo. This game really was no joke.

This looks like an area that had a load of those bloody ninjas in it. What a pain in the ass they were. :D

You'd think someone would had stuck a railing at the edge of that toxic waste river. Seems like kind of an occupational hazard.

In your head you're currently hearing this.

deviantArt Updates 11/08/11

2011-08-11T15:34:00.000-07:00

The hits keep coming with another pair of wallpapers this week. Fragments is a simple, but interesting-looking wallpaper that I came up with while doodling away and watching some episodes of My Name Is Earl last week. Acid, on the other hand, is a ridiculously bright mess of colours derived from the Psychedelic wallpaper I put up a few weeks ago. It looked a lot more like acid eating through something at first, which is where the name come from. The more I fiddled with the brightness and contrast though the more it looked like the result of someone vomiting the early 90's onto my computer screen or in other words, the more awesome it got.

deviantArt Updates 04/08/11

2011-08-03T16:44:00.000-07:00

I'm back again this week with more, uh, deviantArt goodies.

First up is another wallpaper - Throwing Shapes is something I started doodling while marathoning almost the entire series of Battlestar Galactica back in the Spring. (And I enjoyed the last few seasons, screw the haters. :D) I came back to it more recently and turned it into a kind of cool vector people dancing wallpaper.

Dispersal is a combination of two little images I whipped up with the smudge tool in Paint Shop Pro, one of which I turned into the surprisingly popular (by my low standards anyway :D) Disperse wallpaper. I'm kicking myself that I didn't do those images at a massive resolution now though, because I think this two would actually make for a pretty bad ass print.

I've also added a new deviation to my scrapbook. Old Skool Butterfly is a butterfly I drew recently with the airbrush in PSP in the style of the butterflies I drew for my Junior Cert stuff many moons ago. Funnily enough, I spent a few minutes today watching a butterfly on a blackberry bush. I was kind of surprised to see it fluttering its wings to scare off an oncoming bee.

I better stop now, I'm suddenly turning into Karl Pilkington. :D

Accidental Screenshots: Portal

2011-07-28T16:38:00.000-07:00

It's another week and that can only mean more accidental PC screenshots (at least until I run out :D). This week's collection comes from the old meme enthusiast's favourite: Portal.

Incidentally, every time I try to type "Portal" I can't seem to stop putting "2" after it. Perhaps a sign I should get on board with the sequel? I'm kind of waiting until Christmas though; It's bound to be on sale for a pretty good price then.

Anyway, onto those screenshots:

Now, where to begin?

Your bullets are powerless here, gun turrets.

An old favourite.

No one puts a portal in the corner.

(I'll get me coat)

deviantArt Updates 28/07/11

2011-07-28T16:21:00.000-07:00

The summer of wallpaper rolls on with two new additions today. Neon Noise is a slightly iffy one I slapped together back in early January, while Recursion took an image I made in Paint in 2007 and repeated it several times over in 2009. (Putting it up in 2009 would have been far too predictable, of course :D)

Speaking of old stuff, I also dug out a coloured in version of Gangster from a zip file the other day, which I thought I might add it to my gallery too, so I did.

deviantArt Update: Tiled Wallpaper Collection

2011-07-25T14:05:00.000-07:00

For a while I've been thinking of putting my old bits of tiled desktop wallpaper up on my deviantArt gallery, but the thought of more than a dozen tiny images burying everything else brought me to the conclusion that bundling them up as a collection would be the best way to go. If you still remember what tiled wallpaper was or indeed, if you're still rocking Windows 3.1, the whole glorious collection is now available. Well, apart from a few duds I decided to leave out and a few I already discarded years ago.

Even thought I never stopped to ask "do people even use tiled wallpaper any more?", whipping up abstract little wallpapers was one of the quickest and easiest ways to get new content to put on my old GeoCities site in the early aughts. Not that anyone visited that site, but that's never stopped me before (or since :D ). By the time I nuked the site in 2003, the wallpaper page had produced some pretty interesting-looking stuff - a minor miracle given the main tools I was working with: a 486 running Windows 95 and a copy of Ulead Photo Express LE that came with our scanner.

To mark this shameless repackaging of the past, I thought I'd take the time to look back on the wallpapers within the collection and the only three I know to still exist that I've left out. Let's start off with a little blue-on-blue action:

Blue Paint

I'm not sure what this started as, but the swirl effect was done with a special version of MS Paint that came with Creative Writer 2, a kid's word processing package that came with our first PC. I'm pretty sure this is one of the oldest wallpapers here, probably dating back to 1999, before we even had the internet.

Baby Blue

Yeah, blue is going to be kind of a recurring theme here as it was my favourite colour at the time. Maybe it still is, though I'm quite partial to lime green too now.

Getting back to the topic at hand, this is actually just a modified version of Sky Tiles. I'm not quite sure what I did to turn it into this, but I still really like the look of this one.

Colourburst, Frosty, Stained Glass

There isn't much to say about any of these, I'm afraid. They're all latter period wallpapers I made from scratch in Ulead Photo Express. Colourburst is kind of a dumb name though. I'd expect something called that to be much brighter and more colourful. This looks much more like blurry stained glass to me now.

Colourfade

Perhaps a sign that I needed to give up the tiled wallpaper gig, this originated as a screen cap of the Ulead Photo Express colour chooser thing.

Denim Boxes

A remake of a wallpaper I first attempted in 1999 (the one on the bottom, though I added the frame around it in 2000). The idea was to use the spray can tool in MS Paint to draw a square that looked like denim. Why? Well, it sounded like it'd be easy to do. Both attempts turned out pretty awful, I think.

I would have probably excised this from the collection, but I'd already made a sweet preview image before I thought of doing it. :D

Digital, Dreams

I don't know much about the creation of these either, I'm afraid, but they both have pretty weird names that begin with "d". I think I went for Digital because the colours evoked a kind of cyber world, while I thought Dreams had kind of a nightmarish quality to it.

Flower Blossoms

I have a feeling that this may be derived from Colourburst (or the other way around). This is one of my favourites. It really reminded of the Flower Fields area of the first Paper Mario at the time, hence the name.

Juicy

This is a textless, cropped version of a banner ad I made for my Orange Theme in 2000. I think this actually turned out much better than the background of the real theme.

More to come, including some deleted scenes after the jump.

Leafy

I think this started out life as a picture of a leaf from Encarta 97. As usual, I fiddled around with it to within an inch of its life in Ulead Photo Express to get this.

Tiled Grafitti

Doesn't look much like graffiti, but naming things has never been my strong point. This is one of the first of these I made, dating back to August 1999, though I gave it a significant polish up when I put it up on my current web site in 2007.

Disco Squares

This started out as a wallpaper of a football surrounded by a sort of rainbow aura. Zooming into the rainbow bit, I thought it looked much cooler than the overall image, so I made a wallpaper from bits of that instead. Not sure how these are in any way disco-related, but it seemed to make sense at the time. :D

Sky Tiles

I'm pretty sure this is a cropped version of the background from my first website. If you thought black text on a cloudy blue background would be pretty much unreadable, you'd be right.

That wasn't the only thing I used that background for either. Shortly afterwards I made up a web site for another religion project from the same teacher that demanded that terrible poem to be composed.

Stripes

This started as a corrupted screen that I think I captured from Dungeon Keeper. It was a solid screen of coloured static that I stretched out until it turned into a series of coloured stripes.

Watercolour

This started out as a sheet of paper I was testing out felt tip markers on. I scanned it in and messed around with it until I got to this.

And that's it for the collection, but if those are the wallpapers that found their way in, what on Earth got turned down? Well, these:

Sweets

A scan of a few Celebrations wrappers I made on Easter Sunday 2000. I know this because I spent pretty much of the entirety of that day scanning in N64 and SNES boxes and writing mini reviews to put onto my web site. (sigh) What a colossal waste of time. :D

Treble

A scanned-in page from a Man Utd. magazine surrounded by some text doesn't really make for a very worthwhile wallpaper. I was very excited by their treble win at the time though.

Ugh, I've just noticed that I spelled ""treble" wrong. Awesome.

Rainbow Streak

A bit of rainbow-coloured airbrush work on a black background isn't much of a wallpaper either. So this one found it's way into the dustbin too.

deviantArt Updates 22/07/11

2011-07-21T17:54:00.000-07:00

You know, I was poking around my computer tonight and there's a bunch of stuff on there that I could be uploading to my dA gallery. Well, that's exactly what I'm going to do over the next few weeks, starting with today's new deviations: Retro and Psychedelic

Retro is a combination of two different retro game inspired images that have been sitting around in some form, unfinished since 2007. Meanwhile, Psychedelic is crazy, er, psychedelic wallpaper I whipped up back in January.

I know, I'm not getting any better at naming these things.

Accidental Screenshots: Half Life 2: Episode One / Blue Shift

2011-07-19T16:23:00.000-07:00

Another selection of accidental screenshots today, from two of Half Life's shorter instalments. Like before, I found that these had materialised in the games' save folders after I'd accidentally mashed F6 while trying to quick save. Let's start off with a particularly troubling one:

Ummmmm.....

Moving over to Half Life: Blue Shift:

No one survives the stairwell shotgun.

Fucking Zen.

Yep, this screenshot is totally boring.

And Now, Some Terrible Poetry

2011-07-19T15:32:00.000-07:00

Don't worry, I haven't suddenly started fancying myself as a poet or anything. :) What I've posted here for your reading pleasure is a cliché-ridden, anti-drug poem I was forced to write over the course of a forty minute religion class in 1998. It was an entry for some drug awareness art competition/exhibition that was taking place in the following days.

Now, I'd never attempted to write a poem before this, was never good at cranking out a complete assignment during class and as usual, was stuck sitting directly in front of the teacher. Despite all this immense pressure though, I managed to cobble together something vaguely resembling poetry that even rhymes. (That's how you know it's good.) As the minutes to the end of class ran down, I was also pressed to come up with a name for literary work. "Who Cares?" wasn't a bad bit of thinking on my feet. It even works on few different levels. I mean, if you're really reaching.

Taking it home that night, I set about decorating it a little, at the teacher's behest, I imagine. The drugs on top look kind of wonky, but I'm actually kind of impressed with the wild pattern running through the lettering . It's far cooler looking than this piece of crap deserved anyway.:D

Backlog Assault: Mario Kart Wii

2011-07-18T17:41:00.000-07:00

Title: Mario Kart Wii
Platform: Wii

Bought: 01 April 2010
From: HMV.co.uk
Price: €40.00
Beaten: 20 June 2011

Backloggery Dump:

??/04/10 - I've finished the 50cc cups and I'm about halfway through the 100cc ones.
15/07/11 - Got golds in the last two 150cc cups tonight. Not sure I'll bother with mirror mode though.

Previously on JiliK's Blog:

12/06/11 - I guess I've missed out on the main draw of the game with my crappy broadband connection, but I really didn't enjoy the Mario Kart Wii single player. The AI rubber-banding and the unbalanced power ups, the things people have been complaining about for years, were not only not improved in that game, they were worse than ever.

Thoughts:

So, I finally decided to dust off Mario Kart Wii the other day and finish up the 150cc cups, of which there were about six left to do. And I'm sad to say that I didn't enjoy it any more than the last time I played it over a year ago. Seeing as it was the 150cc cups I was trying beat, I found the AI more ridiculously cheap than ever, ramming me like they were playing Burnout and raining blue shells, red shells and lightning down on me like they were types of confetti (usually combining the two, just to be sure).

This might honestly be the most unfair, unbalanced Mario Kart I've ever played. I mean, previous entries were pretty cheap, but I'm not sure the AI was ever as aggressive as this and I don't remember getting hit by two or three power ups in a row ever being such a regular occurrence. I guess Nintendo is trying to make Mario Kart as chaotic and unpredictable as possible in an effort to make it more fun. Maybe it is when you've got a bunch of people playing. As a purely single player experience though, it's bullshit.

Accidental Screenshots: No One Lives Forever

2011-07-11T18:11:00.000-07:00

I guess this proves that I'll post pretty much anything on here. Here are a bunch of screenshots I found, accidentally taken by mashing F6 instead of F5 to quicksave in No One Lives Forever.

Bonus: I just remembered I had a few NOLF screenshots on Flickr of an SMG floating in the sky. Might as well tack them onto the end of this post while I'm at it. :D

Well, you can never be too sure.

No idea what's going on here.

More compelling content after the jump.

Pretty sure the chances of getting smoked during the Mission Summary screen are minimal at best.

You know you're not a hardcore gamer when you're quicksaving during a boss fight.

Bonus Section:

Cooking: Simnel Cake

2011-07-11T15:10:00.000-07:00

Blimey, it's been a while since I did a cooking post, but cook I did over Easter as I attempted to bake a simnel cake - basically a fruit cake, with marzipan in the middle and on top of it. I was using this recipe (using marzipan in place of the almond paste), and things seemed to be going well at first. I even had eight Marzipan balls on top to represent Bowser and the seven Koopa Kids. (Those who accept Bowser Jr. are heathens.) Then I realised that you're not supposed to put on the top layer of marzipan until the cake's baked. Queue a pained effort to remove the top layer of marzipan from the sticky cake mixture. I just about managed it, damaging a good streak of it in the process and forcing me to flatten the marzipan balls to repair it.

The baking didn't go too smoothly either. The cake ended up being done more than an hour before the recipe said. I guess the fan-assisted oven might have been to blame. When I took it out, it was a little burned around the edges and pretty dried out towards the outside of the cake, especially on one side.

Despite a fairly dry outer layer though, the cake didn't turn out too bad. I'm not sure the marzipan added much (I'm sure the home-made almond paste would have been preferable), but the cake itself was a nice and rich, not too dissimilar to a traditional Christmas cake. Just the thing to have with a nice cup of tea as you come to the end of a Mass Effect 1 & 2 marathon, which is how I spent most of Easter.

And It Was All Going So Well... The Steam Summer Camp Sale

2011-07-10T18:31:00.000-07:00

So, I guess Steam's summer sale is annual now. Pretty bad news for my gaming backlog, but how could I resist these fine deals?

Day One: 30 June 2011

Oblivion: Game of the Year Edition (€6.80)

I may have had to pull myself away from Morrowind last year for fear of never finishing another game ever, but I enjoyed the hell out of the fifty or so hours I put into it, and I've been chomping at the bit to try out Oblivion. I passed it up during the holiday sale for €10, but now I'm slightly glad I waited, cheapskate that I am.

BIT.TRIP RUNNER (€2.00)

This looked awesome when it debuted on WiiWare, so it was a no-brainer for €2. . It plays a lot like Tomena Sanner, another WiiWare game. It's kind of a rhythm game masquerading as a platformer. In each level, you automatically run from left to right, encountering a series of obstacles, which you need to avoid by hitting the appropriate action button at the right time. When you do, a little beep or bloop is played, which form into an 8-bit style ditty, when you pass a bunch of obstacles in a row. Pretty neat, but it does get pretty hard pretty quickly.

Day Four: 3 July 2011

Torchlight (€2.99)

I've heard a lot of great things in this, mostly on the Bombcast, but I've often had to turn down a discounted copy on Steam in favour of some other, more desirable goodies. On the 3rd of July, I said "No more!". (Not really though.)

Day Six: 5 July 2011

Beat Hazard Ultra (€1.12)

I picked up vanilla Beat Hazard during last summer's sale and enjoyed it a ton for a few days and then, sadly, kind of forgot about it. Hopefully, this cheap and seemingly large piece of DLC will rekindle my love for music-fuelled, twin-stick shooting.

Day Ten: 9 July 2011

id Super Pack (€29.99)

The big one. I've been lusting after this since I first joined Steam in 2008, but it's always seemed a bit too expensive to grab, even for €30 during the previous sales it popped up in. This time, I hadn't gone too crazy with my spending beforehand, so I decided to finally throw down the required amount and finally get to play some Final Doom, Commander Keen, Hexen etc. and not for id's over-inflated asking prices. Seriously, €20 for Doom 3, €20 for Quake III, €10 for each of the classic Doom games. Is there anyone out there who'd pay that much for those games in this day and age?

Eternity's Child (€1.00)

I remember this was slated for a WiiWare release at one point. I'm not really sure what happened there, but I always quite liked the art style and it's got to be worth a go for a euro.

NyxQuest (€2.50)

A WiiWare game that did actually make it out, I really enjoyed the demo for this that Nintendo released a while ago. I guess I'm legitimising their disinterest in demos by going ahead and getting this on Steam instead of WiiWare though. Sorry, everyone. :D

Total:

If my calculations are correct that brings my total spending to €46.39. Ouch! A bit more than I was expecting to drop, especially given how frugal I was last during last summer's sale, not to mention the size of my backlog (again). Still, I'm glad I finally grabbed the id pack. When it didn't go on sale during the holiday sale, I was afraid I missed my last chance to get hold of it for €30. Now, to get source ports of all those games up and running and then never touch any of them ever again. :D

Site Update: It's a FAQstravaganza

2011-07-10T17:29:00.000-07:00

Nobody remembers except me, but it's roughly nine years around now since my brief, pathetic tenure as a writer of gaming FAQS. In the couple of months I was screwing around, I managed to produce only one complete FAQ for Worms on the PC, as well as maybe 10% complete ones for Blast Corps and Mario 64.

Reading through the Mario 64 FAQ, it looks like I intended it to be my first one, but the size and complexity of both it and Blast Corps meant doing a FAQ for either without a TV of my own would be quite a bothersome task. Worms was a much more manageable undertaking. I had ready access to a PC at the time and I had played that game to death over the previous two years. In the end, I don't think it me too long to crank out the FAQ and I had it up on GameFAQs a day or two later. Of course, a bunch of other cheats site had nicked it for themselves within a few days, with only one or two actually bothering to ask permission. Bastards. :D

To celebrate this momentous occasion, as well as giving the Worms one a much-needed spelling, grammar and formatting overhaul, I've also unleashed the the two unfinished FAQS for the first time on the my web site. Why? Because what else am I going to do on an idle Sunday night? What? Get on with those Backlog Assault entries? Don't be ridiculous.

Definitley Not Live Blogging Nintendo's 2011 E3 Conference

2011-06-12T16:25:00.000-07:00

This year, just like 2009, I missed the live stream of Nintendo's E3 conference, tuning into GameSpot's feed just after it finished. After fiddling around with that stream for a while and getting nothing but the same couple of seconds at the beginning looping over and over again, I headed over to G4's recording and bashed out my thoughts second by second in Notepad.

What on earth will Project Cafe turn out to be? Are there literally no other games coming out for the rest of the Wii's lifetime. Will we ever find out anything about Skyward Sword? All these questions and more will be answered. Off we go:

-:--:-- Gah, dammit! I guess the press conference is just finishing in real time. I'm staring at a spoiler-filled wall of logos. Luigi's Mansion 2 and Kirby Wii are the ones immediately jumping out at me.
-:--:-- Right, back to the beginning. Looks like the audience are being treated to some Zelda trivia.
0:00:16 Okay, that stream isn't working at the moment, so I've switched over to the G4 recording. The conference is kicking off with Skyward Sword and a live orchestra accompanying the video. I guess that answers the question of orchestrated music in Zelda then.
0:00:41 I think I spoke too soon. This seems to be a video for the 25th anniversary of Zelda.
0:04:02 Pretty cool so far. Looks like this is some Skyward Sword footage. Link and a girl are riding on birds through the air. I'm guessing you're going to have to rescue her at some point.
0:04:33 I really love that OoT artwork. I wish I could get it at wallpaper size.
0:05:23 It's Miyamoto. Man, that smile is infectious!
0:05:47 I guess we've heard the Skyward Sword title music already then. I can't believe they're still using the same crappy font for Skyward Sword logo. :D
0:06:50 More orchestrated Zelda music. Fine by me.
0:07:23 Oh, Miyamoto, you're just too cute.
0:09:09 A Zelda game for each platform for the 25th Anniversary. One of them is Link's Awakening DX for the eShop.
0:10:07 Some OoT 3D talk, nothing new though.
0:10:48 Free Zelda Four Swords for the DSi. Nice.
0:11:20 Skyward Sword for the Wii during the holidays.
0:11:40 A gold Zelda Wiimote is coming out with the game. I think I'll be needing one of those.
0:12:08 Skyward Sword is "great exercise". Hopefully that doesn't mean a total waggle fest.
0:12:16 There's lots of content in Skyward Sword. Sounds good to me. I know some fans will be pissed about them cramming in extra stuff to make it longer though; just you wait.
0:13:01 Zelda concerts for each region. Hopefully we get recordings of those too.
0:14:07 Yep, looks like they're offering a CD as some kind of tie-in with Skyward Sword. I wish they'd put some of these soundtracks on iTunes or something for once though.
0:15:07 Some more of the guys who worked on Zelda over the years come on stage, including Anouma. Zelda timeline reveal imminent!
0:16:00 That's the end of that segment. Pretty cool.
0:16:44 Iwata takes to the stage.
0:17:03 Nintendo - keeping the stock photography industry in business since 2006.
0:17:59 Sounds like the Cafe announcement. A platform that's attractive to all players? We'll see, Iwata, we'll see.
0:18:43 Deeper games and wider appeal to all gamers. Well, he's certainly talking the talk.
0:19:10 Full details not coming until a little later. Hmm, they usually have a bit of a roundtable talk later on too don't they?
0:19:52 No Cafe info for the moment. How about some 3DS games though?
0:20:06 Mario Kart. Wouldn't it be nice if the balanced the single player for once this time?
0:20:19 Was that a hang glider coming out of Mario's Kart?
0:20:36 Star Fox 64 3D. Looks like the old voice acting is still in. Yay! I'm hitting L AND Z twice.

More impressions and some lengthy analysis after the jump.

0:20:54 Mario for the 3DS. That's the tanooki suit confirmed, plus the music blocks are back from Mario 3.

0:21:15 Kid Icarus. I really like the 3D effect they've managed to pull off here.

0:21:43 That'd be Luigi's Mansion 2. Looks great. The ghost kind of looks like the blob from De Blob.

0:21:54 Reggie, accompanied by some Kaiser Chiefs.

0:22:31 Reggie's slipping up at his speech. I guess his circuits are overheating.

0:23:40 A tricked-out version of Mario Kart. I'm patiently awaiting Xzibit's arrival on stage.

0:24:12 So far, so Mario Kart.

0:24:48 Looks like there are going to be hang glider and submarine sections in some tracks. Makes me pine for a new Diddy Kong Racing.

0:25:17 Looks like there's some room for customising the karts this time. But what about that damn blue shell, Reggie?

0:26:32 Tilt or d-pad control for Starfox 64. Plus a live (choppy) video feed of your friends faces during multiplayer. Kind of neat.

0:28:21 Mario 3DS in action. It looks a lot like a portable Galaxy. Count me in.

0:28:46 Hmm, I'm a bit worried about the tanooki suit. They didn't show Mario flying or turning into a statue with it on, just gliding a bit.

0:29:07 Super Mario 3DS this year, bitches.

0:29:43 Kid Icarus now. Hah, they totally faked me out with that Man Icarus type guy at the start. :D

0:30:18 Graphics look great. Gameplay looks very much like Sin & Punishment.

0:30:36 Team-based multiplayer? Interesting. Not to me, but to someone else, I'm sure. :D

0:31:59 No cheer for Luigi's Mansion 2? Bastards.

0:33:17 Looks quite a bit nicer than the original game. A new game with several mansions.

0:33:36 Some 3rd party 3DS stuff.

0:34:39 Ooh, Tekken.

0:25:25 eShop. Choo, choo!

0:36:24 No word on GBA coming to 3DS VC yet.

0:37:39 Pokedex 3D. Boring.

0:39:19 Cafe time, birches.

0:40:09 What? Reggie's making absolutely no sense now. He appears to be speaking in pure marketing gibberish.

0:40:26 Wii U. Terrible name, worse logo.

0:41:02 The tablet controller future is a reality. I'm not sure I like the placement of the buttons and analogue sticks up there.

0:42:02 Playing NSMBW on the can. A dream finally realised.

0:42:15 Draw (penises) on the new controller. You know, I'd totally be down for a version of Art Academy on this.

0:42:34 A flash-style version of Othello being played on the controller alone. Definitely some potential for board games on there, but I've got to imagine Apple is already doing this kind of stuff though.

0:42:54 Looks like the view on the controller screen can change depending on what part of the TV you're putting it in front of.

0:43:17 It seems to be compatible with the Wiimote and balance board.

0:43:24 Ugh, and the fucking zapper. :D

0:43:31 Silent Scope Mii Edition.

0:43:56 Video chat with the controller, but only during the most incomprehensible conversations known to man.

0:44:23 So, I guess you can beam videos (of porn) from the controller to the TV. Why?

0:44:37 Inventory screens on the touch screen, as predicted by everyone.

0:46:01 There's a stylus for the screen, and the Wii U is compatible with the Wii Wheel. My prayers have been answered.

0:56:40 Looks like the controller's got 3DS circle pads rather than analogue sticks. Also, two triggers and rumble.

0:47:21 As well as a microphone, a speaker, motion controls and a camera. This thing is not going to be cheap.

0:47:42 VERY IMPORTANT: Wii U controller NOT a portable game machine, please continue to buy the 3DS. Thank you.

0:48:00 The video is being sent from the console to the controller wirelessly.

0:48:50 Good grief! That Zapper is actually a new model. :D

0:51:26 Lots of great new ideas incoming for Wii U, promise. Doesn't look like they're going to show much in the way of games today.

0:52:35 It's 2005 all over again. Iwata drops the bomb on a new Smash Bros. coming (for the 3DS and Wii U, no less) and shows nothing. What a troll. :D

0:52:48 Both versions will interact somehow? They haven't even started development on it have they, Iwata?

0:54:05 A tech demo for the Wii U. Takes you back to they days of the GameCube Rebirth demo doesn't it. Looks good, at least on par with the 360/PS3. (Which I can totally judge looking at this low-res streaming video :D).

0:55:32 New Super Mario Bros. Mii? (sigh) Get those fucking Miis out of my face. We need some Peach and Toad up in here.

0:56:29 So, you can use Wiimotes and Wii U controllers to play the same game. If Pac Man Vs, Zelda Four Swords and FF Crystal Chronicles don't end up on this thing, people need to be fired.

0:57:25 Lego City Stories? If that's not a GTA Lego crossover, I have no interest in playing it.

0:58:07 Huh, that doesn't seem to be a million miles away from the truth actually. Still not interested. :D

0:59:30 Yay. Everyone loves the Wii U. You know, I'd be much more impressed if they roped in Mark Rein and Cliff Bleszinski to extol it's virtues and tell us how easily it'll run UE3.

0:59:40 Darksiders II, Batman: Arkham City and Tekken: Wii Successor? Current-gen ports abound. Let the Dreamcast comparisons commence!

0:59:54 Assassin's Creed multiplayer with the new controller. Interesting.

1:00:29 So what are Vicarious Visions working on now anyway?

1:02:02 The new Metro game? Now there's something you'd never expect to see on a Nintendo console.

1:02:23 Face painting for Tekken. Well, you have to look your best when you're throwing someone into a volcano, I guess.

1:02:47 Ninja Gaiden 3. Looking brutal as ever.

1:03:48 So, anything else for the regular Wii this year, guys?

1:05:49 Sounds like Nintendo might have their online system in order this time. About time.

1:10:09 And we come full circle back to the wall of logos. Looks like a Mario Party 9 logo on the right side. I guess that and Rhythm Heaven account for the rest of the first party Wii releases this year then.

1:10:47 And that's it.

Thoughts

First off, let's get right down to the Wii U - While I'm a bit concerned about the button placement and how the controller might feel to hold, I'm really excited by the potential gaming applications of the thing. There's a ton of functionality packed in there and I can see Nintendo and a few third parties putting out some really innovative stuff taking advantage of its various features.

Not too surprisingly, the console itself isn't exactly a next gen powerhouse. But it is in HD and should be powerful enough to support the current middleware being used by the industry. That should ensure most multi-platform games gracing the Wii U, as well as the PS3 and 360, as well as encouraging most third parties to have a crack at Wii U development (especially given how many missed out on the early, more lucrative days of the Wii). And, of course, we're going to see Nintendo's offerings making the leap to HD, which will be awesome.

I'm fairly concerned about it's eventual fate as far as third party support goes though. The Wii name is poison for most core gamers and presuming they already have a PS3 or 360, they're not going to care that Arkham City or Darksiders II is available on Nintendo's box; They can already play those on the consoles they have. It's nice to see Nintendo acknowledging the need to get major Western developed games on the Wii U, but ports aren't going to woo many over to the Wii U, especially with new Microsoft and Sony consoles somewhere over the horizon.

To have any chance to get core gamers outside the Nintendo faithful interested in the Wii U, they're going to have secure a bunch of big, exclusive, core-focused third party games (not Lego City Stories) and/or develop new "hardcore" IPs internally. I don't think they'll do either. I think the audience for core games on the Wii Uis going to be pretty small and once the ability to easily port stuff from the PS360 goes away, the amount of third party games that don't have "dance" or "party" in the title will be minuscule.

Am I going to buy a Wii U though? Of course I am! I'm still a Nintendo fanboy after all. There wasn't an awful lot to get excited about Wii U-wise at the conference though, other than the controller and the vague promise of a new Smash Bros.. I would have loved to have seen a few new, actual games get announced, but I guess that's what next year's conference is for, eh?

Turning my attention to the original Wii, I was really hoping that they'd blow the lid off a bunch of unannounced games to fill the giant, gaping chasm that is the Wii release list for the rest of the year and beyond, and that they'd show off Skyward Sword a bunch. I guess the Zelda 25th anniversary segment ate into any potential Skyward Sword time, so despite the handful of info and footage we got, I still feel a bit in the dark about that game. Having said that though, I enjoyed the Zelda bit of the conference lot. Miyamoto goofing about with an orchestra and a bunch of cool announcements made for an entertaining start to the show.

Other than Skyward Sword, the only other Wii games only got announced via the logo wall at the end of the show. I guess that makes sense given the time they needed to unveil the Wii U, and the fact that none of the games announced were exactly going to set the world on fire. Mario Party 9, Kirby Wii and Rhythm Heaven - I guess it's something, but Dragon Quest X, Xenoblade or The Last Story would have made for pretty awesome announcements during the show itself; One last hurrah for the Wii. Of course, we still don't know if the latter two are even coming to the US though.

And that leaves the 3DS, which didn't really have a huge showing, I thought. I'm pretty excited for both Luigi's Mansion 2 and Super Mario. The first Luigi's Mansion was enjoyable, but fairly short and limited in scope and I'm interested to see what they do with a multi mansion spanning sequel. Super Mario looks a lot like Mario Galaxy with some elements brought back from Mario 3. You won't get me complaining about more Galaxy, but after putting so much focus on the return of the raccoon tail, the lack of flight in the video has me scratching my head. Surely they haven't brought back the tanooki suit to allow Mario to do a little glide across gaps? If so i'm going to be ridiculously disappointed. The ability to take to the skies with the racoon leaf was one of the best things about Mario 3!

As far as the other 3DS software goes, Kid Icarus and Starfox were already shown last year and the umpteenth versions of Mario Kart and Tekken arren't exactly sending my hype levels into overdrive, especially Mario Kart. I guess I'm missed out on the main draw of the game with my crappy broadband connection, but I really didn't enjoy the Mario Kart Wii single player. The AI rubber-banding and the unbalanced power ups, the things people have been complaining about for years, were not only not improved in that game, they were worse than ever. I might be forgetting a few other 3DS games, but for a platform that's been struggling slightly, I was surprised they didn't wheel out some more big guns. Major third party announcements were notably absent, especially compared to the bevy of third part support that was pledged last year. Has everyone jumped ship to the iPhone or the Vita already?

All in all, not a bad show, but not a terribly exciting or surprising one either. The Wii U was pretty much what everyone expected, dumb name aside. And aside from Luigi's Mansion getting a sequel and the slightly unexpected appearance of Metro: Last Light and maybe Ninja Gaiden 3 on the Wii U sizzle reel, there was much in the way of surprising game announcements. Well, maybe Mario Party crawling back from the dead was a little surprising, but it wasn't exactly a new Retro IP or a Starfox revival or, as some had been speculating, a big Rockstar announcement. Damn it, Iwata, where are those bombs at?

Definitely Not Live Blogging Microsoft's E3 2011 Conference

2011-06-12T15:31:00.000-07:00

It's almost a week later now, but let me to take you back to the halcyon days of last Monday, where Microsoft blew the lid of their E3 offerings with my own real time impressions. I missed the live conference, but watching the GameSpot recording allowed me to pause the proceedings and make many more non-insightful comments than if I was watching it live. Lucky you.

Although I've never done this for the Microsoft conference, I have watched it as a prospective customer of theirs for the last few years and last year I finally got around to buying a 360. With a year's worth of playing neither dudebro-pleasing first person shooters nor Kinect shovelware, will Microsoft have anything to offer me during this? Is there even a slight glimmer of hope that Rare will ever get to make anything besides Kinect Sports? Well, let's find out:

0:00:21 Kicking off with Modern Warfare 3. Never actually played a Call of Duty game, let alone a Modern Warfare game or even many FPSs for that matter. Let the excitement commence.
0:02:43 Swimming slowly underwater for almost three minutes now. Thrilling. There must be big reveal at the end of this surely.
0:02:55 A second checkpoint? You haven't even done anything yet!
0:05:29 Shooting military guys from a first person view. This is innovative stuff.
0:08:00 The demo guy gets out of the sub and we're taken on a tour through a harbour full of naval vessels laying waste to an American city and being bombed to shit in return. Looks cool, but there's very little in the way of gameplay here.
0:08:40 Look at that sky; UK Resistance must be turning in it's grave
0:10:00 MW3 - "big", "epic" and launching on Nov 8.
0:10:35 Hi, Don!
0:11:12 Infinity Ward and Sledgehammer Games - The World's Greatest Storytellers™.
0:12:03 Tomb Raider.
0:14:43 Looks nice, but super-linear.
0:15:30 Man, Lara's not having much luck with that torch.
0:17:22 You know, if she stopped talking to herself so much, maybe those zombie guys would have a harder time finding her.
0:18:18 "Visceral combat" - it's the only kind I care about.
0:18:21 I'm cautiously optimistic about Tomb Raider. I'm digging the visual style, but I hope it turns out to be more that a series of linear corridors, broken up by a few quick time events.

More impressions and some final thoughts after the jump

0:18:34 Peter Moore talking EA Sports. I guess there's some Kinect stuff in this year's games then.

0:18:56 Yep.

0:19:39 We've got nothing to show, but just imagine the fidelity a theoretical EA Sports Kinect game might have!

0:19:54 You can also use Kinect for The Sims and Hasbro Game Night. Just take our word for it!

0:20:16 Whoo! Mass Effect 3. (/fanboy)

0:21:24 Voice recognition for Kinect. Meh.

0:22:07 Garrus, Liara and Mordin. Squee!

0:23:01 Ugh, reading out the dialogue you want to say and having Shepard picking up where you leave off is kind of a messy system. Plus, way too much work.

0:23:39 Lightning bolt! Lightning bolt! Kinect - all the embarrassment of LARPing in your own home.

0:24:24 Ooh, was that Wrex talking?

0:25:12 Some Tom Clancy stuff now.

0:27:12 The future is now! It's Ghost Recon: Future Soldier. There's Kinect support. Surprise!

0:27:56 Customise weapons with an interface vaguely reminiscent of Minority Report. Oh, E3 crowd, you are easily impressed.

0:28:16 Enthralling.

0:29:39 Fucking hell, the Kinect shooter controls here might just be the dumbest thing ever.

0:30:53 Xbox Live stuff.

0:32:34 Another dashboard update. Meh.

0:33:22 YouTube is coming to the 360. As a gold-exclusive feature, no doubt.

0:33:47 Bing on the 360. Finally. Hah, not a single cheer.

0:34:49 You know, actually being able to cut through the 360's convoluted menu system like this could be really useful.

0:37:02 Game Night? But, it's bright outside.

0:37:19 UFC stuff. Never watched any UFC, probably never will.

0:40:41 Some exclusive games at last.

0:41:16 Gears of War 3. Haven't played any of these either. :D

0:42:39 They ain't safe. Ice-T knows what's up.

0:47:00 The demo's over and Ice-T's reunited Body Count in honour of Hoarde Mode returning (or something).

0:47:15 It's a trailer for that Crytek 360 exclusive, I guess.

0:47:26 It seems to be set in Ancient Rome.

0:47:35 ...and the Rome of alliteration.

0:47:55 Did that dog just say something? Man, I hope he's the protagonist.

0:48:31 Oh snap! It's a Kinect game.

0:48:42 With kicking and head-butting. This won't end well for your TV.

0:49:03 Having only played about 20 minutes of it, even I know that music. I guess this is the Halo remake.

0:50:25 Halo Combat Evolved Anniversary. Dang it, and I just bought the original version on PC last year.

0:50:40 Heh, that's pretty sinister music for the Forza guy.

0:51:31 Future racers will learn the trade from Forza 4. Really, Forza guy?

0:53:17 Peter Molyneux is here to discuss his balls (presumably).

0:54:04 No, it's Fable: The Journey, which I've already heard is a Kinect game.

0:55:15 A guy controlling a horse and carriage with Kinect. It looks just as dumb as you'd imagine.

0:56:32 Now we're in what looks to be an on-rails section, where the dude is firing energy balls at goblin-type things. I'll admit the procedure to build up the orange ball was pretty cool, but this looks to be little more than a glorified light gun game.I'm really not buying that the guy was turning the game's viewpoint with his body.

0:57:15 2012? Seems a bit far off, unless there's much more to the game than what they showed.

0:57:58 Minecraft for Kinect. Yep, haven't played Minecraft either.

0:58:24 Yipee, more Kinect stuff.

0:58:48 Kinect Disneyland Adventures.

0:59:40 Ugh, kill me now, a couple of overenthusiastic stage school kids are doing the demo.

0:59:52 They got the coins! Awesome job, guys!

1:00:06 Damn it! The special coin! They were so close!

1:00:47 Man, all these kids are crazy for coins. Took bad they're all so shit at collecting them.

1:01:05 Is it "so cool"? I'm not entirely convinced.

1:01:19 Fist bump! hell yeah, brah!

1:02:15 Kinect Star Wars. Oh, shut up fanboys. :D

1:02:25 Looks like it's based on the prequel trilogy. Always a plus.

1:03:50 I think I saw some X-Wings back there and a star destroyer. There may be hope for this after all.

1:04:18 "Lightsaber on!". You know, just like they say in the movies. Also, either this footage is recorded or there's some pretty serious lag going on.

1:06:53 Eh. Can't say I'm excited for Kinect Star Wars. Looks like the Double Fine Sesame Street game is up next.

1:08:39 I can see that this'll be cool for parents and kids, but what I wouldn't give for a Conker or Blast Corps right sequel about now.

1:11:29 It's Kudo. Insert avatar shoe joke here.

1:13:45 Kinect + Finger Tracking = ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

1:17:02 I guess object scanning is here at last. Looks kind of cool.

1:17:57 (sigh) Kinect Sports Season 2. I remember when you used to be cool, Rare.

1:18:47 Big Park? What's happened to Rare then?

1:20:45 No way that birdie wasn't pre rehearsed.

1:21:23 It's that guy from Harmonix. Quick, someone queue up Guile's Theme.

1:24:11 That looks like Dance central all right.

1:24:50 Time for one last thing, eh Don?

1:27:14 I'll already know it's Halo 4 anyway, way to bring something new to the table, Microsoft.

Thoughts:

Pretty much the same old, same old from Microsoft. More Halo, more Gears, more Forza, a bunch of half-baked Kinect games and a few third party demos.

I guess it's unfair of me to write new instalments of old 360 reliables off as dull announcements. If I'd played the previous games in the series, maybe I'd be going crazy for a double whammy of Master Chief too. As things stand though, nothing they showed of these games looked particularly interesting to me. And to be honest, I find the lack of new, non-Kinect exclusives for the 360 extremely depressing.

The Kinect stuff they showed didn't do much to cure me of my total Kinect apathy. I'm sure the Disney and Sesame Street games might be fun for kids, but the more core-focused titles they showed looked entirely devoid of entertainment value: an on-rails Star Wars game, an on-rails Fable game, and Ryse - a game surely engineered for the sole purpose of having you destroy your own TV. Maybe Dance Central is fun?

Outside a couple of content provider partnerships and another thrilling dashboard update, that leaves the third party stuff. Tomb Raider had a nice visual style, but if it's as linear and as QTE-heavy as the demo suggested, I'm not sure it'd even be worth playing, just watch it on YouTube. :D Modern Warfare 3 looked like another shooter on the 360. Mass Effect 3, we didn't see much of and the voice commands are totally dumb, but it was by far the most exciting they showed during the conference for me, just because I really like Mass Effect.

And I guess that's it. Not a particularly thrilling conference from where I'm standing, but I'm sure cat helmet owners and motion enthusiasts everywhere are ecstatic.

Damn you, Microsoft, where's my Blast Corps 2?

How to Turn Firefox 4 into Firefox 3.5/3.6

2011-05-10T18:32:00.000-07:00

Just installed Firefox 4? Not too hot on all the terrible modifications they made the to the interface? Never fear, neither was I and I just spent the last few hours undoing them. Here's I did to turn Firefox 4 into Firefox 3.5/3.6, or at least a close approximation of them, because change is always a bad thing.

Step 1: Show the menu bar

Right-click on the navigation bar and select on "Menu Bar" from the right-click menu.

Step 2: Show the status bar

Actually the status bar is gone, but the new add-on bar serves most of the same purposes. To display it, right-click the menu bar or the navigation bar and select the "Add-on Bar" from the menu.

Step 3: Move the reload button and the home button

Who knows why, but the reload button is now at the end of the address bar. To move it back to the left of it and turn it back into a proper button, right-click the menu bar/navigation bar, and select "Customise". Now, drag the reload button from the end of the address bar back into it's usual spot.

I'm pretty sure the home button is also moved by default in Firefox 4, to the left of the address bar. To move it back to it's normal position, just drag it over.

Step 4: Move the tabs back to their normal place

Again, right-click on the menu bar/navigation bar, and select "Tabs on Top".

Step 5: Add-ons

Install these add-ons:

Firefox 3 theme for Firefox 4+ 1.3.1

Restores the Firefox look you know and..love?

Add-ons Manager Dialog for Firefox 4 1.0b1pre

Makes the Add-ons Manager open as a separate dialogue box, rather than in a tab.

Back/forward dropmarker 1.0

Adds the drop down history menu back to the left of the forward button.

Status-4-Evar 2011.04.06.18

Removes the exit button from the add-ons bar, displays the network/default status on the add-ons bar. Basically, it turns the add-ons bar into the status bar of old.

It also adds a progress meter to the address bar, which I think was a feature introduced and dropped in the Firefox 4 beta. To disable it:

1) Open the Add-ons manager by selecting "Add-ons" from the Tools menu.
2) Click on the options button next to Status-4-Evar.
3) On the dialogue box that pops up, click on the Progress icon at the top.
4) On the URL Bar tab, uncheck "Show progress in the location bar"

And that about does it, I think. Now, let's party like it's 2009.

Retro Backlog Assault: Starfox Adventures

2011-05-08T16:03:00.000-07:00

As I've been playing some recently acquired games lately instead of working through my backlog, I thought I'd take some impressions I had lying around for a previously beaten game and fashion them into the first Retro Backlog Assault.

Title: Starfox Adventures
Platform: GameCube

Bought: 05 February 2010
From: eBay
Price: €10.00

Beaten: 25 June 2010
Final Game Time: Unknown
Cost/Hour: n/a

Backloggery Dump:

I've rescued Tricky, now I'm looking for some doodads for his mom.
25/02/10 I'm currently stuck trying to pass the third Kraoza spirit's stupid-ass test.
24/03/10 I'm on the hunt for the fourth Kraoza spirit. Getting pretty bored with this now.
23/06/10 I've got the last spell stone. Time to put an end to these sub-par adventures.
25/06/10 Beaten. Not Rare's finest hour, that's for sure.

Thoughts:

Starfox Adventures starts off as a pleasant enough, if not terribly engaging experience. The graphics look wonderful, the locations are pretty and the soundtrack accompanies the environment perfectly. If this was a much shorter game, I would have probably had a pretty good time just moving through the game's world, admiring the scenery as I tackled the not-terribly-taxing adventures of the title. This isn't a short game though and the more you play it, the more it falls apart.

The further you get into the game, the more it's myriad of minor flaws begin to grate. After a while, it feels like the game is going out of it way to annoy you in every way possible. Among those methods are:unskippable cutscenes; backtracking galore; a confusing inventory system; a useless world map (great for navigating); lots of annoying, timed mini games you need to complete to progress and a camera that can only be centred behind Fox, as if the C-stick didn't exist. I'm sure I'm missing one or two more.

I have to mention the story too. It's such an incomprehensible mess of gatekeepers, kraoza spirits, warp stones, land walkers, red eyes, temples and fuck knows what else. It's like someone was going out of their way to make up the most stupid, convoluted, videogamey story they could muster. In most of the cut scenes, Fox doesn't look like he has the slightest idea what the fuck's going on and I completely empathise with him.

The main problem with the game though, is that the gameplay just dull. For a Zelda clone, none of the puzzles are terribly tricky; The combat's pretty shallow (In the vast majority of encounters, once you've landed a successful blow, you just need to mash A to win); The Arwing sections are nothing but short, simple afterthoughts.

Star Fox Adventures might be pleasant to look at, but that doesn't make this fairly hollow, monotonous and increasingly irritating experience bearable in the long run.

Backlog Assault: Lego Star Wars

2011-05-08T15:41:00.000-07:00

In the last few years I've built up a pretty crazy gaming backlog. This year, I've decided it's high time I do something about it. Join me as I begin to regret more than ever all those impulse Steam buys and 99 cent PS2 bargains:

Title: Lego Star Wars: The Video Game
Platform: PS2

Bought: 19 September 2008
From: GameStop
Price: €7.99

Beaten: 18 March 2011
Final Game Time: 6:00 approx.
Cost/Hour: €1.33 approx.

Backloggery Dump:

??/??/09 - Finished Episode I Chapter 2.
04/03/11 - On Episode III, Chapter 3 now. Looking forward to slaughtering me some Lego younglings later.
18/03/11 - And I'm done. Pizza rolls anyone?

Thoughts:

I didn't go into this game with the highest of expectations having played and not really enjoyed Lego Star Wars II a few years ago. There were certainly elements of the second game I liked: the music; the look; the cute cutscenes and the funny, little hidden areas. The actual gameplay though, I just found incredibly dull; The platforming was simple, the combat was basic and aside from a few puzzles here and there, there was no real challenge to the game at all.

You need next to no skill to progress in these games. If you die for any reason, you instantly respawn, in the same spot, with next to no penalties. All you need to do to get through the game is to keep slogging through the levels, death after death and you'll get there in the end. I suppose this inability to fail is part of the reason the Lego games are so popular, but along with the bland game design, it makes playing these feel like a complete waste of my gaming time.

Unsurprisingly, this game is very similar to it's sequel, just based on the shitty half of the Star Wars saga. Though, the puzzles in this one tend to be quite a bit simpler than the second game, making it feel slightly more pointless to play through (and I didn't even get to kill a single youngling) .

Backlog Assault: The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

2011-04-01T17:55:00.000-07:00

In the last few years I've built up a pretty crazy gaming backlog. This year, I've decided it's high time I do something about it. Join me as I begin to regret more than ever all those impulse Steam buys and 99 cent PS2 bargains:

Title: The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
Platform: PS2

Bought: 23 July 2010
From: GameStop
Price: €0.99

Beaten: 04 March 2011
Final Game Time: 4:00 approx.
Price/Hour: €0.25 approx.

Backloggery Dump:

01/03/11 - Thought I'd give this a spin tonight. I'm up to Fangorn Forest at the moment, mashing my way to victory.
03/03/11 - Seriously? Not a single checkpoint in that bullshit Wall Breach level? No way I'm trying that for a third time, I'm done. :D
04/03/11 - Turns out there was a way I was trying Mission 11 again, on easy. :D Went on to beat the final mission after that.

Thoughts:

In my experience, EA games from this era are usually solidly-made, reasonably entertaining, but never anything really special or inspiring. The Two Towers doesn't really buck that trend.

In case you don't know, this is a hack and slash game, covering the major battles from the first two movies. I'm not exactly an expert on these types of games, but the combat seemed decent enough and there's quite a bit of depth added to it as you buy more combos with the experience points you earn. I may have been stumped by that second last level, but for the most part, the game's difficulty on Normal feels pretty well-balanced, at least for a noob like me.

Level-wise, the game's made up of (disappointingly) linear treks through enemy-infested areas and larger-scale battles taking place in more open areas like Balin's Tomb. For an early PS2 game, the amount of enemies on screen in the second type of level is quite impressive and I was pleasantly surprised by how tense and exciting those battles could get. As far as I can tell though, these levels are checkpoint-free (unlike the others), making multiple failures a controller-throwingly frustrating experience.

Presentation-wise, the game could be better. Transitioning from movie footage to the in-game action is certainly a neat idea, but when the game in question is rough-looking, even for an early PS2 game, it only serves to highlight how much of a visual gulf there is between the two. The character models fare especially poorly in this juxtaposition (Gimli's face makes him look like a deformed latex puppet), making the movie to game switch kind of hilarious. Well, at least to me anyway. The voice acting isn't too great either. Ian McKellen puts in a fine performance, but the rest of it seems pretty phoned-in. (Viggo Mortensen sounds more like he's rehearsing lines from the script to himself than delivering them.)

I'm just nitpicking now though; It's a pretty short game and it does have it's problems, but I mostly enjoyed the few hours I spent playing it. I wouldn't go out of my way to get hold of a copy, but if you see one lying around for 99 cents, you could certainly do worse.

Christmas Snacks 2010

2011-03-13T15:29:00.000-07:00

Ah, Mid-March, what better time to review some of last year's Christmas-themed snack foods. (Festering in a reduced to clear bin near you now!). Just like Halloween, I'm rating everything on the internationally-recognised, five-point Screaming Torres scale. Let's begin!

Pringles Pigs in Blankets

A peppery, bacon-flavoured crisp, with a hint of sausage buried pretty deep down - not terribly well balanced, but tasty nonetheless. I'll give these a festive, four out of five.

/5

Pringles Roast Turkey

These taste far more like chicken than turkey to me, with dash of herbs and a hint of garlic. Not bad, not great either, I'll give these a three out of five.

/5

Cadbury Snow Bites

Round balls of chocolate surrounded by a crisp shell and dusted with powdered sugar. I really like the look of these and I'll take Cadbury's chocolate over that of Smarties or M&M's any day, but the harder shell, and the larger size of these makes it harder to chomp through handfuls of them at once in the same satisfying manner as the aforementioned candies. I'll give these a three out of five.

/5

Galaxy Mistletoe Kisses

A caramel/truffle combo covered in Galaxy chocolate. Rich, delicious and definitely the pick of the bunch here, I'm giving these a very merry five out of five.

/5

Cadbury Wishes

A truffle-filled chocolate star. Good, but not terribly exciting, I'm giving this a three out of five.

/5

Backlog Assault: Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers

2011-03-01T18:49:00.000-08:00

In the last few years I've built up a pretty crazy gaming backlog. This year, I've decided it's high time I do something about it. Join me as I begin to regret more than ever all those impulse Steam buys and 99 cent PS2 bargains:

Title: Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers
Platform: Wii

Bought: 11 July 2010
From: HMV.com
Price: £19.49

Beaten: 25 February 2011
Final Game Time: 11:16
Price/Hour: £1.73

Backloggery Dump:

21/02/11 - Started this tonight. Good God, the camera controls!
25/02/11 - Well, that didn't take too long. A fun little game, if a bit lacking in substance gameplay-wise.

Thoughts:

With the tiny amount of coverage this got at the time of it's release, part of the reason I picked this up was to figure out just what the hell it was for myself. Now that I've beaten it, I can state conclusively that this is an action-adventure game set in the Crystal Chronicles universe; Think Zelda with no dungeons, but lots of moogles.

It's true there isn't too much meat here in terms of gameplay. Most of the game consists of you traversing the overworld, talking to one person here, another person there - just moving along the story by triggering cut scenes. Accompanying that there are a few boss battles and a whole bunch of other "playable events" ranging from rail shooting to airship steering to ferret chasing to dancing. If you feel like supplementing that with some optional stuff, you can have a wander around the overworld, where you can find some pretty fun mini games to complete and groups of enemies to fight.

Combat takes place in real-time and makes use of your telekinetic powers to pick up enemies, throw them at each each other and clobber them with nearby objects. I found it mostly enjoyable, apart from the d-pad-controlled camera on occasion. With a more limited range of movement, the d-pad isn't a great substitute for analogue camera controls, especially with the fast pace of combat here. You run into an even bigger problem during the first boss encounter of the game, where you need to move the camera up and aim the pointer at the same time, using the same controller, before you miss a narrow opportunity to throw a sword at the boss. Think patting your head and rubbing your tummy at the same time.

The biggest problem of all with the combat though is that it's almost entirely optional and mostly pointless. One one hand, for taking on a group of enemies in the overworld and closing the portal they spawned from (for the first time in an area only), your health gets increased by one and you might get a few items you can combine into stat-boosting accessories. On the other, you can safely bypass almost every enemy in the game and the few bosses you encounter are never any real challenge. The benefits you gain from fighting aren't really useful when you almost never need to fight or beef yourself up for difficult bosses down the line.

Having said all that though, I still enjoyed the game for what it was. The playable events, mini games and the few battles I partook in were all quite fun; The story's interesting; The characters are likeable; The soundtrack's fantastic and the game world itself, with it's lush grasslands, dusty plains and sweeping blue skies is a joy to wander about in. Look, I brought some more holiday snaps (full album here):

Backlog Assault: Final Fantasy X

2011-03-01T18:28:00.000-08:00

In the last few years I've built up a pretty crazy gaming backlog. This year, I've decided it's high time I do something about it. Join me as I begin to regret more than ever all those impulse Steam buys and 99 cent PS2 bargains:

Title: Final Fantasy X
Platform: PS2

Bought: 06 August 2010
From: eBay
Price: €11.02

Beaten: 21 February 2011
Final Game Time: 61:47
Price/Hour: €0.18

Backloggery Dump:

02/02/11 - I'm back in Luca after rescuing Yuna from the Al Bhed.

03/02/11 - On my way to Djose Temple now.

05/02/11 - I'm making my way through Macalania Woods, and getting lost at every turn thanks to the constant random battles. *grumble*

07/02/11 - Welp, so much for Home... On to Bevelle!

09/02/11 - I'm done with Bevelle. Looks like I'm going back into the damn woods now.

10/02/11 - After a gruelling trek up, down and back up Mt. Gagazet, I'm finally on my way to Zanarkand.

15/02/11 - Taking care of some sidequests before I head for Sin.

17/02/11 - Looks like I'll be taking on some Dark Aeons to finish off two of the sidequests I'm doing. I foresee this going badly...

18/02/11 - Holy shit, those dark Aeons don't fuck around! :D I've decided to go get my ass kicked in the Omega Ruins instead now.

21/02/11 - Beat the final boss tonight, then went back to rip Omega Weapon a new one. Final time: 61:47

Thoughts:

Nearly 62 of FFX hours in three weeks - I think it's fair to say I enjoyed my stay in Spira. :D The battle system's plays it pretty safe here, but it's a damn solid game, helped along by a reasonably engaging story, characters who're still likeable despite reams of dodgy dialogue (and terrible delivery in Yuna's case) and an interesting backdrop in Spira itself.

I guess the big innovation in the game is the Sphere Grid, a way of levelling up by traversing a board game-like grid, and activating attribute and skill nodes when you get close enough to them. It adds a interesting level of strategy to the levelling up process - Do you stick to the route that's been obviously laid out for a particular character, sensibly activating every node on the way or do veer way off the prescribed path, teaching your strongest attacker a bunch of healing spells or making a beeline for Ultima with one of your magic users? If you're willing to grind enough, you can customize your characters quite a bit, though you can definitely end up screwing yourself in the process if you're not careful.

After spending the last few months playing games on the 360, the graphics did take a bit of getting used to, but they do actually hold up pretty well, especially the facial detail on the characters and the cutscenes, which are still pretty damn spectacular.

If I were to nitpick, the temple puzzle-solving segments are a real drag, especially when combined with the slightly stiff movement of your character and the fixed camera angles, but overall, FFX was a thoroughly engrossing and entertaining experience. So much so, that even after nearly 62 hours, I'm still craving some more Final Fantasy. Hm, let me see what else I can dig out of the old backlog...

Site Update: Deep Blue Theme 1.3

2011-02-25T17:05:00.002-08:00

TL;DR: A new(ish) version of this turn-of-the century desktop theme awaits on my web site. The shiny new wallpaper's up on my dA gallery.

Back in the Summer of 2000, I was way into desktop themes, well, that, NES ROMs and Limp Bizkit; It was kind of a strange time. I'd been throwing together bad wallpapers for more than a year, but the concept of themed wallpaper, cursors, sounds, etc. in a single, handy package was mind-blowing to my tiny, nerdy mind. Having assembled this bitchin'-lookin' 800 x 600 wallpaper from two royalty-free photos, I decided it'd be the perfect foundation to build my first theme upon.

By July that year, I had a bunch of accompanying cursors I'd made in Cursor Maker; a set of sounds I sampled from the shitty dance tracks I made the previous year (scroll down, if you dare); and a very blue colour scheme packed up with that insanely highly-compressed JPEG as the Deep Blue Theme.

As well as putting the theme on my own site, I sent it into download-behemoths-at-the-time, Tucows, where bizarrely, it got highlighted as the Theme of the Day for July 13, 2000. I was probably walking on air for a week after I found that out, I don't think I'd ever been as proud of anything I'd done up to that point. :D Not only that, but there were actually real people dropping by my crappy little site for the first time ever, leaving messages in the guestbook (remember those?) and even sending me email questions about a fucking desktop theme!

Now, I know no one else cares, but since I pulled down my old web site in 2003, my cerulean masterpiece has been missing from internet. That's mainly because I've never been happy putting together a new version with the old wallpaper - it's small, heavily artefacted and maybe a bit dodgy copyright-wise. I needed a new one, and in classic JiliK style (in a number of ways), I finally threw something suitable together in Paint Shop Pro last July.

Tah-dah! It's quite a departure from the original, but it is actually original this time and I think it works pretty well. Well, that is if you want to rock a Windows Classic theme in this day and age. :D If that sounds good to you, Deep Blue Theme 1.3 is now up for download on my downloads page, appropriately enough.

Steam Holiday Sale 2010

2011-02-21T06:41:00.000-08:00

An actual train of thought from a few weeks ago: "I wonder if I should try out FlatOut 2? Hold on, do I own FlatOut 2? Didn't I buy it during the Steam sale? Holy shit, yeah, there it is! Fuck." Time for a little holiday sale recap, maybe?

This year's sale kicked off on December 20th with more daily deals than ever, a bunch of crazy-cheap indie bundles and publisher packs galore, all presented in a nifty flash-based sale catalogue. This year I was hoping to grab Oblivion and Super Meat Boy for cheap, keeping spending to about €40. So, how did that all go?

Day 1

Super Meat Boy €3.50

I grabbed this one before the store front was even up, worried that such a deep discount on a pretty recent release could only be a mistake. I'm on World 2 at the moment, really digging the look and the music and it's nice to see my investment into a wired 360 pad is finally paying off. Much like N+, which I've played a fair bit of lately, it's hard as balls, but super-addictive. Finally figuring out the strategy for getting through a seemingly impossible level and then pulling off is the most satisfying thing in the world.

F.E.A.R. €2.24

I think the first I heard of FEAR was through a Quicktime trailer on a PC magazine cover-mount in 2005. It looked pretty cool, but there wasn't a hope in hell it'd run on the shitty Packard Bell I had a the time. Better late than never.

Peggle Complete Pack €4.79

After playing both Peggle Extreme and the free WoW-themed version, I was confident I had had my fill of Peggle; It was fun in a mindless, casual kind of way, even a little addictive, but there was no way I was forking out even €10 to get more of it. Dammit though, Popcap got to me somehow; As soon as I saw both games for less than a fiver, I was thinking "Hell yeah, I want to buy Peggle!". Bastards.

Magnetis €0.50

Originally a €5 WiiWare, that I was kind of interested in, how could I pass it up for 50 damn cents?

Day 2

Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light €3.60

Who'd have thought that that unplayed Steam copy of Tomb Raider Anniversary would have come in so useful in the end? Thanks to owning that already, I was able to nab this for €3.60 instead of €5.10. Another sweet deal on a pretty recent game.

Puzzle Quest €1.50

When everyone was ranting about how awesome this Bejewelled-fuelled RPG was, I thought they they were insane. Since then though, I've come to know the joy that is match-three gameplay and I'm quite eager to try this out.

The other deal from Day 2 I was strongly considering was The Witcher for a paltry €3.99. Knowing that in all likelihood, I wouldn't get around to playing it before next year's sale, and trying to stay within budget, I took a pass on it in the end.

Day 5

Overlord II €1.35

In a continued (and rare) showing of self-restraint, I managed to resist any purchases for a whole two days until I snagged a copy of Overlord II for a little over a Euro on Christmas Eve. To date, I've only played a few hours of the original, but it was pretty damn fun. No way I could pass up on the sequel for that price.

Day 6

FlatOut 2 €1.00

Having bought it in 2009, I've only got around to playing the first FlatOuta bit of it in the last few months. What better time than now to add the sequel on top of a backlog so immense that the games on the bottom have formed into diamonds? :D Eh, the first one seemed like a pretty solid racing game and I'll buy pretty much any thing for €1 or less. Speaking of which...

Caster €0.89

I was planning to buy this along with a bunch of other cheap, non-daily deals to round out the sale. Seeing as I was only spending a Euro on FlatOut 2 though, what was the harm in another eighty nine cents?

More reckless fiscal policy after the jump.
Day 9

RUSH €1.52

Another WiiWare port, this time of the 600-point Rubik's Puzzle Galaxy: RUSH form the Toki Tori guys. I was already going to get this on the last day for the existing €2.50 price tag, but at this price they were practically giving it away.

SimCity 4 Deluxe €2.49

The only Sim City game I ever played was 2000, which came pre-installed on an old Compaq Presasrio we got in 1998. I wasn't particularly good at it, but man, did I dig the funky MIDI soundtrack. I've been thinking of picking up a used copy of 2000 for a while to have another go at it, but for that price I thought I might as well try this one instead. Hopefully it doesn't place too much emphasis on laying down underground pipes. Ugh, fuck those pipes.

Day 11

Amnesia: The Dark Descent €3.60

Actually a deal from Day 10, I managed to get hold of this at the very last minute after the Day 11 deals didn't really do anything for me. I'm pretty sure I'm not going to find this remotely frightening, now that that element of the game's been talked up to astronomical proportions by the gaming press, so I'm hoping there's a decent game in here too.

Day 13

Indie 2D Pack €4.49 (Bullet Candy, Galcon Fusion, Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved, Super Laser Racer, VVVVVV)

Knowing that there weren't going to be any more new deals on the final day of the sale, it was finally the time to open the cash floodgates and grab everything I had my eye on since day one. First up was a ridiculously cheap pack of indie games including Geometry Wars, which I've wanted to try out for ages and VVVVVV, which looked like a lot of fun from the Giant Bomb quick look.

I'm not sure I'll be able to get into Geometry Wars as much as many others have, never really caring about high scores in games, but I'm having fun with it so far and loving crazy, neon, vector-style graphics.

Tropico Reloaded €1.74

I've never been particularity good at strategy games, but running my own banana republic seemed like an interesting prospect, especially for the asking price.

Flight Control HD €1.36

A Day 10 deal, I gather this is one of the games all the kids are playing on their space phones. I thought I'd give it a go for the low asking price.

Toki Tori €1.12

I've had the WiiWare version of this since 2008; I think I'm somewhere in the last world at the moment. The last run of levels get pretty damn tough, but it's an enjoyable, well-designed little puzzler and solving one of those later levels by yourself always makes you feel like the smartest person in the world.

Armed and Dangerous €1.99

I know precious little about this, but I remember someone on some podcast said it was pretty rad at some point. If that's not a top recommendation, I don't know what is.

Zeno Clash €3.00

The last daily deal I picked up. Lots of people seem to like this and/or are freaked out by the world it takes place in. I'm always down for a little freakiness, especially for €3.

If my calculations are right, that comes to a total of €40.68, pretty spot-on as far as my budget was concerned and a damn nice haul too.

I'm kicking myself now though that I didn't get Oblivion for €9.99 about midway through the sale. Having played a lot of Morrowind last year, I'm sure I'd get my money's worth at that price, but I was hoping to get it for a little cheaper, so I passed on it at the time. I was hoping it'd pop back up during the last day of the sale, but alas, it was nowhere to be seen. I guess there's always the Summer Sale to look forward to.

Jack-o'-lantern 2010

2010-11-18T14:44:00.001-08:00

It's 18 days since Halloween and that can only mean one thing - bad photos of a totally unremarkable Jack-o'-lantern I made almost a month ago.

Enjoy! :D

Halloween Candy 2010

2010-11-14T15:00:00.000-08:00

While picking up some Halloween candy I stumbled across in October, I thought I should probably ~~blatantly rip off~~ ~~-RoG-~~ do a blog post, reviewing whatever spooky treats I could get my hands on locally. Not much as it turns out, but that didn't stop me from photographing dissected chocolate eggs like a crazy person or indeed, rating all the candy on offer on a Screaming Torres scale of 1 to 5. So let's get to it:

Cadbury Screme Eggs

A new Halloween variety of creme egg had me so excited that I bought two. Imagine my disappointment when I bit into the thing and discovered that it was just a regular old creme egg, with the yellow dye used for the yolk replaced with green. They didn't even use a Halloween themed mould for the eggs themselves. Come on guys, you can do better than this.

They may still be creme eggs, but I can only give this kind of unimaginative laziness a three out of five.

/5

Cadbury Dead Heads

More egg-based business from Cadbury. I really like the look of the monster faces on these guys and while I was a bit disappointed that the red/maroon filling wasn't cherry or strawberry flavour, any chocolate product filled with caramel (even when it's dyed red) is always more than welcome by me.

/5

Natural Confectionery Company Spooky Treats

Here we have a some jellies boasting natural colours and flavours. I really liked these - the fruit flavours are tasty and quite intense and I appreciate how there are more jelly shapes than there are flavours. Although I guess that's why there were far more black (blackcurrant) and red (strawberry) jellies in the bag than the others - bad news if you prefer orange, lemon or lime.

/5

Natural Confectionery Company Cauldron's Mix

The sour coating's pretty weak on these, but I'm still digging the fruit flavours, which seem to be exactly the same as the Spooky Treats. Can anyone tell what the green, black and white ones above meant to be though? I'm going for a troll, a lump of coal and a mound of bird shit (A ghost you say? How dare you dismantle my sub-par jokes).

/5

Haribo Horror Mix

You can't go wrong with some Haribo, especially when it's the kind with the soft white underside, which makes up most of the bag here. I'm not really seeing where frogs and snakes fit in with a Halloween themed product, but I 'm liking the design of these, especially the spiders, who naturally, have crosses embossed on their backs. The skeletons look a bit goofy though and their creepy, smiley faces freak me out for some reason.

/5

Haribo Super Sour Monsters

Where the Cauldron's Mix coating failed, these deliver with a damn sour exterior. Underneath that you've got an interesting and delicious trio of flavours: cherry, lemon and apple. And to top it off, the odd, alien-looking monsters they went for here are pretty awesome-looking. I guess they could have added another flavour or two to the bag, but as things stand, these are already sour candy perfection.

/5

Spooky Halloween Bars

A full-sized Snickers? Naw, you're getting a portion controlled Halloween bar, fatty. With "portion controlled" prominently displayed on the packing, I was expecting some joyless, tasteless, low fat chocolate inside, but these aren't too bad actually. Half of each bar is fairly generic-tasting, but passable milk chocolate and the other half's white chocolate dyed orange, which I kind of liked. They're not the best bars in the world but I could happily munch my way through them a pack of them. I love the cute little wrappers they come in too.

If the bars themselves do nothing for you, you can also grab a scissors and cut out the smallest playing cards known to humanity from the included fun card and play snap with them. Make sure to grab a magnifying glass first.

/5

Great Moments in Marketing: Screaming Torres

2010-10-13T23:56:00.000-07:00

Well friends, the World Cup may be long gone, but there's still a bit of footballing business I need to take care of. And seeing as adverts and the like irk me on a pretty regular basis I thought I might start a feature with it.

So here we have the Pepsi Max World Cup-themed 2l bottle label from the summer (or at least the only one they had shops around here). It's got Spain's, Fernando Torres as some sort of tribal football warrior. A valid angle to take, I guess, but his pose and expression along with all the weird, photoshopped psychedelia make him look like an angry, shirtless hippy doing his best Mario impersonation. Or in other words, ridiculous.

See.

As an added bonus, we also get a bit of life advice, apparently from Pepsi's newly acquired Wheel of Morality - "Life's a pitch; You can't win without friends." After pondering how life was in any way like a football pitch, I started wondering if the Spanish team had a big falling out before the Switzerland game back in the summer. This label, thought provoking, if nothing else.

GameStop Pick-Ups: PS2 Games from 99c, JiliK Goes Wild

2010-08-01T17:44:00.000-07:00

The following recently-finished, four-month-old blog post is brought to you by laziness...

Urgh, as if my backlog wasn't sizeable enough already, I wandered into GameStop last week with €20. Seeing that PS2 games were on sale for as little as €0.99 and that there was a buy two get one free promotion, I knew it was my mission to buy as much stupid shit as possible.

I rifled through the PS2 section, grabbed ten games coming to about €18 and marched up to the counter with my haul. It was a spectacularly low-rent display of extravagance, like waving around wads of dollar bills or speeding around in a Honda Civic. Having thoroughly impressed all the eight-year-olds in the shop with my purchasing prowess, I headed home to check out my big bag of crap.

From Russia with Love - €0.99

The first thing I picked up, mainly because it's one of my favourite Bond movies and I was always curious as to how this turned out. I can't really comment on the game from the nanosecond I had it on for, but the inclusion of the Connery era gun-barrel is pretty awesome and I really like the box art. I think this is the style of Everything or Nothing though, which wouldn't be a good thing, given how much of a chore I found that to be.

Tiger Woods PGA Tour 06 - €0.99

Believe it or not, I've never picked up one of the Tiger games. 99c seemed like the perfect price of entry, so I decided to give this golf thing a go. Rather than being constantly berated for my lack of club-swinging prowess, I made sure to shut the commentary hitting the green - a move well justified as it took me more strokes than you'll see at a masturbation convention to finish the first course. The controls were pretty easy to get the hang of though and this seems like the perfect game to just pick up and play while you're listening to a podcast or something.

Enter the Matrix - €0.99

Oh, Year of the Matrix, where did it all go wrong? From what I've played of this, I'm not especially hopefully that it'll be any more enjoyable than stinky turd that was Revolutions - the camera's jerky, the graphics are pretty poor and the tutorial has you constantly referring to the controls menu to figure out what button does what. A Matrix game could have been awesome, but not like this. (Sorry)

More bargain bin crawling after the jump.

Burnout 3: Takedown - €3.99

The only Burnout game I've played up to now is the first one on the GameCube. Despite being a bit rough around the edges, it was a damn enjoyable racer and I've been on the lookout for Burnout 2 ever since, being a bit scarred off by the increased emphasis the later games supposedly placed on crashes and takedowns. For €3.99, I thought I'd finally give the much-lauded third instalment a go and no surprise, it's a damn fine game.

Weaving your way through incoming traffic at blazing speeds, narrowly avoiding crash after crash after crash is still great fun and incredibly exciting. Rather than ruining the game, the takedown system is quite a satisfying addition, finally allowing you to dole out richly deserved justice to cheating AI bastards by wrecking their car in number of cool ways. And despite my general apathy to the game's love of cars getting trashed, the crash events are actually quite enjoyable, puzzle-based affairs where you judge how and when to crash your car into a group of stationary vehicles to wrack up the required amount of damage to clear the stage. Watching the chain reaction caused by your wreckless road use can be quite mesmerising at times, just as it occasionally is during a race.

More often than not though, the game's insistence replaying each and every crash you've played a part in, mid-race, is just an unwanted distraction. It's worse still when you've crashed your own car and all the AI racers somehow gain the power of time manipulation during the replay, speeding ahead of you out of nowhere. I guess, in a way, running the risk of an unskippable replay and being taken advantage of by the AI raises the stakes of every dangerous manoeuvre you take, adding to the thrill of the game. Frankly, I'd rather be thrilled in a less frustrating manner.

For a game that's pushing on for six years old, the graphics still hold up pretty well with some really nice reflection effects on the cars and the road. Though the road one I could kind of do without as it can sometimes make it harder to see what's coming up ahead - definitely not helpful for such a fast-paced, obstacle-ridden game.

The music's a different story though. Were people really still listening to shitty punk pop in 2004? Good God! There's more teen angst on there than a Home & Away / Hollyoaks crossover. And naturally there's a fucking "DJ" butting in every five seconds interrupting anything you were actually enjoying. Oh well, at least it's nice to see Ash get a track in there. Any chance of a Rock Band pack, EA?

The Godfather - €3.99

It may have been a combination of curiosity and the inclusion of a sweet collector's tin that got me to pick this up, but after playing a little I'm feeling a little better about my purchase. They seem to be treating the property with considerately more respect than I was expecting and it looks like the game might even weave in pretty well with the events of the movie. I'm also kind of excited about the 1940's setting, could be a nice change of pace from the GTA games. Still, if all that falls through, that tin is pretty awesome...

Headhunter - €3.99

You know, it suddenly strikes me that I actually know very little about this game. I know it's some kind of third-person shooter, published by Sega in the dying days of the Dreamcast and that's about it. I guess that was enough to have it stick in my head for all these years.
So far, I've played through the tutorial, which makes it look like a third person shooter, with a cover mechanic and I'm guessing, some stealthy bits. Oh, and it does have some very punchable live action newscasters filing in the game's back-story. Looking forward to seeing more of them.

Splinter Cell - €1.99

While I've gotten into the Metal Gear Solid games in recent years, I've been a bit hesitant to give the Tom Clancy flavoured alternative a go. Everything I've heard about the early Splinter Games makes them seem pretty unforgiving in terms of mistakes and given the number of times it took me to pass over an area of broken glass silently in the tutorial, I'm not sure how long I'll last in the proper game before letting the terrorists do whatever they sodding well want.

Jak II - €1.99

I've heard lots of bad things about this over the years, but for €2, it's got to be worth a try. From what I've played, the platforming seems similar to before and it's nice to see them starting off the intro in the colourful, carefree world of the first game before dumping you into into urban dystopia land. The game still seems to have good sense of humour though, so maybe it's not going to be the joyless, "mature"platformer I was expecting.

The Lord of The Rings: The Return of the King €2.99

I remember this and The Two Towers got pretty okay reviews way back when, so I picked it up hoping that it'd be decent. I've only had it on long enough to know that the cut scenes are unskippable (always a plus) and that the game's graphics don't quite match up with the film clips (The fairly seamless transition between the two painfully underlines this). If nothing else though, playing this prompted me to go and watch the LotR trilogy again. That's worth at least ninety nine cents, right?

Steam Perils of Summer Sale

2010-07-07T15:31:00.000-07:00

Not content to just wring our wallets dry at the end of the year, Steam sprung a surprise Perils of Summer sale on us on June 24th. Knowing that the only real peril here was Steam itself, I waded into the bargain-infested waters.

Alien vs. Predator Classic 2000 (€0.75)

I'm not sure if this is any good or not, but for that price I'll buy pretty much anything. It did sound kind of interesting in the preview I read of it in Arcade in 1999. Never thought I'd be downloading a legal copy of it from the internet for a pittance in 2010.

Shatter (€2.00)

I've had the supposedly awesome soundtrack for this for a few months without listening to it, might as well grab the game so I can fully ignore all things Shatter.

I'm kidding. I have played through a few levels and the soundtrack is indeed awesome (glad I grabbed it now). The game itself looks promising - it's a Breakout-style game with a really nice look to it and suck and blow (I'm sure that's the official name) mechanic is a really clever addition, allowing for greater control of the ball than any of these games I've played before. Looking forward to getting deeper into this one.

The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom (€1.99)

I don't know much about this either, other than it involves solving puzzles to steal pie. The art direction looks awesome from what I've seen of it though.

Beat Hazard (€1.74)

I've been having a ton of fun with this since I got it. It's an awesome little 2D shooter where the levels, and the strength of your ship's laser at any given time are based on the the music track you've loaded into it. Just like Audiosurf, it's fascinating playing different tracks just to see what the game turns them into and I always like to do something else to occupy myself while listening to music, so this is right up my alley.

Max and the Magic Marker (€3.75)

Previously a WiiWare-only game, this has you using your mouse cursor as a pencil to fashion wonky-looking stairs, platforms, boxes, rafts and the like to help a crazy-haired kid (who you control with the keyboard) to make his way from left to right. Enjoying it so far, but it looks like every level has the same music. It's not grating or anything, but I'd like the option to mute the sound and put on my own music instead, an option that I haven't found so far.

Puzzle Kingdoms (€0.95)

I'm always hearing great things about Puzzle Quest, so a spin-off made by the same guys has to be worth a shot for that price.

Super Laser Racer (€1.00)

I've never been particularly good at old school overhead racers, but the colourful, vector-style graphics caught my eye. I mightn't get very far, but it was only a Euro.

Chrome + Chrome: Specforce (€1.49)

As I'd been fairly sensible with my purchases throughout most of the sale, I felt the overwhelming urge to grab something stupid as it drew to a close. The gleeful cat slaughter of Bad Rats put me off that and Alpha Prime looked like it might chug on my relatively modest PC, but two cheap, janky-looking shooters? Sign me up. (I'm never going to download these, am I?)

In the end, that's a total of €13.67, a surprising show of restraint for once. I guess it helped that I was still sitting on a massive backlog from the Holiday Sale; Starting off by playing Morrrowind may not have been the best move in retrospect. :D

Walkers Flavour Cup: Part Three

2010-07-07T13:04:00.001-07:00

With the actual World Cup winding up soon, it's high time to get off my lazy ass and wrap up this crisp tasting extravaganza - or at least I would if I could track down the remaining flavours. The Scottish, Welsh, South African and Australian crisps remain elusive. I'm thinking the first two may be exclusive to the UK, but surely the other two must be out there somewhere? In the meantime, let's put another three bags through their paces:

Irish Stew

I don't think I've ever came across lamb flavoured crisps, so I was kind of excited to try these. Sadly, like the Brazilian ones, they barley taste of anything. There's some kind of meat flavour deep down there, but it's easily overpowered by the base flavour of the crisps. A single head-butt is almost too much.

Spanish Chicken Paella

I've never had paella, but I'd wager that it involves chicken and peppers from tasting these. The peppers come across way more powerfully than the chicken does and these are easily the saltiest Walkers crisps I've ever had. Like the cheeseburger ones, that may sound bad, but I quite enjoyed them. I'll give these a respectable three out of five.

Italian Spaghetti Bolognese

Initially, I got kind of a barbecue flavour from these. That soon gave way to a herby, meaty stab at a bolognese sauce. It's a decent stab, but I think one bag of these is plenty for me. I'll give these two unenthusiastic head-butts out of five.

Nintendo E3 Conference 2010 Live Impressions

2010-06-15T10:55:00.000-07:00

It's E3 once again and seeing as I kind of enjoyed doing it last year, I pulled up Notepad and jotted down some impressions as Nintendo's conference unfolded. If you want to follow along at home, you can watch again here or here. So, without further ado let's witness some megatons being dropped. Or not.

08:48 Just tapped into the GameSpot live feed a few minutes ago. I'm rocking a cup of Twinings green tea with pineapple and grapefruit and I just got some hastily-ordered Microsoft points in the post to take advantage of the XBLA sales this week. Nothing you do can bring me down now, Cammie.
08:52 People are still trickling in, taking their seats. It looks like they're cycling through trivia questions on the three big screens in front of the audience.
08:55 That looks like a Mario Kart 64 question. Definitely Nintendo trivia then.
08:57 Yay for generic indie music!
08:59 Nintendo logos on the screens. Shit's about to get real!
09:01 Countdown!
09:01 Reggie!
09:03 Zelda!! Cel-shaded adult link. Otherwise, it looks a lot like Twilight Princess in terms of style.
09:06 Miyamoto sporting the old master sword and shield combo. The game's sounding worryingly on-rails at the moment.
09:07 Miyamoto bursts out of the backstage like a boss.
09:08 Sword control doesn't exactly seem 1:1, Shiggy.
09:10 Shiggy's not doing too well with those octoroks.
09:11 Okay, so it looks like he's moving Link with the analogue stick. Phew!
09:12 Item selection looks pointer-based, less fumbling through menus is always welcomed.
09:13 No pointer controls for the bow and arrow. Too bad, I thought they worked really well in TP. Plus, Miyamoto's making some really weird noises.
09:14 He seems like he's really having fun though. Nice to see.
09:15 The Motion Plus based aiming looks kind of janky here. Shiggy and Bill Trinen are claiming wireless interference.
09:16 Shiggy's flying a beetle. Hopefully it's easier to control than that damn pointer-controlled bird section in TP.
09:17 A whip! Eat that Igarashi! Looks cool.
09:18 Looks like Bill and Shiggy are abandoning the demo.
09:19 Next year for Zelda. Boo.
09:20 A pretty cool gameplay trailer. Is that some skydiving I see? Transporting a bomb with the beetle item brings back memories of PD's CamSpy. I approve.
09:21 Reggie's going on about sports games.
09:22 A new Mario sports game. Looks like volleyball.
09:22 Nope. Basketball and hockey too.
09:23 Mario sports mix. Looks neat. A multi sports Mario game just seems more appealing than a single one to me for some reason.
09:24 Sales talk. Using that Wii lifestyle shot to refer to casual Wii players makes me laugh for some reason.
09:25 Oh, those lifestyle shots are are as hilariously lame as ever.
09:25 A new "bridge" title. Hmm.
09:26 So much fun! So this is Wii Party I guess.
09:27 Yep. How is this in any way a "bridge" game, Reggie?
09:27 Another Just Dance? I'd rather not.
09:28 Dance crew face-offs! Finally.
09:28 That guy wooing needs a slap.

More live blogging and a little analysis after the jump.

09:29 Golden Sun Dark Dawn incoming, and I still haven't checked this series out. Definitely looks like a DS RPG.

09:31 GoldenEye for Wii. It's the trailer that leaked yesterday.

09:31 That cheer is still hilarious. "Oh my God! Yes!" I love how the focus group are loosing their shit in anticipation, before the guy even announces the new game.

09:32 It's hard to tell if this is a genuine remake or if they're trying to con us by focusing on areas that are modelled on the movie's sets and also appeared in the N64 game.

09:33 Epic Mickey incoming. Never got into Disney in a big way, not really too hyped up for this.

09:34 "Disney Epic Disney" Yo dawg, I heard you like...

09:35 Gameplay footage. Graphical style looks kind of Kingdom Hearts-ish.

09:38 Restore or erase the world with paint or thinner. Play-style matters (TM).

09:39 A Steamboat Willie side scrolling stage. Sweet!

09:41 Sakurai? Could Kirby finally see the light of day.

09:41 He's on screen. Kirby's worked his way into Reggie's hardened gamer heart. Aww!

09:42 Kirby Knitting confirmed.

09:42 No. It's Kirby's Epic Yarn. A new 2D platformer, love the art style.

09:43 This looks awesome. The fabric-based world and Kirby's interaction with it remind me of Paper Mario. Oh, Paper Mario sequel, where are you?

09:45 Dragon Quest talk

09:46 Other M trailer. Looks cool with some great music. I hope they show off some more gameplay on stage. Still not entirely convinced by this.

09:48 The box art. XD Yo dawg, I heard you like Samus...

09:49 Donkey Kong!!! By Retro. It's true.

09:49 Looks a lot like Jungle Best. I approve of the classic music though.

09:50 Is that a pirate ship? Mine carts! Barrel cannons! Yes.

09:51 Donkey Kong Country Returns. Not sure about the name for what looks more like a Jungle Beat / DKC cross-over.

09:51 3DS incoming.

09:52 Oh, man. These photos. Fuck 3D glasses, man!

09:53 Somebody order a pretentious 3DS trailer?

09:54 "This is Nintendo 3DS." Looks like a DS.

09:56 Looks like there's an analogue nub.

09:57 A touch screen. I guess it's backwards compatible then.

09:57 Graphics. Or not - not even a single screen shot. XD

09:59 It takes 3D pictures, interesting.

09:59 3D movies coming to 3DS. No deals to announce yet. Super smart move. They're all the rage with the kids nowadays, I hear.

10:00 Project Sora! It's a 3DS game.

10:01 Holy crap, Casamassina redeemed, It's Kid Icarus.

10:02 Charcters based on their SSBB designs by the looks of things. Looks like there's going to be some on-rails bits. They're giving me a Space Harrier vibe.

10:03 I already wish Pit would shut up.

10:05 Sounds like Wii Connect 24 lives on with the 3DS. Let's see how it works out there.

10:07 Nintendogs...with cats! Skittles! Skittles? Were are you, Skittles?

10:08 Resident Evil on 3DS. Yes, please.

10:09 Ooh burn, MGS. Take that PSP. :)

10:09 Developers responses to 3DS. Inafune says it's powerful. Lots of these seem super-scripted.

10:11 I like to think Reggie was holding their families hostage. Read the lines, bitch!

10:12 Reggie's back.

10:13 Holy shit! An Iwata and Miyamoto comedy skit.

10:14 An Arwing! Believe!

10:15 Reggie laughs at the imminent death of his corporate overlords. He must pay.

10:15 Reggie's shirt is burned to a crisp. So corny. So awesome.

10:16 Whoa, is Reggie going to pull another Oprah?

10:16 No free 3DSs, but everyone gets a free lady. Take that Microsoft.

10:18 That's it! Time to check out those XBLA deals.

A pretty enjoyable show, I think. Kirby looks fantastic and both that and the Donkey Kong game were nice surprises. I wish they'd stuck closer to the look of Rare's DKC games with DKC Retruns, but I'm sure it'll be a solid game with Retro behind it. Hopefully they can get David Wise on board for soundtrack, a critical part of what made those first two games great as far as I'm concerned.

I really liked the art direction they're gone for with Zelda and I'm not really concerned with the controls being as problematic as they were on stage, however I'm a bit disappointed with how safe the whole thing seems. From everything they showed, it looks like another adult Link Ocarina of Time esque adventure with an as-yet-unrevealed new mechanic thrown in to spice things up (what the skydiving bit was hinting at, I think). With the way TP catered to every fanboy demand so thoroughly, I was ready for some batshit-crazy Majora's Mask type madness this time. In the end though, the point of the Zelda games is the dungeon design and I'm sure that'll be as ingenious as ever. Hell, maybe I'm totally off with branding this as conservative. All we really saw was about ten minutes of gameplay footage; I'm just going on the vibe I got from that.

What else? The 3DS looks very promising, as does Kid Icarus: Uprising. Epic Mickey, I'm not convinced about yet. I'm not really into Disney stuff I guess and I don't know enough about Warren Spector's previous stuff to know if he can make good on his claims about the game's characters being influenced by your interaction with the world. (Though there is an unplayed copy of Deus Ex around here somewhere.) And they still haven't shown anything resembling that stunning concept art from a few years ago. If it's a fun platformer, I'll give it a try, but from what's been shown so far, the massive hype remains unjustified for me.

As for the conference itself, I thought it was professional, well-paced and struck a nice balance between core and casual core stuff. They delivered an almost non-stop stream of new game announcements, including a few genuine surprises without ever resorting to the scripted, cringe-worthy exchanges and feigned enjoyment of Microsoft's event last night. Bravo, Nintendo.

It's also nice to see Nintendo's laser focus on their three or four big, core franchises being shifted significantly this year with new Kirby, Donkey Kong and Kid Icarus outings. It gives me hope of one day seeing that awesome Star Fox revival that has the same care and attention lavished on it as Metroid Prime did. - the one that only exists in my mind. Okay, now I'm really going to check out XBLA. Right after I have another sob about Star Fox.

EDIT: Damn it! I completely forgot about The Last Story and Xenoblade. Not a peep about them at E3. Hopefully they won't follow the likes of Captain Rainbow, Fatal Frame 4 and Zangeki no Reginleiv in becoming Japan-only titles. As nice as it is to see the likes of Kirby and DK return, I'd love to see Nintendo putting more risky core games out over here. They may well flop, but then again, who would have thought that the likes of Advance Wars would have caught on in the west?

Walkers Flavour Cup: Part Two

2010-05-26T12:47:00.000-07:00

Brazilian Salsa

An ambiguous plasticy flavour with a vague hint of something resembling a tomato or a pepper. Barely deserving of Zidane's attention, I'll give them a single headbutt.

(I bet the bag tastes better.)

American Cheeseburger

They may have been ridged crisps as opposed to regular ones, but I've definitely had these before. They've got kind of greasy, pickly Big Mac flavour and as gross as that sounds, I quite like 'em. These get a respectable three headbutts out of five.

English Roast Beef & Yorkshire Pudding

I assumed these were just going to be the Argentinian steak flavoured ones in a different bag, but they've done a great job here capturing a drier roast beef flavour. I've only had Yorkshire pudding once or twice, so I'm not sure what to look for in that department - There's definitely a faint secondary flavour of some kind, but I can't quite place it. Being right up there with their Argentinian counterparts, I'll give these four headbutts out of five.

German Bratwurst Sausage

These have got quite a sweet bacon flavour. I'm not sure how that stacks up to the actual taste of a bratwurst sausage, but I'm definitely a fan. Another three headbutts coming right up.

Walkers Flavour Cup: Part One

2010-05-16T11:20:00.000-07:00

To coincide with the World Cup, Walkers have fifteen new crisp flavours out competing in the "Walkers Flavour Cup""for the prestigious title of "Walkers Flavour Champion". I'm struggling to think of a more pointless contest, but I'm all for weird new snack foods, so I'll be checking them all out over the summer and rating them in Zidane headbutts out of five (the only scale that matters). Let's kick off (*gets shot*) with this lot:

Dutch Edam Cheese

Calling these Edam flavour is a bit of a stretch. They taste just like every other cheese-flavoured crisp you've ever eaten. That's not to say they're bad though, I quite liked them - probably more than I would have liked Edam-flavoured ones. I'll give these three Zidane headbutts out of five.

French Garlic Baguette

A pretty spot-on garlic bread flavour, with a really strong buttery taste. If that's your thing, you won't go far wrong with these. Personally, butter kind of makes me wretch. I'll give these two Zidane headbutts out of five.

Argentinian Flame Grilled Steak

Definitely the pick of this bunch with a tasty and pretty convincing beef flavour and a hint of onion. I'll give these an impressive four Zidane headbutts out of five.

Japanese Teriyaki Chicken

Generic oriental-spice-flavour crisps. There's a bit of ginger in there and a vague meaty flavour - nothing your taste buds will get too excited about though. I'll give these two Zidane headbutts out of five.

Check Out My NikeiD's, Bro

2010-04-21T13:18:00.000-07:00

With the limited variety of size 13 shoes available locally, I decided to grab a custom pair from Nike's on-line store for the first time a few months ago. To preserve the majesty of the sweet-ass colour scheme I choose, I took a few photos before I hit the streets with them and started standing in dog turds. (It's how I like to break in a new pair.)

The customisation's a fairly simple process done through a Flash-based interface. You start off by either selecting a pre-set scheme or going with a blank (grey) shoe. Then you can rotate your flash-based shoe around, while you click on the various shoe parts and select their colour from a pop-up menu. There are only a limited number of colours for each part and some parts are tied to the colour of others, but there's plenty of scope for customisation there.

For the shoe I was ordering, part of the design included optional numbers on the tongue and sides. The one on the tongue would be covered up most of the time anyway, so I decided to go with "64" (in honour of the Atari Jaguar, of course). The number on the side, I wasn't so sure about. It could be up to ten digits long, so the choice of number was immediately apparent, but wouldn't it look really dumb there? Well, on the Flash shoe, it looked pretty small and it was grey against a white background, not that noticeable, so...

I totally went for it. However, on arrival a month later, those damn numbers looked black, bold and FUCKING HUGE. I had clearly geeked these shoes up beyond all repair. :D

Despite the possibility of incurring eye rolls from fellow Losties though, the shoes are quite well made and I'm really pleased with how the colour scheme turned out. I would have expected a wide size 13 to be a little wider than these, but overall, I'm pretty happy with them. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go find a pair of extra long boot-cuts.

Some more pics here

A St. Patrick's Day Gift for You from JiliK

2010-03-17T11:59:00.000-07:00

It's St. Patrick's Day apparently, which makes it the perfect time to post this old home-made card I found again last summer. I drew it in school one day while I was bored in 1996. I'm not really sure why though, I was never that big on the occasion and you can't get me far away enough from parades, Irish music and the like. I usually just lay low today so they pack me off to wherever those non-existent snakes are hanging out now.

It's also ten years ago today since I unleashed my first web site on the unsuspecting internet. I had only been hooked up to it about a week earlier, but for some reason, I desperately wanted to have a web site and I set St. Patrick's Day as the day of the grand launch. I worked on it night after night that week with Microsoft Publisher and sometime after 1AM or 2AM on the 18th March, it was finally up.

The end result was a gloriously awful-looking site, full of idiotic, poorly-spelled opinions written by a know-it-all teenager. I really wish I had a copy to post, but it's all gone now, which makes all the nights I spent slaving over it seem like even more of a waste of time. :D

Anyway, happy St. Patrick's Day, I guess.

Merry Xmas Card

2010-01-15T16:54:00.000-08:00

Dammit! I really meant to post this on Christmas Eve, but I totally forgot. This is a photocopy of a Christmas card I drew in art class when I was in first year at secondary school (back in 1998). As far as I can recall it was an entry to some competition back then. I really love how it says "Merry Xmas", despite depicting a Nativity scene, almost as much as love how the hills that appear to be made of Christmas pudding.

Feel free to print it out, colour it in and give to loved ones next Christmas.

Steam Holiday Sale 2009: The Aftermath

2010-01-15T13:37:00.000-08:00

It only comes but once a year and when it does it brings a great need need to drop cash on cut price PC games you'll probably never even download. Yes, the Steam Holiday Sale was in full effect from December 23 to January 3 much to the delight of gamers everywhere. Wallets, on the other hand were less pleased. So what did I pick up? Well I'm glad you asked...

Lucasarts Adventure Pack €2.50
Even though I already bought Fate of Atlantis for €4 when it came out (and still haven't played it), this bundle crazy cheap, especially considering what these games were going for on the likes of eBay a year ago.

Space Quest Collection, King's Quest Collection €2.50 Each
From what I've head these two series seem a lot less accessible than LucasArts back catalogue, but I figured they were well worth a shot at that price. I hear the collections don't agree with 64-bit versions Windows though, although a few of the games do work in SCUMM VM. Luckily, I'm still running 32-bit Windows XP though.

Indigo Prophecy €2.99
I always wanted to check this out but I must have missed it coming to Steam (I wasn't about to take a chance on whatever third party DRM it has on Direct2Drive). It seems pretty interesting so far, although the camera control's a bit iffy. It's also pretty easy to unlock the virtual orgasmic sex scenes in this version. Yay boobs!

RIP Trilogy €0.99
I passed up on this in last year's sale when it was €2.50, but for a euro, I thought I'd be worth a look, so I installed the demo of RIP 3. For some reason, I thought these were strategy games, but I quickly found out that RIP 3 was, in fact, a dual stick shooter and a pretty fun at that.
Disappointingly though, the original RIP has you in control of a fixed turret only. You can't move your character around at all which makes for a more shallow and less enjoyable game. I've yet to try out the second game, but €0.99 for the third one alone was a good deal nonetheless.

Zombie Bowl-O-Rama €0.99
I'd never even heard of this, but with a concept like that and a €0.99 price point how could you go wrong? From what I've played, it's quite fun. Killing zombies in an unconventional manner will never get old.

Red Faction €2.49
I seem to remember the Penny Arcade guys disliking this back in the day, but it got pretty decent reviews and I was certainly up for trying it out at that price.It seems to be a pretty competent Half-Life homage so far, but I'm finding it extremely easy to get lost wandering around the early areas.

More rampant consumerism after the jump.
Lumines Base + Advance Pack €2.99
Who knew this was available on Steam? I was planning to get the 360 version when I finally go and get one, but this seemed much better value for €3. Disappointingly, this seems to be a pretty lazy PSP port, so it doesn't support the higher resolutions you get on a PC. As well as that, it looks like this is missing the licensed skins from other versions, so, bleah. I guess I can't complain too much at that price though.

Foreign Legion: Buckets of Blood €1.39
This looked like a fun little shooter for next to nothing, so I decided to grab it. The first level is really kicking my ass though. It's the kind of level where you need to defend a target from oncoming attackers on all sides - Definitely not my favourite kind of challenge; I just don't cope well when there's too much stuff to keep track of in a game at the same time.

Zombie Driver €2.24
I know I have a tendency to go a bit crazy in the midst of a sale, so from this point on I was trying to keep my spending a little more under control. I wasn't too sure about this, so I almost left the daily deal on it slide. I'm glad I didn't though. This reminds me a lot of old school GTA and not just in terms of the camera view or the controls - It's got the sense of tension and excitement as you career around the streets, desperately trying to reach your goal before the time runs out or your flaming car explodes and the same sense of satisfaction when you manage to do just that.

Max Payne 1 & 2 €3.74
I haven't even touched these yet, but I wanted to play them for years and this was an insanely good deal.

Luxor 3 €0.99
I bought Luxor 2 in last year's sale and it was a lot of fun, so this was a no-brainer. I found the second game got crazy hard later on though, so hopefully they've toned it down a little. From what I've played, this seems to be largely more of the same, but they have given the graphics a nice polish up.

Zombie Shooter €1.24
There were a bunch of Sigma Team's Shooter games on sale for €1.24 each. I wanted to try out one and I figured I liked shooting zombies more than aliens, so this was the clear choice.

Star Wars Jedi Knight Collection €9.49
I had my eye on this since the start of the sale and at this point I figured that it was unlikely to be one of the daily deals so I went ahead and grabbed it. So far, I've only played a bit of Dark Forces, which is a fairly interesting-looking Doom clone. The games I really wanted the pack for though were the Jedi Knight games, which I've yet to try/download.

Morrowind GOTY Edition €4.99
Dammit, just when I thought I was done with the sale this pops on the second last day as one of the daily deals. Again, I've yet to fire it up, but I suspect there's an awful lot of content in there for a fiver.

STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl €2
I REALLY thought I was done at this stage (the last day), but this deal popped up again and although I passed up on it the first time, thinking my PC wouldn't be up to it, an examination of the recommended specs revealed that they weren't quite as extreme as I had assumed. With a download of almost 6 gigs though, this is one game I won't get to try out any time soon.

And that was that, 37 games for €43.81 or less than the price of one PS3/360 game. A pretty awesome sale and a fine haul of digital goodness if I do say so myself. The only thing I'm disappointed about is having missed out on Prey for €2.24; The CD keys ran out midway through the daily deal and it's still not available at the moment. Oh well, there's always next year I guess...

Christmas Cooking: Christmas Pudding

2010-01-15T12:11:00.000-08:00

So, this year I decided to try my hand at making a Christmas pudding. With a 13 minute cook time in a microwave, this recipe had "bad idea" written all over it, which only made it all the more intriguing to me. I made a few minor changes to the recipe, swapping apricots for dates and using golden syrup instead of treacle. I put it all in a microwavable bowl, covered it with cling film and cooked it as instructed.

While I was sure the cling film on top of the bowl was going to explode at one point, thankfully it didn't and the only problem in the end was that the centre of the pudding turned out kind of gooey. I remedied that by putting it back in the microwave for two minute spurts, checking it after each one. I think it took about three to get the middle of the pudding nice and firm.

The resulting pudding definitely had the consistency and texture of a Christmas pudding, but the taste was quite different to what I was used to; It was much more fruity, with the booze and spices taking a back seat to the citrus flavours. It was quite nice though and I'd certainly consider making this pudding again for next Christmas.

Christmas Cooking: Christmas Cake

2010-01-15T11:41:00.000-08:00

It may be mid-January, but the Christmas spirit lives on here in the form of some stuff I meant to post over Christmas, but didn't. To kick off, here's there recipe I use every year to whip up a Christmas cake. To be more precise, it's actually just a porter cake with icing, but damn it, that's close enough.

Ingredients:

8oz Sugar
8oz Butter
1lb Self Raising Flour
1/2 Teaspoon Mixed Spice
1/2 Teaspoon Cinnamon
3 Eggs
1/2 Pint Porter
2lb Dried Fruit
2oz Ground Almonds

For Icing:
Strawberry Jam
1 Bag of Icing Sugar*
1 Pack Marzipan

*Plus whatever ingredients the icing recipe on the bag of icing sugar requires.

Method

Cream the butter and sugar (I'm sure there's a YouTube video on this :D)
Mix the spices together with the flour.
Beat the eggs.
Start adding the eggs alternatively with the flour to the mixture, once the eggs run out start adding the porter instead.
When all the eggs, flour and porter are added to the mix, add the ground almonds and fruit. I usually add a small carton of mixed peel, a small carton of glance cherries and make up the rest of the 2lb with a combination of raisins, sultanas, currants and dried cranberries.
Preheat your oven to 150C and transfer the mix to a 9 inch cake tin. I usually line the cake tin with cardboard (from a cardboard box) wrapped in greaseproof paper - a round disc of cardboard at the bottom and a strip along the side (a few inches higher than the tin). That may well be a fire hazard (Do it at your own risk!), but I find it makes it easier to remove the cake once it's done.
Start checking the cake once it's been cooking for 1 1/2 hours.
When it's done, the top of the cake should be brown and a knife/fork handle/knitting needle inserted into the centre should come out reasonably clean and not covered in wet cake.
Once the cake is done, leave it cool before taking it out of the tin. I usually leave it overnight. Wrap it in tin foil to keep it from going hard.

Icing:

Put a few desert spoons of jam into a mug and melt in a microwave. It should only take a minute or so at full power.
Brush the melted jam onto the outside of the cake with a pastry brush.
Roll out the marzipan with a rolling pin until it's big enough to cover the top and sides of the cake. Use some of the icing sugar to stop it from sticking to the rolling pin or the surface underneath.
Cover the cake with the marzipan, smoothing it down with your hands.
Make the icing as per the instructions on the pack of icing sugar.
Cover the marzipan coating with icing. I find a kitchen scraper works well for this.
After a few days drying, the icing should be solid enough to decorate or alternativley, to re-wrap in tin foil.

deviantART Update: Evil Glow

2009-12-13T17:29:00.000-08:00

As well as adding a couple of pictures in the post below to my deviantART gallery today, I also put up this. It's one of the crappy jack-o'-lantern photos I took 2007, screwed around with a bit in Paint Shop Pro.

Christmas Decorations 08 Style

2009-12-10T13:28:00.000-08:00

Man, I really didn't pick the best time to start that weekly gaming thing, partially because it's almost Christmas and, much to my dismay, those decorations had to go up sometime. This does, however, give me the perfect excuse to post a few pics I took of my jolified gaming room last year, like this one:

First up is this finely-crafted, flat-pack bookshelf, which plays host to my (boxed) game collection circa January 2009, two Halloween figures still full of candy from 2007, some VHS tapes, The Bible Part 3 and an old copy of Arcade I'd bought on eBay earlier in the month. What better way to enhance this fine collection of stuff than by Sellotaping a set of LED lights to it?

Rave time!

Tinsel - a tasteful addition to any entertainment cabinet. It's my TV, complete with a variety of consoles. Outside we have some clear fairy lights attached to a wall via a creeping cotoneaster and on the window there's a lighting Merry Christmas sign.

A close-up of the sign and the lights outside.

And finally, it's another window-mounted decoration from a different room. This one's Santa sitting on the moon and why wouldn't he?

This Week I 'Ave Been Mostly Playing...

2009-11-24T16:21:00.001-08:00

You know, this would have worked so much better if I had posted this on Sunday. Well anyway, this is a new bit I'm hoping to do weekly (let's see how long that lasts), where I talk what I've been playing recently, so let's get to it.

With New Super Mario Bros. hopefully arriving on Friday (thanks to a super-late pre-order), I was pretty sure I wouldn't have time for many other games for a while after I got stuck into it, so I made a special effort to finish off as many old games first including:

ArtStyle: Cubello (WiiWare)

I'd already beaten seven or eight levels in this a few weeks ago, certainly enough to realise that the game's robot announcer was annoying the shit out of me; however there were still about 22 levels to go, so I muted that fucker, fired up a few podcasts and got going.

This is actually a great game to play while you're listening to something else - it's mindless, but fun and you're really not missing out on much by not being able to hear the sound. In it, you use the Wiimote to launch coloured blocks at a rotating structure of blocks; Match four blocks and they disappear, at which point you get four more random coloured blocks to launch. The aim of each level is to eliminate every block until all that's left is the big centre block, which I'm assuming is the "cubello" (Hey, it's not like I read the instructions or anything).

After a couple of nights, I managed to make my way to the end of the game. There were a few nasty levels in there, but they were mostly pretty manageable and as I played through it, I began to notice that the levels were usually set up so a certain strategy could be used to clear away the structure more efficiently, you just needed to keep your eyes open. One thing that really annoyed me, though, was that after you fail a level, the remaining mass of blocks come and bump into your TV screen. To me, it felt like a subtly obnoxious way calling you an idiot.

The Ultimate Doom (PC)

This wasn't even one of the games I was trying to finish last week, but I randomly started playing in the middle of the week and kept going to very end. I can't say it was because the game had me gripped though; If anything, I just wanted to get it out of the way now that I was back playing it again. I really loved Doom II back when I first played it in '98 and while I enjoyed the action just as much here, the endless wandering around, searching for which arbitrary door was opened by the switch I just activated drove me insane. Maybe I'm just not as patient now; maybe the level design just isn't as tight here. Either way, I was damn glad to see off that last Spiderdemon and leave Hell behind.

New Super Mario Bros. (Wii)

NSMBW actually arrived on Thursday, a full day early in all it's awesome, red-cased glory. I've been enjoying the hell out of it of far and I'm kind of surprised to see that it actually does pack a decent challenge, especially when it comes to grabbing the star coins in each level, which can sometimes require Super Mario World levels of platforming ingenuity. The level of fan service and affection for past Mario outings here is also really impressive; You can't help but smile when yet another seemingly forgotten enemy/obstacle/sound effect pops up and takes you right back to your misspent childhood, sitting in front of a TV, control pad in hand.

The music was the thing I was most worried about before the game landed on my doorstep. There's been so much fantastic music featured in the old games, but the little snatches of the soundtrack I heard in trailers and such didn't do much for me. While I still not in love with some of the more prominent tunes in the game, there's still a lot of great music in here, like the underwater theme, which is just godly.

I'm a bit disappointed by the boss fights so far though. While I'm happy to see the Koopa Kids back, the battles aren't too far removed from the ones you remember from the old days - stomp times three and you're done. With Kamek showing up to spruce things up before the final boss battle in each world, I kind of expect Yoshi's Island-kill-a-frog-from-the-inside levels of insanity, not minor alterations to the basic fight you just had a few levels ago.

And while I'm bitching, why can't Mario throw shells up any more? It was an awesome method of dealing with those pesky lakitus. I guess it's compensated by the fact that Yoshi can now swallow and throw back frikkin' hammers, but only just. :D

Overlord (PC)

After buying Overlord and its expansion for €4 the weekend before last, I finally finished downloading it last Saturday (Oh, the joys of a 1 Meg connection). I only wanted to see if it was working, but I ended up spending a good two hours playing. Sadly, my current hardware was only to play it with the graphics turned down significantly, but it ran pretty smoothly and I've had a lot of fun with it so far.

The game's very much like Pikmin, where you control a Sauron-style overlord who rolls around with his posse of minions, who you can command to do your bidding, well to a point anyway. You can target something, dispatch your minions and they'll kill or destroy the target and bring you back the spoils which can be gold, health or mana. You can also remotely control the movement of your minions by holding down the left and right mouse buttons and moving the mouse around to steer them. It's as clunky as it sounds, but it can be useful, especially for areas you can't reach.

In the game, I've decided to be a good guy, at least for the moment, so I'm leaving the townspeople alone and dealing with the evil halflings that are running amok instead. The last mission I did was retrieving the humans' stolen food food from a sizeable hobbit hole, er, I mean halfling dwelling. Basically, this consisted of killing every halfling in sight and just because I'm a dick, laying waste to anything that would break in there, which was pretty much everything.

Animal Crossing (Gamecube)

I decided to pay a visit to my long-abandoned town in the Cube version of Animal Crossing on Sunday, not least because there's still a bunch of NES games in it that I never unlocked. Since I started playing Let's Go to the City earlier in the year, I had been under the impression that very little had changed graphically between the two, but on my return to Wiiville (I got AC in late 2006, I was pretty excited), I was taken aback by how bad everything looked. I'd forgotten the blocky characters, blurry textures and low-res menus. I guess the Wii version has something going for it after all. :D

Well, not much had changed in the 99 weeks since I last showed my face in Wiiville, aside from a generous helping of weeds and some pissed off animals. I bought a bunch of stuff in Nookingtons to get raffle tickets and tried my luck at the fishing tourney, but none of my catches measured up. After that, it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to time travel to the end of the month to check if there as actually a NES game on offer in Nook's end-of month raffle at all. There wasn't, which gives me the feeling it may be another 99 weeks until I check back again. :D

Kururin Squash! (Gamecube)

After I had finished with Animal Crossing on Sunday, I decided to whip out my copy of this and try to get past the level in World 5 I'd been stuck on for months. I could finally see that my problem was trying to collect as many coins in the level as possible, so I decided to just ignore the coins and make a beeline to the goal. Navigating my way through the narrow paths and tricky obstacles was no mean feat, but I finally cracked it after several attempts and moved onto the World 5 boss. As far as I could tell it was the main bad guy and from what I remember (it's been a while), I fought him a bunch of times before, but the cut scene after seemed to have an air of finality about it and sure enough, the credits rolled directly after it - another game down and I didn't even know I was near the end.

Cooking: Pear Pie

2009-11-17T17:48:00.000-08:00

If there was one thing I was determined to make with our pears this year, it was a pear pie. Maybe that was just because I'm a Pushing Daisies fanboy (*sob*), but with the latest Giant Bombcast playing on my MP3 player, make one I did, and it turned out great, even without the mood-enhancing homoeopathic drugs. :D

I used the pie recipe here and I got a recipe for the crust from here. For some reason, pie dishes seem pretty hard to come by locally, so I busted out a new 9-inch silicon baking tin instead. It's not too deep, so it wasn't a bad substitute. I stuck fairly close to the recipe , but I didn't have any lemons at hand, so the peel wasn't an option and reading over it again, I see that I didn't dot the top of the pie with butter either (doh!). It turned out really well either way with a crumbly, buttery crust and a lovely, surypy, fruity filling. Damn, I'm hungry again now.

How Not to Photograph a Jack O' Lantern

2009-11-17T17:32:00.000-08:00

While we're still on the subject of jack o' lanterns, here's a selection of my botched attempts to take a decent photograph of one two years ago. I was making do with a crappy Vivitar camera at the time, which was always terrible in low light situations. When I couldn't take a decent shot with that, I resorted to the camera in my mobile phone. Why do you need to know any of this information? I have no idea. :D

Jack-O'-Lantern Time

2009-11-03T17:25:00.000-08:00

It's that time of year again, or at least it was a few days ago. Here's my latest attempt at pumpkin carving. I was sort of making the design up as I went along and you can really tell. :D Hope everyone had a fun Halloween!

Cooking: Pear Crumble

2009-11-03T15:02:00.000-08:00

Autumn's just passed which means the mounds of apples and pears from the fruit trees outside are just about gone. This year I thought I'd try a few different things with the pears, beginning with a pear crumble. I got the recipe here, which usefully allows you to scale up or down the quantity of ingredients according to the number of servings you want. I scaled it up to four servings, grabbed some pears and got cracking on it.

I cut up eight smallish pears, which I thought would be about the same as six regular ones, put them in a casserole dish and mixed in the lemon juice. After I'd made the crumble (without nuts, which I didn't have :D), it was pretty clear that the crumble mix wouldn't even cover the pears fully, so I doubled the amount of everything in it. Well, except for the spices, I just put in a teaspoon of each in total. Once I had the crumble on, I popped the dish in the oven and hoped for the best.

The first batch was really tasty, but I thought the crumble was a bit too sweet, so I reduced the amount of sugar to half from then on. I've also tried adding some vanilla to the pears instead of the lemon juice, which was quite nice. I've yet to try adding the nuts back in, but I'm kind of sceptical about them adding much to the dish.

deviantArt Update #2

2009-10-20T17:30:00.000-07:00

Another DA upload. This time it's a new wallpaper I inadvertently made while messing around with an image in Paint Shop Pro.

deviantART Update

2009-10-19T17:58:00.000-07:00

As well as adding the Arty Screensaver to my DA Gallery today, I put up this little guy, who I doodled in MS Paint with just the Airbrush tool around Christmas 2006. I've been trying to do something with him for a long time, but I finally gave up and decided to put up the original image. He kind of reminds me of a lecturer I had at the time actually. :D

Arty Screensaver

2009-09-23T14:59:00.000-07:00

TL;DR Version: I've remade a screensaver from my old site, get it here.

Back in the Spring of 2000 I was in the middle of finishing up my Junior Cert. art project. The theme I'd picked for it was "Summer Memories", so in the run-up to doing the final painting, graphic design, 3D and craft pieces I was cranking out practice drawings and paintings of flowers, butterflies and the like as well as design ideas for my final project submissions.

In the Summer of that year I took some of those drawings (and some other stuff) and made them into a little screen saver. I called it the Artwork Screensaver and uploaded it to my old web site on the soon-to-be-closed-down GeoCities.

A couple of months ago, I set about remaking that screensaver with higher resolution images and lots of new screens. I put the finishing touches to it a few weeks ago and popped it up on my web site, where you can grab it , should you feel the need to do so.

After I'd finished, I thought it would a nice idea to go through the saver screen by screen and give a little background on the bits and pieces of feeble artwork it contained. And that's exactly what we're going to do. Hey, come back!

Screen 1: How abstract. This comes from a not-so-great design I entered in Telecom Eireann's Design a CallCard competition in 1997, in which I was one of many, many runners up. Seriously, there were about seven in our school alone. For the original screensaver I scanned in a photocopy of the design (TE kept the original), cropped it to this and messed about with the image a bit in a program called Repligator, I think.

Screen 2: Two flowers I drew one day at home while I was messing around with some pastels. I'm pretty sure I was finished with the whole art project at that stage, so I guess these were done on my own time.

Screen 3: A little drawing I did sometime early in 2000. After having seen this documentary on a modern artist one night, I decided that anyone could crank out the type of stuff he was doing. Within the next few days I set out to draw something as arty and pretentious as possible and this was what I came up with. I really liked the drawing so it got included as the third screen in my super-pretentious Artwork Screensaver™. I think they call that "hypocrisy"

Screen 4: This was a practice sketch I did the night before my Junior Cert. sketching exam. It's of a spoke shave, which was one of the tools I used to craft my awesome (er,... not so much) Woodwork project for the Junior Cert. It's a bit on the wonky side, but at least it resembled the thing I was sketching, not like the life sketching I was cranking out at the time, those things are scary. :D

Screen 5: These come from a sheet of lettering styles I was trying out for the graphic design part of the project. I still think the top one looks kind of neat, with the menacing eyes in the background. The bottom one however... Well, it would look a lot more appropriate if it was preceded by "This" and followed by "a cyborg vigilante fights commie ninjas from the 80's".

Screen 6: The last five screens were all featured in the old screensaver, but here we have the first all-new one (get excited, people). On the left is a flower made from bits of cut up magazines with two bits of black thread for leaf veins. It's truly a triumph of stick-based glue technology. On the right are two potential designs for the bowl I was going to make for the 3D part of the project. They're both coloured in with ink, which I remember as being a complete pain in the ass to work with.

Screen 7: These were two alternate colour schemes for the batik I did. Looking at these, I kind of prefer the blue one to the one I actually used. Oh well, too late now. :D

Screen 8: Some 'shrooms. If I remember right, I did these during the mid-term break in October/November 1999. The one on the left turned out pretty well I think, but didn't scan too well though. Even though I only put this screensaver together a few weeks ago, I'm scratching my head as to why I included the janky looking orange one. I do like the way it looks like it's casting a light onto the brown one though.

Screen 9: An earlier design of the book cover I did for graphic design part of the project. It's a flower with each petal depicting a summer scene. The title of the book was taken from the same sheet of lettering as screen 4, but I cropped it out here. Spoiler: It was "Summer". I like the flower idea, but the mostly solid blue background is a bit overpowering. While the final design wasn't very original, I think the front cover looks a lot better than this one.

Screen 10: An even earlier design for the book cover. This was done while the concept of shading was a bit of an alien concept to me, so everything looks very flat. I really like the butterfly patterns though, especially the one on the right, it's looks like a crazy cartoon explosion.

Screen 11: Here we have two butterflies - one done in paint and a lopsided one done with colouring pencils. On the right is another potential design for my bowl and for some reason, a vase (with markings from a rusty paper clip on it).

Screen 12: I'm not sure what part of the project this was intended for, but I like the look of it. Those lopsided windows were totally intentional, by the way.

Screen 13: A section of a chair I painted the same night as I sketched the spokeshave in Screen 4. I was intending on pasting this over the laughably awful-looking shoes the girl in my painting had. On reflection, that may not have been the best of ideas, so I'm glad I didn't get the opportunity.

Screen 14: Okay, this is just plain bad, but I spent valuable time doing this and I'll be damned if that was all for nothing. :D What we've got here are some flowers coloured in with chalk of all things, apart from the one in the bottom left, which was (badly) coloured in with pastels.

Screen 15: The final screen. Here are two more potential designs for my 3D piece. I love how all these potential designs look way better than the one I finally made - a basic papier-mâché bowl with a messy paint job. (EDIT: Man, I really need to get some photos of that monstrosity up sometime. :D)

Recent Game Pickups

2009-08-20T13:28:00.001-07:00

It's been ages since I posted anything, so I thought I'd talk about a few of the games I picked up recently. Well, not about Pikmin 2 or The Munchables. They were pretty sweet deals at €23 and €18 respectively, but I just want to knuckle down and finish Super Mario RPG on the VC before I move on to anything else on the Wii. Just one more star to go!

Frequency:

I was in a local record shop to grab some headphones last week and I went to check out their small game section at the back. Sitting on the shelf was Frequency, Harmonix's first PS2 effort and a pretty damn expensive game to get hold of now, new for €9.99.

I really enjoyed Amplitude. It made you feel like you like you were mucking about on a mixing desk, building songs up from their basic components. I thought was always was interesting to hear what different combinations of those components sounded like. Some of the later songs required crazy amounts of dexterity, but hitting the right combination of buttons at the right time and activating the track you were on was always extremely satisfying.

Frequency seems to pretty much the same as it's sequel, from what I've played. The graphics aren't quite as flashy and the track listing seems a bit more obscure, but I'm sure that I'll enjoy it equally.

Sonic Mega Collection Plus

While Sonic Mega Collection on the Cube is great, there is one major drawback. The lack of save states makes it pretty tough for a lazy game such as myself to beat any the games on it. Screw practising, I prefer to cheat my way to success. Thankfully, you can save away in the PS2/Xbox versions, so after spotting it in GameStop, I decided to double dip.

Just like the Cube version, this includes with all the major Sonic games from the Mega Drive, but you also get a bunch of (fairly ropey) Game Gear efforts. From what I've seen so far, there doesn't seem to be any 60Hz option, which is a big disappointment if true. On the bright side though, you can save anywhere you like by bringing up a menu with the L2 button. The only problem with that is that it takes forever for the game to save or load. A temporary quick save like in the PS2 version of Half-Life would have been a welcome inclusion, but it's better than nothing guess. Maybe I'll finally be able to get past the fucking Labyrinth Zone now. :D

Castlevania & Contra

Another compilation and one I had forgotten about until pretty recently. I already had the original Castlevania on the VC, but I didn't have the rest of the games here and with the cheap price it was going for on eBay, I decided to grab a copy.

What you're getting here are the three NES Castlevanias plus the NES versions of Contra and Super C, complete with customisable controls and save states. I was kind of worried that the game mightn't agree with Windows XP, but it worked fine and the emulation seems pretty good from what I've played.

The only problem I have is that in order to save or load, just like Sonic Mega Collection, you have to go into a menu to do it, there's no way to quick save or load by pressing certain keys. I mean, the time it takes to save or load a game on a PC is minimal and you've been able to do this in PC emulators for ages, so why not include it here? I guess I'll have to soldier on without it, but it would have been nice to have the option to use it for some of the more bastard-hard sections of the games. Medusa heads, I'm looking at you.

Perfect Dark Zero

I'm planning on picking up a 360 soon, so I decided to have a gander around the used section at GameStop to see if I could find anything interesting. Prefect Dark Zero immediately caught my eye. While I know it's not the greatest of games, I sunk a hell of a lot of time into Perfect Dark in the N64 days and I really wanted to check this out. And hey, it comes with a fake DataDyne security card thing. That's got to be worth €13 all on it's own.