So I really want an Asus Eee. It’s roughly £200, although one place I’ve seen is selling at £189, and it’s possibly the teeny-tinest machine I have ever seen!

It’s about the size of a hardback book when closed, and doesn’t have a CD drive or a hard disk, but does have onboard flash memory to save stuff on, and wi-fi for getting on the Interweb. It runs Linux, because Windows is too expensive, but I’m cool with that, especially because I’ve been wanting to get my hands dirty (as it were) with Linux for a while now.

So the only difficulty I can see is that spending £189 would leave me uncomfortably close to being utterly broke. Which isn’t good, for very obvious reasons. Like my powerful need to continue being able to eat, but even so… I wants one.

Do you have an nVidia graphics card?

If so, you can get Portal: First Slice, composing:

• Portal: First Slice (being the first third of Portal, the Game of the Year)
• Half-Life 2: Deathmatch (being a game where you can kill people with ballistic toilets)
• Half-Life 2: Lost Coast (short tech demo fun)
• Peggle Extreme (addictive promotional puzzle game)

Seeing as how this bundle is free, it’s well worth getting!

Head over to the Steam website to get it.

I haven’t posted anything in just forever. Really it’s just symptomatic of my complete failure to have any discipline in any whatsoever. I really had grand plans for this blog, like learning XHTML/CSS and making it pretty and the like - all of which have been utter failures.

So, I think I’ll try and write either every day or on a M/W/F schedule. See how it goes.

Anyways, in summary:

Buy the Orange Box, you fools! If you have a gaming bone in your body, or even if you don’t, go get it.

Quantum Mechanics is both hard and intellectually satisfying simultaneously.

God still doesn’t exist.

The TV spots for The Golden Compass make me angry: "Legend tells that the last Golden Compass - whoever can read it has the power to rule the universe… The quest for the compass begins". I’m… urgh. The book (which is actually called Northern Lights) is one of my absolute favourite books of all time, and it makes me angry to see it mutilated so. I hope that this trailer is only aimed at incredibly stupid obese Americans, able only deal with plots shallower than the pools of hideous drool collecting underneath their slack, lifeless mouths.

I want to see a documentary about Tony Blair on TV on Sunday, but I’m probably going to forget.

Going swimming by yourself is about 15 different kinds of dull.

I waste a frightening number of hours every single day.

I got the new Buffy Season 8 comic, it’s awesome, one of the best yet. I also picked up the "Tales of the Slayer" graphic novel, which is a collection of stories about slayers in the past, written by some of the people who wrote Buffy for TV. And it has more Fray, and Fray is just brilliant-fantastic.

I’m sure some other things’ll come to me later. There are so many things I want to tell people that I only think of while I’m by myself. It’s an annoying paradox is what it is.

Andy out.

So my last couple of entries have more or less been about games. I would apologise for not writing about what’s happening in my life, but you probably don’t want to hear about the trivial minutiae anyways. Needless to say, the following entry will hold no value for you if you don’t play games.

So Halo 3 is already receding over the horizon - the Zero Punctuation review is up, and it’s spot-on accurate. The people throwing it perfect scores are indeed rather misguided.

This is a rather disturbing trend - two of the games which made my list of most anticipated games of the year were good, beautiful and well-crafted adventures, but lacking that crucial spark that sets the great apart from the merely good.

With any luck I can rely on Valve to buck this trend. As the tantalising countdown in Steam tells me, Episode Two and Portal will be released in about 7 and a half hours as I write this. By the time anyone actually reads it, it’ll probably be out. Their companion game, Team Fortress 2, is already out in beta and it’s The Shit.

It’s a finely-honed brilliant game, and on top of that it’s probably one of the best looking games of the year. It’s scary that the graphics shown in the “Meet the…” series of videos (which are very worth watching, incidentally) are actually representative of the in-game experience - the art style is simply breathtaking. It’s the perfect antidote to the “realism” dross that’s been infecting the genre for years. None of this annoying burst-fire-to-control-recoil nonsense, just the unashamed, glorious spin-up of the Heavy’s chaingun, his wondrous bullet-hose, the ever widening grin on his face as enemies are chewed up by the pain-stream. It’s good. Really good.

A reminder of why Valve is probably the best developer in the world - they understand a worrying wealth of things that most developers just don’t, like the importance of excellent writing and pacing, of using art to tell a story, or push an effect you’re going for. They excel in almost every area of game design, and they’ve got it down almost to a science rather than an art. You play something Valve’s done, and you know that almost every design decision they’ve taken is based on experimental evidence. It’s like that because they know that is the most fun.

Anyways, I’m kinda gutted that I have to be in lab tomorrow morning. I’m getting back here asap after lab finishes to play. The only question is which of the games to hit first, Portal or Episode Two.

PS. I’ve got a copy of each of HL2 and Ep1 to give away! So please ask if you want.

Oh god, I just hooked up my 360 to Live again, and because I’d last played using my profile on my sister’s 360, I had to recover the profile. No problem.

Except there is one. It’s swallowed my entire gaming history since moving out here, which means my entire set of Halo 3 achievements. I’m glad I didn’t get any I really had to work for, but it probably means I’m going to have to play the entire fucking thing all over again!

AAAAAARGH!

Fuck it, I’m gonna play TF2.

So I just finished playing it, rather annoyingly I also don’t have internet at the moment, so this probably won’t go up for a while. Anyways, here be spoilers, so don’t read if you don’t want to know.

Read the rest of this entry »

So I played through Bioshock the other day and I was going to post up my thoughts, but heck, like most things I plan to do, it didn’t really happen. In fact so little has happened this holiday that I haven’t written a blog entry for over a month, which frankly just Isn’t Good Enough.

In summary of what I can remember, I lazed about a worryingly large amount, did no work, earned no money, went out a few times, but otherwise wasted weeks of my precious youth. Urgh, sounds worse when I say it like that.

Anyways, I played through Bioshock, and some of my thoughts are vaguely congruent with this here video, which is just too funny for words to quite capture:

He is quite right. Bioshock is probably going to be one of the best games of the year, a few other ones not withstanding. This isn’t a reflection so much on the quality of Bioshock per se, and more on the fact that practically nothing good has come out for ages. Seriously, can you remember the last really awesome game that came out? I sure as hell can’t.

It’s overly heavy on exposition, the AI isn’t that good, the ghost sequences make no kind of logical sense, the Vitachambers (think instant respawn) make whupping the hell out of everything too easy. It picks up towards the end though, where you start to get a bit more variety into your powers. I’m not full of hate - the art direction is stunning, and some of the individual set-pieces are breathtaking. The concept of the Little Sister / Big Daddy is wonderful, and something I would love to see more of in games.

Little Sisters are little girls who have been turned into monsters; they prowl Rapture extracting Adam (the resource needed to hop yourself up on genetic goodies like fireballs) from the bodies of dead enemies. This makes them somewhat of a target, as they carry lots and lots of Adam, so they’re protected by the huge Big Daddies. Anyways, as long as you don’t attack them, they are neutral to you, and you get lots of interesting behaviours, like the Little Sister pointing at you in fear if you get too close, that kind of thing.

In those details, it’s a good game, but the number of niggling complaints just stacks up. Each weapon has a stupid number of additional ammo types, and couple this with all your plasmid (basically magical powers) types it gets really hard to manage. The slavish devotion to the System Shock 2 archetype is justifiably mocked, it’s harmed what this game could have been.

Anyways, Bioshock is a game that’s worth getting, assuming that its monstrous system requirements don’t melt your PC into a foul smelling pool of ruined electronics.

In other news… (as promised)

• Went for a trip up to Liverpool way to see Niro for his B’day BBQ and met up with the Uni people. It was awesometastic, and therefore deserves its own entry. All in good time, my pretties.
• And next week I’m going on holiday to Majorca with Uni people. Again, probably going to rock.
• The Orange Box has been released for purchase on Steam. It’s about