Sri Lanka vs Australia - Porcupine (16/01/2003 8:05:25 AM)

A one day match that Ninja somehow manages to get tickets in what he thinks is possibly the best spot at the Gabba. Neither of us has been to a one day match before, so we didn't know of the vastly different qualities of the seating arrangements and their environment. Australia vs Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka have been hitting big so we were hoping for a spectacular display of batting. The most uber of wicket keepers, Gilchrist, decided to take a holiday or something, so the Queenslander, Maher, could have a go at the keeping. Fatty Warne was off boffing a nurse or something, so this Hogg guy managed to get a game, and looking at his record, we really wondered why ... who is he sleeping with? McDermott managed to get out of his death bed and was wheel chaired to the ground. I was only going to turn up for the evening session, but Ninja was indignant that I would miss any of the match so I managed to flex off the afternoon. They could hardly say no as I have sixty squillion flex hours up and have been working like a maniac recently. Heart attack any day now I guess. So I turn up a little before hand, the traffic was very very bad around the stadium. Fortunately I have an Aunt & Uncle who live really close by and managed to sneak my car in their yard instead of having to pay some extortionate parking fee somewhere. I made my way to the ground, being very familiar with the seats as they are quite close to where I have season tickets to the Brisbane Lions (ya!). I paid the stadium standard price (triple real world) for drink and chiko roll, then made my way to the seats. 10 mins to start and I was the only one of our party there. Two overs into the game, and Ninja decides to turn up. Fine. I had the happy banter of young yobbos behind me to keep me entertained. That and watching the toss, and my New Scientist magazine which I only read an article or two before the cricketers made their way onto the field. We were sitting smack in the middle of the licensed area, three levels up, right on the front row, practically lined up with the middle of the pitch, awesome view, but the sun was slowly going down and the shade was leaving. This was going to be a warm one until the evening. Luckily I brought sunscreen in my bag. My bag also had a pocket knife, glass bottle and umbrella in it: all contraband here. The guards would have branded me a terrorist and had me summarily shot if they had found this stuff. Fortunately I have the face of an angel, and I just walked through the menacing horde of guards. Well, as menacing as 60kg skinny ass punk kids can look in candy coloured uniforms. When I realised it was the licensed area, I began think about the amount of beer that would be consumed, and how dehydrated I would be getting with the sun on me, and how I wanted to drink more than I usually would (softdrink for those people who don't know me). This was kinda OK for me, but for the beer people ... 8 hours of cricket and drinking might be cause for some amusing behaviour. This hypothesis was to test ever so true. Ninja and Rob turn up with four beers. I thought there were more people coming to share these beers but no, these two guys didn't want to get up so often. They bought them in sets of four, which the bartenders kindly supplied a kind of egg carton cup holder that really seems to fly quite well and not hurt people when they are hit by them. Of course, being the Gabba, you are ripped off with the cost of beer too. Matthew Hayden is a Queenslander batsman who is quite popular. Especially with the yobbos behind me. When Matty came to field in front of our stand the chant from these guys was "Hayden! Give us a wave!" over and over until Matty did the wave and the cheer from the stand was huge! Apparently some girls think that the cricket is a good place to pick up guys. I had a reasonable look around at the people about where I was sitting ... and felt good about myself :) Had to wonder what the criteria for these girls is? Male? Drunk? Likes watching cricket at times? The girls down a couple levels had a sign with something on the front which we couldn't see, but on the back was "Call me on ..." followed by a mobile phone number. Subtle. There were plenty of girls in bikinis soaking up the sun. In fact there was one particular pink bikini wearer one level down that caught the eye of the yobbos behind me, who were moderately drunk by now. After the fighting over their binoculars died out, they started chanting "Pinky! Give us a wave!" and were eventually rewarded with the wave after a 10th chorus. Then began the semaphore messaging, which was to try and get her mobile phone number, or give theirs to her. After 5 minutes of these antics I suggest writing the number down and just going over there and giving it to her. I'm such a practical person. They had no pen, but of course that was another implement I smuggled inside my trusty bag. A chip carton was sacrificed, the number was written and delivered. After that I didn't care. Beach balls were all over the place being bumped around by the crowd. If they went on the playing area then a member of the police or a security guard would wander over and deflate it, accompanied by much booing and often some projectile food. The place where the poor policeman was sitting was covered in food bits. There was a tubby trainer who was talking to the cop, the yobbos behind us thought that it might be Warne, but then they surmised that the doughnuts on the ground would be gone in a flash if it really was Shane. It seemed that Rob's main aim in life was to encourage the people below to hit beach balls up to our third level. He was really into it, letting out some most loud and wonderful descriptions about the skills of the people who failed to bat the ball up. This persisted throughout the night. Of course, there were two balls that buzzed by Robs head over the edge that he should have batted back if he was paying attention. There was a kid sitting in our row a few seats away from us, who accidently hit a ball down. The booing he got was very loud followed by a hail of plastic cups and bottles, and a rain of beer. He took it in good humour, but unfortunately he was sitting right at the front like us. The people on the level below were getting hailed by these containers and beer. So they started throwing things back up. Unfortunately their aim was not so good, and my dodging skills had to come into play. Rob decided to have a go at the policeman who had been popping his much coveted beach balls. He did a subtle rubber neck check for police who might be looking at him, then lobbed a doughnut which was a near miss on our friend in blue three levels below. He didn't even move. I've decided I don't know Rob. There were two empty seats next to me, which were suddenly filled by two girls. Ninja smirking at me but I am ... not on the market just now (just friends!). They disappeared after about half hour or so to be replaced by more drunk yobbos. The sun was really beating down and the sweat was flowing pretty freely. Drunken sweaty yobbos abounded. Ninja neglected to put sunscreen on his chest and consequently now has a very bright red V below his neck which looked freaking painful the next morning. Half time and we waded out of the sun for a bit, as did everyone else. There was much beer being consumed. Then we were back again. The sun was nearly down and things were thankfully cooling. Sri Lanka's turn in the field. Seems the favourite guy to pick on is Muralitharan, who has been accused of chucking. Something about his wrist action that just causes the illusion of throwing (chucking). When he first came to bowl, everyone in the crowd was calling "No Ball!!!". At one stage the captain sent him to field right in front of our stand. The licensed for excessive alcohol consumption stand. The chant "Chucker!!!" went up. Muralitharan played up to the crowd too, he kept trying to egg us on, at one point kicking some of the food off the field just a little too hard and almost into the crowd. He was really taking it with quite a good humour. But then the Sri Lankan captain decided that we might be making Mural feel a little bad, and moved him to the inner field. Unfortunately, when running towards us to prevent a four, Mural tore a muscle or something, and some of the crowd was a little less than impressed and jeered at him - not really good. Later, Mural complained about it, saying he didn't really like playing with that sort of crowd about. The mexican wave got to be actually quite a wet experience later into the evening, with not so empty cups of beer flying regularly, and LOTS of empties. Fortunately the yobbos behind us had a large flag they used in the wave which I grabbed as it flew out and used it as a cover! A guy was dressed in a costume like the phantom, except it is green and gold, with a gold cape. He wasn't happy about something, and the police were trying to make him be not happy somewhere else. Unfortunately for the police, he didn't want to go. And he must have been one strong bastard, coz it took eight police to move him. The crowd were throwing cups, beer filled and not, at the police. The old favourite song "Coppers are wankers!" started up. Ninja, who is a cop, didn't join in. I told him I'd teach him the words coz it was pretty easy, but he declined. He wasn't a very happy camper from that point. He blames the beer shower he got from the wobbly yobbo behind him, as well as a very fragrant bottom burp from the same yobbo, but I think it was the song. There were a number of other extractions and brawls broken up by the police at various points through out the evening with the same happy song being sung. Our stand had lots and lots of police in and around it. The other stands didn't seem to have any. How strange. The yobbos behind us were pretty much blind drunk by now and were trying to do the math for the run rate required. Their subtraction skills were astoundingly pathetic, as they were slurring that Australia was gonna lose as they came up with over 6 runs required an over, when it was actually 4.3 at the time. It wasn't so much as their math skill that was funny, but the fact that the score board constantly had the required run rate written in big digits, next to the score that the yobbo was reading. A little later there was a male streaker who made it all the way to the pitch, got kicked in the butt by the batsman. Fortunately for us, he was clothed. The police eventually caught up with him. He surrendered immediately, but they put the aggro on him anyway and had him in an wrist lock pretty quick. That's the last live match he will ever see. But not the last one for me! Oh! And there was also some cricket going on. I was cheering lots toward the end. Cheers to the teams, to Muralitharan, the stupid streaker, the yobbos, the bikinis, the people who keep blowing up beach balls, the green and gold phantom, the good humoured police and to the poor people who have to clean it all up. Read more (1)

Mafia - Morte (24/12/2002 9:56:56 AM)

When my brother Ben got back from China, he gave me my (very late) birthday present - the E:\MAF subdirectory off his hard drive. Ben may be poor, but he is generous, and it's the thought that counts. At that stage, he'd played up to the point where you get commandeered to drive one of those old 30's race cars in a major race where the Don and all his pals are betting on you to win (this is after you 'borrowed' the main opponent's car and 'tuned' it out of the competition the previous evening). 12 times he tried, and he couldn't win, kept spinning out. I played the game from scratch, got to the race level, won after 5 tries. He reckons it was cos I have a joystick, but I reckon he just can't drive. You only have to look at his car to see why I might think that. Anyway, the game Mafia is entirely engrossing, and to begin with, both challenging in execution yet simplistic enough in principle, to keep you retrying levels until you succeed and hear more of the storyline, only you find that you end up not caring about the storyline as much as wondering what the fudge you get to do in the next level. Now THAT's what makes a game interesting - variety in goals, and variety in the means to achieve them. I spent the entire next two-three weeks playing Mafia in the afternoon and late night after work whenever I had time, and got to the point where I have to get myself some weapons before meeting some 'colleagues'. Given the subtitle of the level is 'end-game', I'm probably at the last level. Unfortunately the structure of the levels is such that there is no 'in-mission' saves. AND, while Mafia is relatively stable, if you get a bit where you're driving along, you go under an elevated railcar, (unavoidable, trust me) and the screen hangs and the sound loops, and you throw your hands up in despair, cos you'd just gotten a totally hot car, and you were on your way to find where that weapons cache was located... REBOOT! Looked on www.gamecopyworld.com - damn, patches and cracks are only at version 1.0 still! I guess I will give up and come back to it later. I still haven't explained the game, have I? Well, I don't want to give away the plot. Let's just say the storyline is kind of told in retrospect in a cafe, with you as a leading mafioso in 1938. As your character relates events in cutscenes, starting back in 1932 onwards, you perform mission requirements a'la GTA III, but with old cars and old weapons, in third person perspective unless the camera gets cramped and you get shoved into a bloody hard to play 1st person. Controls are easy to learn and remember, although I found only in the last two days of playing, that there is a 'city map' function, which shows pencilled locations and moves dynamically in a watermark effect while you drive - a bit like the Indiana Jones travelling map watermark effect, but not as fast, and in a car, and ok, not much like it I guess... Actually, I also found that the city map popup watermark causes frequent game crashes, so it isn't recommended for use in version 1.0 unless you are stationary in the car, and not facing any dynamic scenery. All up, out of 10, I'd have to give Mafia an 8.5 - and it loses .5 for the crashes, .5 for me not having bought it to find out more about how the game actually works (like finding your way about the ever-expanding city), and a final .5 cos if you had an in-mission save feature, I wouldn't have had to take the .5 off for the crashes. OK, now it gets a 9. I updated my video driver to detonator 40.72 (I keep swapping between latest driver for gameplay, earliest driver for videoediting stability) and the Mafia crashes went away. I daresay Porcupine would not be so happy, his Mafia still crashes even on latest nVidia drivers, but then he's running a GeForce4. I've just got a GeForce2 DDR. A pity there are no updates still. Anyway, I finished the game, very sad ending, and am now on to the free ride extreme. Difficult. I think I'll keep designing Trainz locos to pass the time instead.

Need for speed: Hot pursuit 2 - Elsta (27/10/2002 6:40:05 AM)

Well it is time for another game review. This time it’s NEED FOR SPEED HOT PURSUIT 2. I saw the demo on the net, and I can download the thing from my ISP @ 400kb/s so I figure "fuck it". The graphics look OK, but that’s where the fun stops. You have a choice of either a Holden or a Ford, both of which would look like they should be parked outside your local 7-11 with a few drunken hoons standing around them, swilling beer. This is supposed to be a game about strapping fast and exotic cars with the police right on your ass - why the hell do I want to do that in a bev car instead? The physics feel sluggish, not sure if that’s because these are pretty sluggish cars or just some shonky math behind the engine driving the game. The controls are adjustable enough and the choice of manual is refreshing seeing so many of these so called "car games" only let you have automatic these days. The Ford feels like a VW and handles much worse. The Holden feels a little quicker but drives like a small truck through corners that don’t vary a great deal in their apexes. All in all I’d give this game a big phat miss and await the release of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City where you get to race motorbikes through heavy traffic while shooting at people. Need for speed: Hot pursuit 2 = No Bananas! I'm not even gonna link to the demo. Read more (1)

Sniper time - Porcupine (15/10/2002 7:43:09 AM)

OK, it seems that the media are onto us, all computer game players are evil snipers. It's time for we players to break out the sniper rifles and take out a pitiful handful of allegedly innocent civilians before they round us all up, and force us to watch teletubbies and barney the dinosour for 24hrs a day. A better idea than wasting time on civilians would be to take out the idiot MSNBC reporters and media people in general. Particularly those in marketing. I'd pay Aus$85 for a game like that. I'm sure Penny-Arcade would too. The same media that beats up the story about a building that fell down in a town somewhere until the leader of that country had to go bomb the crap out of people he thought might have voted for the government that may have let the actual people stay in their country who might have done the deed. But not before demonising the ruling party to the extreme. "Oh they needed bombing." Never got to hear their side though. Odd, as the US insists that their speeches go out to anywhere they damn well please, and then they get all pissy when their speech is immediately followed by another program which tears apart exactly what was said in the speech, specifically picking up on double standards, pure lies, underlying motivations. Wouldn't it be nice to have a press like that, instead of bend-over sell-out journalism majors? Excuse me while I go buy Silent Scope for the playstation and Operation Flashpoint or Rainbow Six Raven Shield for the PC to brush up my skills. GTA3 and Return to Castle Wolfenstein had some great sniper action. I learn all my morals from computer games because mum and dad are too interested in having a life and career to raise kids. Maybe they both have to work to support a family because businesses have to be totally profit / share holder focused and can't afford to pay one person enough to raise a family. Maybe we are all being pushed into a society where we don't care for, or even fear our neighbours, and forget about living near your relatives. Raising kids is solely a parental effort, nobody else must interfere. Perhaps Mafia might be a goody - think I'll actually buy me some of that classic action. The media is pretty stupid. If all they target is the lowest common denominator, then that is how they will appear. I'm pretty sure most people are cynical enough to see it, but the government doesn't seem to think so, and we've all become so complacent about it. Judgment day has to be near, surely. Have I missed anything? Hell yes, but it's getting late. There's too many points I'm trying to make without being clear on any one of them. Read more (3)

Serious Sam – the first encounter - Elsta (24/06/2002 3:21:27 AM)

Where do I start, firstly you should drop whatever it is you’re doing (with the exception “maybe” of getting a blowjob from two Swedish sisters) and run to your nearest game store, hand the person behind the counter $30 bucks (you heard right, only $30) and demand a copy from them. If by chance they don’t have one in stock you have my permission to beat said person within an inch of his or her life. Serious Sam is a GOD Game (gathering of developers) with Croteam being the leading developers. It has its own engine – The “Serious” engine that is just so kick ass on so many different levels and in so many different ways. The Serious engine has a c++ style command console that gives you enough tweaking control to satisfy even the hardest c0r3 gamer. The only thing that I’ve seen come close would be the quake 3 engine that maybe quicker and more resource friendly but in this age of cheap hardware does anyone really still care? The game has been the only I’ve played that keeps me on the edge of my seat all the time… you never know where the next screaming headless zombie is going to run at you from. The graphics I give an 8 from 10 score to, although If you’re still using a tnt 2 you’ll find the game looks like a giant scrolling bitmap. With current hardware the game runs more like quake 1 and makes for an intense duel or team play match where players can team up to defeat the bots on missions that will leave you exhausted but hungry for more action then the human brain can handle. Not yet convinced? Download the demo! I give this Serious Sam the precious and coveted rating of "Best Game Yet!" Go buy this game now or forever wonder how games could be if only you weren’t such a knob licker : P

Grand Theft Auto III - Porcupine (24/06/2002 12:28:30 AM)

Yes, its been out a while on the PS2, banned for a bit in Australia, then unbanned. Now its on the PC. The original Grand Theft Auto was a hoot on the PC. Top down view, very fun to play in multiplayer, so-so in single player. Saturday night, we hired GTAIII for the PS2 from the local video store, along with a DVD movie. The PS2 as a DVD player pretty much sucks. I don't think it is a common problem but when the DVD reader goes to change layers on some disks, it starts to have serious trouble, and often ends up complaining that it cannot read the DVD at all. Bah. So when the DVD movie stuffed up, we decided to try out GTAIII. It was sick. You are now much closer to the action than the original. After doing the regulation stuff, we walked about the town stealing cars and knocking the pus out of pedestrians. I was shocked and appalled. Mostly at just how much extreme fun I was having at doing something so incredibly evil. Particularly when you get a baseball bat and go nuts on an already prone victim. Ram cars off the road, blow away a chinese food sales man with a shot gun, beat a drug pusher to death with a baseball bat. If you have frustrations to vent, then take them all out here. Better here than in the real world. Of course, there is a nice way to play this game. You can ... borrow a taxi and then ship people around for money. *boring*! Then there are these hidden stunts you can do all around the place to earn some really nice money. So much to do. Very neat stuff. The graphics are outstanding, the game play straight forward and reasonably easy to control. Not recommended for ... well, anyone really. You have to have a firm grip on reality and a calm disposition. I liked it so much I went out and bought the PC version ~ oh ya. Tip: Save often. Wait a few hours before you drive in the real world after playing this game for any length of time.

Dungeon Siege - Morte (16/06/2002 6:45:24 AM)

You know what it is. A hack n slash that whips Diablo II. Damn good game, for the 72 hours it took me to complete the single player campaign. Some arsehole reckons he did it in 40, but I DOUBT he did every feature in the maps. The premise is that your character starts out as a nobody, then you determine what their inclinations and stats are, by using a certain type of offense (melee, ranged, nature magic, or combat magic). The more you use that offense, the more UBER skilled you become in that, in addition to an improvement in stats related to that offense (e.g. strength for melee, dexterity for ranged, intelligence for magics). The other stats increase as well, but at a proprotionately lower rate. Your strength determines your natural level of health, your intelligence determines your mana. dexterity determines something, I think basically your die spin on hits/misses/armour deflection bonus... The interface is 3rd person (or presumably 10th person if you are playing with a full party complement), and a 3 button scrollable mouse is the best interface for the game. To be honest, most of the time you can play the whole game with the mouse, only occasionally tapping the H (health potion) or M (mana potion) in emergencies or longer than usual combat situations. Much like Age Of Empires II, your party members can be collectively or individually configured to be agressive, defensive or passive; roaming, medium movement, or hold position; follow or detached; you have party formations, including variations of distance, and adaptive positioning based on your locale. You can also group and recall groups, and there are hotkeys for party offence types. Plus, the aforementioned exact required health or mana are drunk by the entire selected party when you choose them. THE BEST feature, okay, A best feature, is that your potions are only consumed to the level required, so you can have potion portions and leftovers, which you can recombine between characters if you are like me (see retentive note below). Another best feature is that the magic users can be set up to autoheal other players, reducing/eliminating your dependence on health, and at the same time, you can cast a 'mana balance' spell, such that the ENTIRE PARTY's mana is redistributed continually for the duration of the spell, enabling the whole party's mana to be at the disposal of your magic user(s). The only things I didn't like about DS in comparison to Diablo II are: No insta-port town portals/locale portals. Yes, if you want to buy that 130gold donkey back in the second village, cos you don't want to pay 750gold for it in the third town (all these donkeys are the same, BTW, you just seem to migrate to more money hungry areas), you will have to WALK ALL THE WAY THERE. At least you are likely to find some monsters or paths/crevices you missed before, on the way back. Same with trying to find that shop when you just defeated a horde of rich uglies. WALK THERE. OH, and MAKE SURE YOU PICK ALL YOUR STUFF UP before leaving the game for the evening/early morning. Even if you save the game, all free items seem to disappear from existence. Boy was I pissed [off], on a few occasions. Especially after the PC crashed. Game came back fine, but no happy treasure items. :( Save often, nonetheless. I kept getting decompression CRC check errors at certain points in the game, with recommendations to reinstall. (Which I did, often with little or no effect). I still don't know whether it is my RAM, my hard drive, or my PCI latency (I have an infamous VIA 686B southbridge). Maybe it is a game bug? I think I am still playing version 1.000 I prefer the shopkeeps in DS, they don't recharge you twice the price for repurchasing an item that you just sold to them. In dire straits between shops with too many unequippable items (read CRAP)? Just get a magic user to transmute them into GOLD! YES! (But you don't get as much as at a shop). A funny thing happened on the way to my getting this game. My D&D-zealot brother was pestering me to see if I was going to buy the game, it was (and probably still is) $99.95 in Electronics Boutique. I said, no way are you going to play that on your machine, you've only got a Voodoo2 on a Celeron333. He desisted, but then two weeks later, he called me again and said - "I've bought it, and it doesn't run very well..." I recommended trying to swap the video driver from software to 3DFX and back to see if either mode works better than the other (he was getting no video cutscenes, and weird colours in the game, besides chronic chunking, even at 640x480). Trust me, there isn't much other tweaking he can try that hasn't already been done. I said I would buy it off him for $50. He said NO WAY! and then I didn't hear from him for a week. Next thing I hear is that he is willing to take the $50, so the next thing I find is that he comes over here on Wednesdays to play it on my satellite 3000, while I work at home. I also found myself spending 4-6 hours almost every night playing it until its abrubt conclusion. I was usually playing it at 1600x1200 on an AMD 1.2 Ghz with a 64MbGF2GTS. Believe it or not, the framerate went UP when I changed res from 1024x768! (Up to 30-40fps, that is). The framerate is way better at 640x480, but why suffer big pixels on a 21" monitor, I always say. Having read the DS forums, I know I'm not the only one that has happened to (increased framerate for highres). I feel very upset that I couldn't go further with my kick arse character in single player (like you can in DiabloII), and more so that I spent so much effort working up my other party characters (you can build up a party of 8 characters in the game, with a mix of styles, and a mix of fighters, and pack mules to carry extra stuff), when you can only take a choice of one character (any character) into multiplayer games. I played it building up a party of 8 pretty early on - 1 nature magic/all-rounder (me), 2 melee specialists, 2 archers, 1 combat mage, and 2 pack mules. Playing advice - if you are going to get mules, get them early, when they are cheap. If you are going to get party fighters, get them early, when they are cheap. (And malleable). If you are really anal retentive, like me, you'll get to the point where you max out your gold at 9,999,999 - even before you finish the final single player level, and the shops aren't selling anything you want. If you want a tough central character to play with later on multiplayer, DON'T have a large fighting party. your character works up in ability to meet the challenges. It might take longer, but you'll become an ultimate fighter, even if you have to suffer the ignonomy of dying repeatedly and getting resurrected/revived by a magic user. Interesting points - there are technologically inclined goblins (and I always thought gnomes were the tech-heads), with lightning guns, flamethrowers, and vulcan cannons .... which are ranged weapons you can pick up and use (by a sufficiently statted character). Although believe it or not, they AREN'T the most cool ranged weapons you can pick up. There is a HUUUUUUUUGE community out there supporting it, and there are GMAX game dev modules and an SDK on their way for level and mod design (if they aren't already out). That means free expandability. From what I understand, servers run on a quake3 basis, rather than a persistent MMORPG, and there are NO FEES for their servers. I suppose it's not as big as battle.net, but jeez, it's only a few months old. So if you haven't played it, it is TOTALLY worth $50. I'd even buy it for $70. I don't think any games are worth more than $70. I would also say BUY THE GAME, don't copy it, mainly because I never got any of those decompression errors until I installed the game on a backup I made of the originals (I did it to prove the backups worked - how ironic) - gamecopyworld says there is only basic protection on it, which basically means that you need the CD in the drive to play, which for some strange reason, annoys some hax0rs. (Idi10ts.) I am of the personal [paranoid] impression that DS employs one of those new copy protection techniques I have heard about whereby one of the normal hardware CD locks (unreadable sectors which are uncopyable) are combined with a software feature to combat the crackers who just jump over CD read checkpoints. Specifically, the game DEGRADES over time, with anomalies popping up more and more frequently and severely, all the time indicating operating system related failures, rather than repeatable game software glitches. Even after you reinstall your 'illegitimate' copy, the problems continue. Even after I reinstalled the game from the backup, I was getting the decompression errors, (but in different places), but when I reinstalled the game from the originals, the decompression errors went away for a couple of days. I am not playing DS any more, I am making levels for Quake 3 Rally! You may plead with me for more information on that if you wish. I may submit a review and other info given enough incentive. (N.B. Threats to life, liberty, and property are not classed as incentives). I also spent some time on Trainz!, and that is kewwl, too. But Q3R is more fun in terms of instant gratification. Read more (2)

Jedi 2 review - Elsta (21/05/2002 8:03:10 AM)

Alright, seeing no one is doing any game reviews I thought I’d give it a go. The game: Jedi Outcast 11 The price: Free (Demo) The engine: Unknown, Looks like tribes or quake engine at a stretch Eye candy factor: 6/10 The game looks good enough though they could have put some more work into making a believable atmosphere. Eg: it’s snowing but there is no snow on the ground (falling from the sky but not collecting on the ground). The play: A bit like tribes as far as the weaponry and shootouts go but then you pull out this Light Sabre you have no real control over and the view switches from first person to homosexual or at the very least bi-curious mode. The demo was over in the blink of an eye taking all of 10 minutes to play through. Do I recommend it? Well if you’re on optus cable and your download speed will be throttled back, as they say, and a cap put on your download quota then hell I recommend you download every stupid fucking game you can, while you still can ... twice. Read more (1)

EverQuest - The latest designer drug to hit the street - Mac (24/04/2002 4:47:40 AM)

Bad mmkay. Don't install it. Don't buy it. Don't even go in the games store. Run for your lives.

Too Uber - Porcupine (30/03/2002)

I couldn't let this go without sharing. Note for non-EverQuest players FBSS=very nice belt for your character FRSS=moderate belt for your character Uber=(oober) German for above/super/superior ... GUILD CHAT ... D 'whats the item thats like FBSS but not quiet as good?' O 'cloth belt' W 'bah, im still running with my FBSS' G 'W, so is N hehe' W 'eh?' G 'using FBSS' P 'so does my SK' W 'oh, hehe' A 'What is wrong for a FBSS ... some of us worked hard for one' W 'nothin wrong with it =p' W 'just price gone to crap =(' P 'W is too Uber for it' W 'bah, im not too uber for any haste item sept FRSS' V 'I'm too uber for my sash, too uber for my sash, it aint worth that much cash' ... I'm too uber for sash, too uber for my sash it aint worth that much cash And I'm too uber for my plate, too uber for my plate it drops regularly in hate And I'm too uber for my boots, too uber for my boots cant right click grasping roots I'm a twinkie, you know what I mean and I do my little turn in the guild chat Yeah, in the guild chat, in the guild chat, yeah I do my little turn in guild chat I'm too uber for this zone, to uber for this zone I like to hunt alone And I'm too uber for a group, to uber for a group I just want all the loot And I'm to uber for that buff, too uber for that buff Aegolism is *just* enough Coz I'm a twinkie, you know what I mean and I do my little turn in the guild chat Yeah, in the guild chat, in the guild chat, yeah I do my little turn in guild chat I'm too uber for my, too uber for my, too uber for my ... I'm to uber for this song