In a reasonably recent episode of Top Gear, Jeremy Clarkson posed the question of why people do not just get up and drive around. Not to go anywhere, not for anything, just for a drive. With this in mind, for the past two weeks, I have taken the most convoluted route to get from uni to home on a tuesday night. I did this in the spirit of just enjoying the drive and enjoy it, I did. 

My car is not the best in the world, it is not fast, it is not stylis, it just gets me from A to B. But despite this the feeling of just driving along the freeway, being on the road, was fantastic. 

I write this at a particularly fucked up time of the morning known as the morning. Its close to 8am and being up at this hour I have deemed more than once to be completely perverse. However it is not all bad as, despite the early hour, I have actually not gone to bed yet since yesterday. This is mainly due to me waking up at 1pm and deciding, fuck it! If I have to be at uni tomorrow at 8:30am, there is really no point in me trying to get 1hr of sleep before heading off. So after spending the entire day playing World of Warcraft, yes I do mean the entire day (something which I am sure my project team members would kill me for), I am about to hit the 18hr mark and I am curious to see how far I can push myself today. If I can stay away to get back to a regular sleep pattern, lets say 10pm, I would hit 33hrs, which would be respectable but not my personal best. My personal record is 46hrs and that was no picnic. But since we all now live in an age where energy drinks have replaced massive amounts of coffee and caffeine comes in lovely, over the counter at the pharmacy, pill form, I may be able to one day break my own record.

I do believe this whole thing may have gone off on a tangent but that is only due to lack of sleep. 

Not bad at all

Been getting back into this TV series of late and have found it be very enjoyable. For those unaware of the premise of the show, an average intelligence US Marshall becomes the Sherrif of a town called Eureka, built to house the smartest people in the world. Of course zany things happen all the time due to the fine line between genius and crazy and well.... its just enjoyable to watch. 

Uni has gotten back into full swing unfortunatly and taken large chunks of my free time with it. Firstly project is has reared its ugly head and with myself being the lead coder, the lay back attitude I had last semester will not fly this semester.

Secondly this semester has me facing an internship which started on Wednesday and was surprisingly enjoyable. First day was spent reading code, for 8 hours. Something of which I still have no idea how I pulled off. Second and third days were much more enjoyable with myself doing actual work. Most of the second day was done doing PHP and CSS coding whilst the third was a combination of work from the day before with flash coding for a seperate project. It was fun getting back into coding again I must say.

But with that internship taking up my time three days a week, my schedule looks roughly like this.

Mon - Lecture and tutorials.
Tue - Project work
Wed - Internship and WoW raid
Thur - Internship and WoW raid
Fri - Internship and general gaming
Sat - Work and gaming
Sun - Work, internship report and WoW raid.

As you can see, all very busy and with a ridiculous number of new games coming out in coming weeks, let along tv shows that will explode back onto the screen from mid september, I sense I may need to event a machine to slow down time..... yes that will do quite nicely.

Yes two game review in one day, I have been busy.... well not really just slack.

Now Top Spin 4 is a tennis game, so if you hate the idea of tennis or sport games, I suggest you leave right now and not bother reading this as it will have little interest.

Tennis games in my opinion have always had a problem and this is realism. The key issue that I have found is that as long as you are near the ball when it comes onto your side of the net,  you will hit it and usually hit it well, regardless of your inept timing. Most have ignored this problem with x number of tennis games spawning with Mario or Sonics face all over them and focusing on colour and fun games rather than realism. That is all well and good. I cannot recall the number of hours my brother and I battled each other playing Mario tennis in 5 set epic matches that could easily go for 3+ hours.

Top Spin 4 has been the first tennis game I have played for in a while and I have thoroughly enjoyed it. The detail that has been placed in regards to hitting and timing your shots is very well done, even if they do give you the blatently obvious hint of start swinging when the ball bounces off your side of the court. But there is still positioning that must be dealt with an achieving that perfect ace time after time is not something that can be done using the buttons. You must use the right analog stick and get the timing right in order to do that, something which took me a while to master. Something which leads me to my next point.

In reading up ahead of buying this games, I read about numerous criticisms about the control system and how in their attempts of realism, they have may have gone too far and made it too difficult to play. Personally I find this ridiculous and am sure most people will have no problem picking it up. I suspect that it could be due to the notoriously hard tennis school the game has included but you do not need to complete that to become World Number 1.

Once you got the basics down, it time you get on the court. You have your traditional single match, career, multiplayer modes that almost every sporting game has so I will not bother to go to great length on those. The one major criticism I have with the career mode is that matches have been ridiculously shortened in the aim of making it quicker to finish a match. For example, throughout your entire career as a junior or a professional, matches are decided by best of 3, 3 game sets with a super tie break (first to 10 points) should you both win 1 set a piece. Whilst I can appreciate that have a 6 game per set, best of 5 set match to be epic in length, I would have prefered having that long length gameplay rather than the short shit I was having to deal with. Just the option of having long proper matches would have been greatly appreciated and surely could not be that hard to include.  The only time this was included was when you finish a year as world number one and face legends of the game in which you do get those lovely epic matches.

All in all, if you enjoy tennis, I recommend this game quite highly. Despite some minute flaws that most will not care about such as the very occasional graphic glitch on court and the ridiculously designed players area, a lover of tennis will very much enjoy this game.

When this first game was first announced, I was meh about the whole thing. I enjoyed the Soul Calibur 3 game greatly and it was great fun when lanning at a friends place, but the idea of a fourth was still meh to me, even with Yoda included.

However release day came around and I still found myself wondering around every store I could find trying to grab a copy; every EB Games store was sold out. Amusingly enough I was able to pick up a cheaper copy of the game at JB Hi-fi with relative ease.

But anyways onto the meat of the game. You fight people with weapons in an attempt to knock them out in pretty arenas..... that is about it really. They include enough single player elements to keep interesting but once thats over I suspect it will quickly be placed on my completed pile. Do not get me wrong, I am enjoying the game, but I am only playing it between instances or raids in WoW, not as a full time game. I suspect it could be due to the strong multiplayer element that comes with all fighting games but since I refuse to waste my time on the abomination of Xbox Live where everyone I fight will surely have completed it with every character and will most likely knock me out of the ring within 6 seconds. 

Pick it up if you have some spare cash or love the Soul Calibur series but everyone else could probably give it a miss.