Last Ray of Hope

SCIENCE!

That is what I would be shouting if I had been doing science today, however I was woke up my Dave wanting to goto Sainsbury’s to buy stuff for dinner (Rosalyn came too).

The day before we had gone to the market to buy things for supplies, we couldn’t decide whether to get a duck as well as a turkey (some people didn’t think there was such a thing as a Christmas duck), so I offered to buy the duck, as well a large turkey and some fruit and veg.

We finally got around to starting to make the meal, and onto the first basting only to find out that Dave had put the tin foil on backward and the turkey was frozen. There were a few other obstacles, like the insane about of potatoes to peel and cook, then the lack of cooker space (lucky we have two ovens).

The meal was finish, the placemats were set and good times were had by all. The meal itself consisted of (and was nicknamed shortly after) a Jesus Duck, Holy Ghost Turkey and God’s Gravy.

As you can see from the pictures, there was more than enough for 8 people, and we had plenty spare.

Next year, we need to make an even BIGGER meal to outdo this one, like this one outdid the last one we made. It really puts actual Christmas dinner to shame.

Looks like Santa is also been affected by the credit crunch. I was at Sainsbury’s today and there is in the doorway begging for money like a hobo (and clearly starving, what ever happened to our jolly fat Santa?) – as you can see from the picture.

Or maybe he also taken for a ride by the Christmas Parcel Wrapping scam. Those elves have unions nowadays, he probably thought he could save money, but instead they replaced all his toys and gifts for children, with coal.

His mortgage must have gotten a bit too pricey for him, hes even moved his Grotto to Bolton, of all places.

I just had to write a blog entry about this, but as most people know, Chrono Trigger is being rereleased for the Nintendo DS in February (Lavos shall rise again bwuahahahahaha). This game is in my top 5 favourite games of all time…

- Tales of Phantasia
- Final Fantasy 6
- Chrono Trigger
- Ocarina of Time
- Prince of Persia Trilogy

With 13 different endings, several characters to choose from, and so many 3d projects remaking this that got shutdown by SquareEnix, this has to be amazing.

Though I do get the feeling it will just be a 2d port with some extras like the Final Fantasys, I’d much prefer it to be 3d, I don’t understand why SquareEnix don’t do this.

I suppose its so that in another 10 years they’ll rererelease it and make more money… bastards, I want a 3d one now!

George Orwell was a visionary, he forsaw the future, video cameras, TV, Room 101, Big Brother.

Most of this can be read in his amazing book, Nineteen Eighty-Four (or the John Hurt film with the same name).

Nowadays, he goes by another name, a well known alias of Steve Jobs, using his powers of immortality, he plans to take over the world, one Apple at a time.

However, the most important thing about George Orwell that I think you should all know, is that he, all by himself, invented the most important thing in modern times…

…

He invented the internet.

So I finally got around to playing Left 4 Dead. Last time I played it was prerelease on Steam, and I preordered it, but forgot when it was released, and when I did remember, it meant logging into Windows. And then when I did log into Windows, I could not get my WiFi to work due to some changes I had done when I went to Bolton to visit friends.

So tonight I decided to fix the WiFi, after much effort, it turned out it was because my computer was named glyphwire, instead of Glyphwire, my router didn’t understand they were the same thing and so rejected me access (thats what you get for using the generic BT crap they give you).

I didn’t think much of the Single Player, the AI for my team were idiots and in the end got me killed because they decided to stay behind and have a cup of tea or something, when around a zombie infested city, you don’t just stand still and wait around for them to come for you.

However the multiplayer redeems this game, and using my dual GPUs of my laptop, I was kicking ass once I found a way to change weapons without scrolling, even the cut off the internet was fixed when I added Steam ports to the router. One downside is the limited number of levels, and although playing a zombie is fun, its usually short lived unless your a tank, which is fun, since if you take them down one by one, they have no chance, rather than just chasing them all and keep changing, make sure they’re down, then go for another, lets the zombies finish them. The witch is one I would love to play as, but is not possible yet (probably since she can do one hit kills on expert). Boomers are just pointless, but can get you assist points if you bile them, hunters are fun, and the second most effective for attacking a stragller, and smokers are useless unless you’ve got tall buildings to hide behind, then you use them during a large invasion.

One annoying this is the respawn time, 20 seconds before you can become something, as Yahtzee said, it would be nice if you could choose to become a generic zombie till then. Still, once you’ve played it through a few times, it starts to get boring, I just look forward to the Shaun of the Dead mod.

I awoke this morning to find an email in my inbox from Apple, reminding me that I hadn’t finished enrolling for becoming an iPhone Developer yet. Surprised since they hadn’t told me I could finish yet, I just assumed that it must have been filtered by my spam filter (must remember to fix that thing).

So since there was an hour to go before work, I quickly followed the instructions, paid for my membership and got an emailing saying that within 24 hours they will get back to me with instructions of how to setup my iPhone to allow development. However upon getting back from work, I was greeted by an email telling me it had all been setup and that I was now able to develop and publish applications for the iPhone.

The setup process was a little annoying, the tutorials aren’t fully specific, but I managed, and sometimes it was my fault for not reading them correctly, but they do come with pictures depicting how things should look when it is done correctly, which is very helpful. Finally, I setup one of my iPhone examples to compile and run, and bobs your uncle (which he is quite ironically) it worked. So next weekend I’ll start work on porting my chuck norris game as a starter to get use to developing for it.

There are so many things that can be done with an accelerometer that I hadn’t thought of, I even found an example on the internet that uses the accelerometer in a MacBook Pro so you can move water about on your screen. Usually its just used to move the needle off the hard drive when there is a suddenly change of gravity. It can also be used to detect seismic movements, or used in conjuction with Expose so you can tap the side of your laptop and shift screens, I probably won’t use this, I’m already afraid of smashing the glass screen.

After preordering this game the moment I heard about it, I went out on the Friday afternoon after getting back from lunch only to remember that this was being released today, and so quickly went to pick it up. Finally getting back home, I quickly made dinner and then began to play.
The game started quite quickly, with no back story, your the prince in search of Farah, at which point I thought it was possibly a sequel to the previous trilogy, only to find out to my amusement that she was apparently my donkey carrying loads of gold.

One thing that is noticeable straight away, is the amount of doing nothing actually gets you achievements, every time there is a cut scene, or I jump, talk to someone, defeat a generic enemy.. you get the idea. This is probably the only game on the 360 that I’ve completed and nearly got all the achievements bar 2 (the speed run and the “do not die more than 100 times”). There is even an achievement to do nothing for one minute at the end.
Still the game is beautifully done, the cel-shading is amazingly done, and quite possibly the best I’ve seen in games since Tales of Symphonia. But this is let down by the lack of RPG elements, the dialog for a start whilst giving more information on why the enemies were there was bloody annoying, talking to Elika five times just to get everything, this may not seem that bad, however each conversation lasts between 5 seconds to 3 minutes, but with no way to skip it. And it appears usually at the most unintuitive time, usually just as I’m about to jump off a ledge, by which point when I get to solid ground, she doesn’t want to talk anymore.

As for combat, there is a lot of combos, most of which can be strung together to make insanely large attacks, but unless you do them at the beginning of the game, there is very little chance you’ll be able to perform them at the end game enemies to get the combo achievement since every attack you do they decide to block. As with the Sands of Time, there is a mechanism to stop you from dying, only in this game, it is impossible to die. Normally this would annoy me, but considering the annoyance and stress caused by just trying to get to the fertile land, with many accidental jumps when wall running, I was glad for it, and eventually if you suck enough, the enemies stop regaining health to the point unless they absorb the corruption, they will not regenerate at all.
One annoying aspect of the game is the Simon Says moments, when an enemy pushes you or you push an enemy to the edge of the screen or take enough damage and fall to the ground, you are expected to push a button in the time it takes to blink, so if you actually do blink whilst this is happening, you can be sure that the boss you just spent 10 minutes forcing its health down to 10%, will be back up to 90% again after Elika helps you (making you regret her saving you).

Finally the platform elements, I don’t know what Ubisoft have done, but they better undo, the game feels like a one button game, to run along a wall you need only jump into it, but somewhere deep down I want to press A (possibly Mirror’s Edge), however when I accidently do now I’m jumping off the way into a pit, if I want to get the fertile grounds later in the game, I need to jump onto Glyphs which give powers to Elika and allow me to reach other places, but only after I press Y 50 odd times to activate it. Most of the time there seems no point to these long winded transportation sequences, my only involvement is the dodging of a wall when flying, or tapping Y furiously to prevent falling off a glyph when landing. And that is another thing, where the hell are all the enemies. Whenever I enter a corrupted zone there is one enemy protected it, and if I’m quick enough I can slash him before he spawns and proceed to the platform the fertile land is one to take out the regions boss (again).

The I usually associate the Prince of Persia series as a platformer with combat and RPG elements, and lots of puzzles that take me a few hours to figure out. This one, whilst giving me freedom in where I want to go, has as far as I remember, two puzzles, one with turning levers to get objects into position and … no wait that is it. The platforms can be confusing but when I press Y Elika kindly gives a glowing orb not only showing me where to go, but the actual path I need to follow, jumping onto walls and running across them, playing the game felt more like watching a long movie since my involvement just seemed to be guiding the prince in the direction he is meant to go, he might as well have been moving forward constantly and me just turning him, and I could complete the game.

Still the concept is nice, hopefully they’ll add more gameplay and story into the sequel as I’ve heard this is going to be a trilogy as well (and judging by the ending, it better be).

Finally there are 1001 light seeds in the game that about 500 are needed to be able to complete the game, however finding all 1001 of them is a long painful task, although there is meter telling you how many is a zone you have out of how many, the limits of the zone are exactly clear, and trying to find one down below a floating platform because you like to keep your camera facing forward makes you run through each level again only this time falling off the world so you can get a glimpse of any that are below thing. This is the reason I didn’t get the speed run when I set off to the all 1001, I eventually did the painful annoying task, but I keep asking myself, was it worth it, short answer, no.

Still it was quite enjoying when it came to freeing a zone, albeit easy, and I did pay attention to everything Elika said (getting another two achievements in the process), which gave me lots of information about the land, so much so I could live there and pass as one of them. And unlike a colleague of mine, I enjoyed the princes humor.

And there is one other bonus I read about recently, apart from the sequels to this game, and that is the Prince of Persia: Sands of Time film that will be coming out in 2010. Although I’m sure they will destroy it in every way, it they seemed to have cast the prince quite well.