Andy is the second-most prolific writer here, but is prone to extended periods favouring gaming over writing.
Glad that’s over. Now it’s time to get down the serious business of 2005. There’s some plenty of gaming to be done. I had a dream in which I bought Metroid Prime 2. It’s clearly a portent telling me to buy Metroid Prime 2, which I shall do. Such a shiny cover. The DS is being released here in 32 days.
Dungeons & Dragons Online will probably be released at the end of this year. It’s looking pretty sweet.
Oh great. It’s a new year so I guess I’d better accomplish something. Hmm. What to do. In the meantime, I am coming to Melbourne on the 28th of Feb at 15:10 by aeroplane.
What I need is a whole bunch of people to donate money to me which I will then use to help the orphans of the tsunami by kidnapping them and selling them as slaves. Would you rather be free and dead from starvation? I thought so. Send me your money now to help these poor kiddies. Please make cheques out to ‘The Andrew Cares Adoption Agency’
I continue to learn about plane crashes and tropical island survival from this show. The first step will be to involved in such an incident. The plane in Lost left from Australia and I fly in planes that leave from Australia all the time so I’m set there. I’ve been debating the value of being a doctor after a plane crash. On the one hand I could save people’s lives and be a hero, but if I wasn’t a doctor the injured people would die and there’d be more supplies for the rest of us. A tough call. The seriously injured people probably wouldn’t survive anyway. Medical assistance would just stretch out their painful death.
From that last bit you may have guessed that the injured Marshal isn’t doing well.[ftn] He has had the metal in his belly removed but there aren’t strong enough antibiotics to fight his infection.[ftn] The Marshal’s hapless plight highlights the theme this episode: the slow change of the group from following civilised laws to a more survival orientated outlook. Sawyer, while looting alcohol and cigarettes from inside the plane, laughs at Jack’s attempts to save the marshal and tells him to wake up to the fact that they’re “in the wild”. The climax at the end of the episode is a confrontation about what to do with the Marshal. I wouldn’t get too attached to him, if I were you.[ftn]
It’s looking like each episode will focus on a different character past and tell their back story. This episode Kate is the one suffering from a flashback disorder. She’s severely afflicated and spends most of the episode staring into space. It’s a contagious disease with a short incubation period. Her flashbacks leave some questions unanswered so I’m hoping she’ll catch the disease again.
For the rest of the survivors, once the hiking group from last episode return, they start making some long term plans for survival. Shannon is still convinced they’ll be rescued and won’t do anything to help. No one has dealt with the dead bodies; they’re going to stink up the place soon. There’s plenty of other subplots on the boil but they’re too numerous to mention here. On the naked front, there is a backshot of Sun topless.
The episode ends with a cheery music montage and a sudden close up of the bald guy looking evil.[ftn] He’s up to something.
Tom, politely, first asked me to write a gaming review a while back and I told him then I wasn’t interested. A short time later, he asked again, a little more pleading, and I said no, again. He didn’t ask a third time and me being contrary, decided to write it. It turned out to be harder than I thought and I nearly didn’t bother.[ftn]
I’m happy to tell everyone what I think about tv shows, movies, books, and stuff in general but I’ve been reluctant to write about video games. There’s a couple reasons for this. I find a video game a more personal experience than a book or a film. Everyone sees the same film but the interactivity in a video game makes things different in my opinion. There’s more factors involved and these can vary one’s opinion widly. Also, I feel more attached to games than other forms of media. I dislike critically looking at a game because that might force me to see its flaws.
Having said that, as long as I don’t have to weigh the game out of a hundred, I’m happy to tell you what I think. Although if I were to be keeping score, this game would receive bonus points just for being a Warhammer 40k game. All the 40k games so far have been crap to ordinary, so to see a decent game set in the 40k universe is a relief. It’s not a big call to say this is the best 40k computer game yet. Being able to control large mobs of orks as they hack up space marines is delicious. Watching a space marine dreadnought wade through my orks and crush my Big Mek is scary. Much like the Lord of the Rings movies, familiar characters being brought to life as I imagined them is enough for me to give it a thumbs up. Not having played the 3rd and 4th editions of the tabletop game, I can’t tell whether the game is faithful to the tabletop version. From what I’ve read, the developers didn’t aim for a strict conversion anyway, though they did adapt many of the 40k rules, including morale for troops and units having to stay in squads.
Without the 40k setting though, I probably wouldn’t have played the game. The game itself is a great game, but time is short and there are many games to play. I’m glad I played it though. The graphics, despite some glitches, are very good and the camera is able to zoom around right in to ground level to see the killing moves close up. Not that there’s time to appreciate the detailed animations: there’s a lot going on and all the troops need your attention. Resources, in a Ground Control 2 style, are collected by holding special points on the map. I didn’t like this initially but now I see that it makes the game much more offensive and the aggressive player usually wins. This prevents people camping in their bases, something I found to be a problem in Starcraft.
The single player campaign only uses one race disappointingly and features a radical plotline in which the main character is betrayed by his best friend. The AI is very poor. The AI is made more difficult by giving it a resource advantage and tougher units, not with better strategies so isn’t much of a challenge. The challenge and real fun is playing multiplayer. Although the rulebook and tutorial lack detail on controlling the other races, people online are willing to help and explain. Once you’ve got your race figured out, the fun begins. 1 v 1 and 2 v 2 games are very competitive. The games with more than four players are less cut throat and more relaxed as people tend to build up a full sized army before attacking.
The flaws, if I were forced to look at them,[ftn] would be the balance between the races. While the game is complex and each unit has its own strengths and weaknesses, some of the abilities and units are unbalanced. Most of the problems were fixed up with the 1.1 patch but some remain. Only including four races is disappointing too, but there are mod tools available so there should be more races eventually.
Finally, the best bit of the game: The start up video by Blur Studios. It’s an impressive piece of animation. It’d make a great movie or series. For those who haven’t seen it, it is available on their website.
Relic, true to their usual form, has made a great game, using the existing setting of 40k well. I love seeing all the units come to life. If you have a computer that can run DoW,[ftn] it’s definitely worth a look.
My adsl was down this week. It was horrific. I never want to speak of that dark time again.
On the up side, I did get a couple of reviews written while I was isolated from the world in the dank room with only a madman calling himself my brother for company. Ha ha. I showed him. He’s the mad one not I. Not I indeed. He he. All by myself.
As the sole contributor to this site, I see my absence is sorely felt. Well, I can’t help it people. I downloaded Half Life 2 accidentally. I didn’t mean to. I hadn’t intended to play this game. I haven’t got the time. But then I heard somewhere that it is supposed to be a reasonable game and as I haven’t played the original game I felt it would be good for my gaming education to play it a little bit and Bittorrent makes things so easy to download and iinet increased my limit to 24 GB a month and I thought a couple of GB of games would help me use it up. Having looked at the game I am upgrading Half Life 2’s status from Download Illegally to Buy With New Graphics Card. The graphics and the physics in this game are amazing. I need a better graphics card to appreciate it better. It’s like Myst but with people and shooting. I love it.
In tv news, channel seven has decided it’s behind with its Scrubs as we have 3 episodes this week. Firefly is also on for those who haven’t bought the DVD. If I ever own a cowboy space ship, I’ll be hiring cute staff too. In Alias, Vaughn seems to be not drowned as Shannon said and the computer guy has a parachute sewn into the lining of his jacket.
It’s a bad news, good news day over here. The good news is that I’ll be able to go to the Tasmanian Circus Festival in February. The bad news is I can go because they won’t let me in to stinky NICA. The good news is that I couldn’t afford $3500 per year tution fees anyway. The bad news is that I’ll have to think of something else to do next year. More good news is Stargate Atlantis keeps being shown in the US. Bad news is there’s no SG-1 for some reason. Good news: I have my own time zone.
Much like the red sky at night delighting sailors, so does the appearance of Stargate Atlantis on Bittorrent delight me. For where there’s Atlantis, there will be SG-1. And tracker.shuntv.net now does Stargate. No more jostling in the pack for each episode. Atlantis right now is downloading at 152kB/s. Oh baby, things are right with the world once more.
Ignoreth these false prophets spreading their Halo 2 blasphemy. Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War is thine one true god. Doeth not stray from the path or thou shalleth be smote good.
This movie[ftn] takes me back. It reminds me of the good old days, playing in the St Leonard’s soccer B-team. What fun we had! Those were good times, friends, good times. We had assembled the best of everyone not on the A-team.
I led the team wearing the number 1. They called me Empty Hands and nothing could get past me.
In midfield we had Tom ‘Weight Vest’ Charman. No one could leap higher than him with that belly.
Iron Head Hayko and Andrew Iron Shirt were in defense. No ball could get past them.
Matt aka Mighty Steel Leg was up front kicking the goals. No one could stop his flaming kicks.
Neil the Hooking Leg played midfield. No one knows what his nickname means.
We were coached by a lame man, old Golden Leg himself. He had no real effect on the game. He just assembled the squad and we did our thing.
We trained long and hard to try to win that Soccer Championship and the million dollars. To this day, I still recall our final match against Eltham College’s Team Evil. Team Evil was led by an ex-team mate of ours, Conrad ‘I Am So Evil’ Truscott.[ftn] He had become everything we fought against. I remember his cruel laughing face most of all.
It was a very physical game. They were a brutal team. The strength of their kicks made my hands bleed. When the going got tough, our weak teammates fled. We were down to the minimum number of players. This was it.
But no one came to save us and we lost like 14-0 or something. It was very depressing. Let us never speak of it again.
I really liked this film. It’s a wacky, fun film. The special effects are cartoon-like and combined with impressive camera work. It has funny, original wirework instead of the usual Matrix ripoff. The plot is the standard underdog team of misfits trying to win the championship. These aren’t your ordinary misfits; Stephen Chow gives a great performance trying to reunite his brother monks and his suppporting cast are hilarious. I’ve never seen such a lovable group of misfits. If it wasn’t so funny, it’d be cruel they way the good guys beat some of the other lesser teams.
Finally a quick whinge about Miramax. This film was released in Hong Kong three years ago. Miramax decided to do a limited release here with half an hour missing and horrible dubbing. The American trailers have digital underpants put on the goalie. A film this good is undeserving of such treatment.