• 5Jul 08

  New Gaming High! New Real Life Low!

  Just came upon a blog elsewhere whereby someone has made a list of all their games (on pretty much every system of this generation and the last, including handhelds!) and detailing their efforts to complete them all. A worthy project, but they seem to have a lot of catching up to do as they only completed one game in the previous month.
  
  I've become something of a completionist myself of late. This is probably helped by the move from PC gaming to my new Xbox 360 at Easter. I got sick of sitting in front of a PC at work, so my gaming suffered. Now I'm chilling on the sofa with a gamepad, I've been spurred on to new heights of gaming excellence (and a new low in real life existence!)
  
  From 1st April 2008 to today 5th July, I've completed the following Xbox 360 games:
  
  Tom Clancys: GRAW
  Tom Clancys: GRAW 2
  Gears Of War
  Mass Effect
  Assassins Creed
  Prey
  Portal (just completed wihin the past hour)
  Condemned
  Lost: Via Domus
  
  Plus (and this is the shocker) I've played through all 3 Halo games in succession. Twice!!! I'd never played any of them before, and got ridiculously addicted!
  
  I've also slotted in about 80 hours on Oblivion.
  And I'm currently at Nova Prospekt on Half-Life 2.
  Plus have played the first few levels of Kameo, Just Cause and Splinter Cell: Double Agent.
  And I'm still tackling Paper Mario on my old Gamecube too.
  
  I'm not proud of my achievements. And I think I have developed RSI and a phobia of the outdoors. And other human beings. But it's been fun, and most of the games have been brilliant!
  
  I say good luck to that blogger with their endeavour, but they need to keep on mashing those buttons if they want their social life to disappear completely, like mine has.
  • Posted Jul 5, 2008 1:16 pm PT
  • Category: Games
  • 0 Comments
  • Tag
  • Print
  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Digg
• 7May 08

  If you can't string a sentence together, why write a review?

  Each time I visit Gamespot, I grow increasingly appalled at people's butchery of the written word. As someone who enjoys reading and writing and likes to read other peoples opinions and ideas, I find it very frustrating. It is almost expected in forums and IMs, but it really has no place in player reviews.
  
  I wanted to write a nice big long rant about this, but I've decided to keep it as short as I can. I believe that a large proportion of the people who frequent this great gaming community - and the ones who are the main culprits of this literary ineptitude - have little more than a 5 second attention span.
  
  I'm not just talking about spelling here, or the increasing use of geek/gamer SMS-style shorthand of the 'L33T DOOODZZZ ROOL!!! N00BZ SUK MY BFG9000!!!!' brigade. What I'm talking about is structure. What I'm talking about is punctuation. What I'm talking about is paragraphs. But mostly what I'm talking about is having a point, expressing it clearly and entertaining people along the way.
  
  So many players reviews I've read recently I've actually not read, because I can't read them. They seem to be one great big long sentence, devoid of punctuation, capitalisation, sentence structure, grammar and even paragraphs. They read like a great big long telegram, but without the STOPs. For example, here is a review of Halo 2* that I just read:
  
  " pc users are now just starting to experience halo 2. this might sound incredeble but if your a pc user who is going to buy this game make sure you have a windows index score of 5.0.you can look this up in performance and information tools only available on windows vista.in overall this is a really impressive game,the graphics are astounding,mixed in with the story and bon a pettite you have a near perfect video game like this one,just make sure you have plenty of ammo for the second mission.(not real ammo game ammo).i just wish the missions weren't so hard.maybe i shouldn't bore you and get right to the point if your gonna buy this game make sure your computer can support halo 2 or you just wasted $50.and we all now we don't want to waste $50 on a game we can't play because it is just downright annoying.see you next time for another review by xxxxxxx! "
  
  I bet you didn't bother to read it did you? And you won't bother to see xxxxxxx next time for whatever game they intend to babble on about incoherrently.
  
  Okay, maybe that example wasn't so bad, as at least they used some punctuation - though they often used it in the wrong place, didn't add a space after each comma or fullstop/period and had no capitalisation at the beginning of each sentence. All in all it makes what they were saying (which wasn't really very much) fairly un-readable.
  
  Here's another 'review' of the same game:
  
  " i have halo 2 for pc but i cant play campen i can play on line i got it going yesterday 4 like 30 sec it is gust the computer i gust cant get it going if this is happined to u and u have got it going plz help me get it going my frind has it and i can play it at his house but he might because he got a xbox 360 with halo 3 so if u can help me plz email me or try to get a comat on my page or help me by msn "
  
  Quite apart from the fact it is not a review, do they actually expect us to bother to try and make sense of this?
  
  To expand: do people who write such reviews think that we expect to be so entertained and enlightened by what they might have to say, that we will sit here and waste precious moments of our lives trying to decipher their unintelligible streams of consciousness?
  
  In case you are getting the wrong end of the stick here, I am not poking fun at people who cannot spell, are dyslexic or have missed out on some early part of their education. I'm just saying, why do you think the rest of us would be at all interested if you can't at least have a point and express it clearly in a manner that is structured and easy to follow?
  
  Please please please... save that kind of thing for your Halo 3 frag sessions on Xbox Live, and leave the reviews to the people who have the ability to actually string a sentence together and make it worth reading.
  
  Apologies for any spelling mistakes or grammatical errors in this blog
  
  *NB: I was reading reviews of Halo 2 because I have just purchased Halo 3 for my new Xbox 360 and wanted to know if it was worth my while playing the previous two games. Judging by the quality of the reviewers, many of whom expressed a fondness for 'fragging noobz' in multiplayer, I now know to avoid signing up for Xbox Live Gold!
  • Posted May 7, 2008 8:24 am PT
  • Category: Writing
  • 0 Comments
  • Tag
  • Print
  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Digg
• 23Feb 08

  Relatively old gamer muses over personal gaming history

  I've been a gamer since I first played Pong and Space Invaders in an arcade in 1979. So I guess that makes me old.
  
  In 1981 I programmed a pixel based target shooting game at school on an RM 380Z, and the following year successfully wrote a 300 line version of Missile Command on a BBC Micro Model B my uncle had loaned me, but forgot to save it to tape before the computer crashed. I've not really tried to make my own games since then, but have enjoyed everyone elses efforts quite a bit, possibly to the detriment of my own physical and mental health.
  
  I've owned and gamed on various Sinclair, Commodore and Atari computers, on all of which I lost years of my life playing Elite. I probably spent far too much time and money on Commodore Amigas over a ten year period, before switching to PCs in 1998. Since Big Brother Bill released Windows 98 and I bought a Pentium II 266 PC with a 4mb graphics card, I've probably spent UK10,000 building and upgrading gaming PCs, a figure which fills me with horror, especially when I look at my credit card statement.
  
  I only succumbed to the console revolution in 2003 when my girlfriend bought me a Gamecube to play Super Monkey Ball and Mario Kart Double Dash with her. I've been hooked ever since, and even though I've also owned a PS2 and an Xbox 360, the 'cube is still my gaming engine of choice - that is when not replaying Half-Life 2 on the PC for the 17th time or wasting another few months in Oblivion.
  
  What's my all time favourite game? It's so hard to say. I've played so many good ones over the years, and they just seem to get better and better. Oh, don't believe all the rubbish spouted by balding gaming geeks about how the old days of gaming were best... Games are getting so good these days it's scary. My social life is suffering.
  
  Gaming likes: a good story, subtle humour, stylish design, open-ended linearity and anything with monkeys in.
  
  Gaming dislikes: obsessive gun fetishism, politically dubious real war scenarios which are just propoganda/recruitment tools for the US military, tediously realistic track-based driving simulations, overly difficult boss fights and Sony (for forcing me to buy a PS2 to play Shadow Of The Colossus and ICO).
  • Posted Feb 23, 2008 4:49 pm PT
  • Category: Games
  • 0 Comments
  • Tag
  • Print
  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Digg

See Previous Blog Posts