Kinda kicking myself that I have not updated this in a while. Note to self, update more often.Admitedly though this is not entirely my fault. I was away last weekend as me and a mate drove down to Newcastle to go to a friends 21st. It was a great road trip going down and the party was excellent. The theme for the event was I believe superheroes, or who you consider to be a superhero. As such I decided to go as Hawkeye Pierce. For those unaware, and shame on you for not being aware, is the lead character in the TV series M*A*S*H, which I am a huge fan of. Been watching them all over again of late as I own them on DVD.


Above is a picture of myself.

That is a picture of my mate, Jacko, dressed an oompa loompa. I kid you not. Next to him is Chelsea who also came down for the 21st and we play World of Warcraft with.

Finally there is my mate Twit, who also came down, declaring himself to be Will Turner.

Once the party was over and we had a chance to sleep we got up and started the drive back at around 9am. On the way down it was raining a fair bit but it was nothing compared to the rain on the way back. About 30km south of Grafton we got stuck by flood waters for about 1.5 hours; not because we could not get through, but because traffic control was not doing a very good job and was only letting the other side of the road through towards us. Eventually that stopped and we were able to go through said flood waters. Unfortunatly I do not have a picture of the event as I was kinda focussing on not having my car swept away, but we made it through. The rest of the trip after that was slow and we did not get back til about 9pm. 12 hours of driving is not pleasant for anyone, particularly since I am the only one who could drive the car. Next time I go down, i am flying.

...I got two new games today :D. Devil May Cry 4 and Burnout Paradise. I have tried both out and will give a more indepth review when I have had a chance to really play the games but so far both have met my expectations. And with that, I think I am done. Yes that will do.

Well after approximatly 15 hours of gameplay on Burnout Paradise, I believe that i am finally ready to give my review on this game. Actually that is a load of crap, I was just having too much fun and did not want to put it down.

Burnout Paradise is the latest installment of the Burnout series and the only one I have played so I can not compare it to its predessors. What I will say is that if this game is anything to go by, I am really kicking myself for not picking up earlier versions.

You start out in Paradise City with a dodgy old wreck of a car, literally. You pick up your cars for wrecking yards. Once that is done, the city is yours to explore. Everything is open to you instantly which is very refreshing. You can start driving round town learning the streets and alley ways and, more importantly, the jumps and shortcuts you can take; or you can start building up your car arsenal and winning events to upgrade your license.

Events are extremely easy to find and start. See that set of traffic lights up ahead there? Guess what. That is an event. Events are divided up into 5 types. You have your stock standard get from one place to another race. You also have Road Rage, in which your mission is to take out your opponents as you can within a set time frame. There is also Marked Man, similar to race in which you are trying to get to a location on the map but your opponents are not trying to beat you there, they are trying to stop you from getting there all together... evil bastards. You have stunt mode, trying to reach a score within a time limit and then you have Burning Route which are sprint races to win a car.

When you first start up, winning event can be difficult. You do not know the city or the shortcuts which usually results in one of two things happening that will result in you losing the race. One, you will lose your bearings and go off in a completely other direction to where your supposed to be going in a misguided shortcut attempt or, and this is the one that happened to me most often, you will end up crashing into buildings, ramps and walls that will suddenly appear. Now once a race is lost, you might consider doing the race again. Not wise, you see you would have to drive back to the start of the race and that is all the way back on the other side of the city. The better option is to simply choose another event closer to you. The entire city is open to you, take advantage of it.

Now once you start winning races, cars will be unlocked and start roaming the city. To own them, just make em crash and they are yours. The difficulty comes when you are trying to find them. Most of the times I have won new cars is when I was lazily roaming the city looking for new paths to take. A sunday afternoon drive turns into a destruction derby when the car you just unlocked goes flying past in the opposite direction.

The cars are broken up into three categories; Speed, Aggression and Stunt. The class gives an indication for what event the car would be best suited for. Speed for a race, Aggression for Marked Man and Road Rage and the Stunt cars speak for themselves. These classes also determine the quickest ways to get your boost back up. Aggression will get their boost back by destroying cars and general bad driving, Stunt will get boost by doing stunts, and Speed cars have a unique ability in that if you use all your boost without stopping you get a burst of it at the end to refill part of your boost bar, and if you have done drifts, gotten air or even driven on the other side of the road, the typical methods of getting boost, the boost bar can go back to full and keep on boosting. The game calls this Burnout, I call in Chain Boosting. The cars also have some pretty unique descriptions which had me chuckling when I first read them and surprisingly enough were informative enough to give me an impression on how the car would drive. My favourite would have to be the description of the Carson Inferno Van, Handles like a tank. Hits like a tank. Basically, it is a tank. It just looks like a van.

There are also the Road Rules. These offer street based challenges, beat a time or pull a Showtime and rack up points destroying as many other cars as humanly possible.

The online component is also one of the smoothest I have ever seen in my life. To get into online racing you push on the d-pad and get online. That is pretty much it. Once in, you and other players can race around the city, do challenges and try to beat the other players road rules.

It is clear a lot of effort has been put into the game to make it look and sound sexy. The graphics are detailed enough to make it pretty without slowing the game down and the audio is excellent as well. The crashes are bone crunching, the engines will purr at high revs and the accompaning music just feels right bolting through construction sites and parking garages. And your friendly radio host, DJ Atomica, is not the annoying voice over you get in most games. This one is entertaining and actually give you useful information while your driving around town.

For those who do not have this game, get it. For those who have this game and are burning around Paradise City, doing stunts and causing havok, I salute you.

My usual World of Warcraft addiction has recently been replaced with two new games that have caught my eye; Puzzle Quest and Audiosurf. Now Puzzle Quest has been out now for a few month now and I've heard about it before. Just really never had an opportunity to get my hands on it until now. The game itself is pretty simple, RPG Puzzle Game in which battles are played out on a board of stones. You rotate the stones to match the symbols in order to gain mana for your spells, attack the opponent or gain health and experience. That's pretty much it. Its not a complicated idea but it is pretty fun. Below are some screenshots of the game





Now Audiosurf is indeed a game, but its better described as the most entertaining music visualiser ever. When you play the game, you match up coloured blocks to score points my flying your ship into the blocks. Pretty straight forward. The complexity comes as the levels are built entirely based on the song you choose to input, from your own collection should you so choose. Once you choose a song, the game analyses the song, determining things such as intensity of the music and beats and lyrics and from that, creates a whole level based on it, its fantastic. It is quite hard to describe really but I highly recommend it for a bit of lazy fun, or it you just want to listen to your music and have a lil something to do at the same time.

Well, after many hours of work, I have finally managed to complete a publishable version of my Go game. This game is based on the old Chinese game of Wéiqí. I have simplified this version greatly. The basic concept is to simply surround your opponents stones with your own. The game has a built-in AI, very simple and somewhat tough, but an AI nonetheless. You can also play against another person. The game is still in its beta stages and I am continuing to develop the AI and remove bugs, but for the most part it is all good. I am quite proud of it.