Scizorz

So ive been gone a while.Thats because it was college break and i have been working my ass off for money.

This was originally for an upgrade to my computer to notch it back up to gaming specs but thankfully i managed to strike a deal with a freind.He offered me to work decorating his new house he was about to relocate to for a month or so and he would make me a gaming rig.I jumped on it and after about a months of work or so i got my pc assembled.It was an englighteneing experience because i was sat in his warehouse where his company builds pc's to order and i learned way more than i thought i would, or could.I lifted teh specs off his company's website off the base system and added the alterations.

• 
  AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 6000+ 3.00GHz
• Antec Nine Hundred
• Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro
• Asus M2N SLI Deluxe DDR2
• OCZ Reaper X 4GB PC2-6400 HPC (2x2GB)
• NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTB OC 512MB
• Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 500GB 7200RPM SATA-II 32MB Cache HDD
• Pioneer 20x DVD±RW Dual Layer ReWriter
• Corsair TX 650W Power Supply
  
  I also managed to bargain a 26" Samsung SM-2693HM 26" Widescreen LCD Monitor - Black for about £150 (half price basically) as a token of gratitude, from him.

So yeah that prompted me to get back on steam, download TF2 and just go bugnuts with it.I still love how smooth and balanced the game is, theres nothing you cant beat if youre experinced and if the opposing player isnt playing well...and the counter system where everything is countered by something else is awesome.

Speaking of bugnuts, i bought spore.I bought it for £35, played all the way through to the space stage in a sitting and i have no desire to play it again.I dont find the space stage that interesting, seems kind of repetitive and i think that the creations you can make arent all that great.The DRM issue doesnt affect me because theres only a few games i hang onto and play long after release and there always installed, but i can see why people have issues with it.

Im getting into the site again.I just all and out stopped looking at teh site for a few weeks even while i wasnt working so hard because i thought that now the new car smell has gone, theres not that much there.But i think things are stepping up and will obviousley step up quickly so no worries anymore.

Now to look at all those blogs i missed.

This post relates to: Burnout Revenge, Burnout Paradise

At this moment in time im so frustrated with burnout paradise.Ok lets put this into context:
-Burnout is by far my favourite driving series ever since 2 and ive played every game.
-I have ps2 memory cards with burnout 2,burnout 3 and burnout revenge saves at 100%
-I got the highest score in OPM's burnout revenge challenge on the biggest clusterfuck of a track, chinatown winning a 12 month subscription to the magazine and a burnout branded memorycard.
Burnout is something ive been completely enamered in, i was a savant at it and became a complete nazi towards other arcade racers.In every burnout game theres a tipping point where it suddenly all comes to you and youre not crashing into pillars or crashing 3 times over in a matter of seconds and you can pretty much win most races thrown at you.

But in paradise the learning curve and tipping point is so much higher that any burnout, even the first, because of the lack of a restart.People who have defended the game and given it positive feedback defend the lack of a restart but that does nothing but make the game so much higher for anyone entering the game.You can no longer perfect a route and get into a groove because everything becomes alien to you and you dont know that theres a 180 degree turn coming up in a matter of seconds, you crash and the race is pretty much over because the crash reset is heading in the wrong direction.You do not feel like your progressing as a driver which is what skate did so well and what i think criterion were also heading for.Ok for soem conjecture ive only had teh game for a few days and im close to getting my paradise license but its just been a complete grind with events and i still dont feel like ive cracked this game and i have a real good chance at winning.

Thats not necessarily a bad thing because of the ai being so aggresive, in fact in marked man you are so likely to get taken down and its just making it there alive and i dont think that a mode like that is ever going to be easy or make you a better driver because you can just tell that the aggresiveness of the ai is ramping up, to the point where there keeping up with you at full boost and boxing you in.

Apart from the lack of restarts another problem i have with the game is how they change youre trajectory whe you take down a car.In revenge you couldnt hang back and tag youre opponents into a wall and come out of it without doing any work to avoid traffic whilst drifting but in paradise multiplayer this is rampant with people exploiting it.Ok heres an example, i was racing online in a mid level car in terms of speed and my opponents were all in F1 cars, super cars and some crazy unlockable hotrod.I head off and immediatly get left behind at the turbines  by all of them so i take the railroad shortcut ending up in 3rd all the way upto the sharp turn before the naval yard oblivious to the fact im being stalked by 3 other cars, i take a sharp turn and i immeditaly get side slammed by the cars and they speed ahead putting no effort into making that turn but taking me down and just being directed over the finishing line.It was controller throwing frustration that i was sorta "ganked" to use an MMO term by my rivals.It should be when you take someone down you continue in youre direction so if youre both heading into a brick wall and i grind you out just before we hit and i then get respawned onto the otherside of the road in a safe place when i would have otherwise wrecked.Its one of those things which beats on the frantic twitchy nature of the game.

I am waiting for that spark where i just completly gush over the game and it takes over my life for a few months and the addition of competant online might ruin my life but its worrying me that the burnout magic hasnt worked on me.So far its just an impenetrable brick wall,I do commend criterion for supporting the game with free content setting an industry standard but im so fucking frustrated at the game.

Oh and hopefully my next blog will be a love letter to the game

So yesterday i bought Burnout Paradise, sort of an impulse purchase seeing it there pretty cheap and i wanted to play the game again but this time at my own pace.I cant help But feel that the game is a lot harder and a lot more frantic than previous games, mainly because you cannot cause chaos with the driver AI and get a good lead in front before just gettinginto a mid paced groove and winning the race.The introduction of ordinance points and using  those to dictate the direction but not the route of the race is perfect for burnout where you could be only a intersection away from winning and you crash because you took a look at the minimap.

It must have taken me at least 30 minutes to win even 1 race usually losing by a car which can be so frustrating.So after an hour and a half with the game im finally getting into it, it takes a while to get aclimatised with the rush of speed that is burnout with your eyes just not keeping up initially.The eyes get to keep up though with some of the most beutiful graphics in an arcade racer, i cant help feel that  everything but the cars have a soft focus on it for that aura of paradise and that the cars are so sharp and in focus which helps a lot dodging traffic.

Im very pleased and its the best driving game, the best reinvention of the driving genre and the best online system that ive seen in a long time.Seriousley that driving system needs to be ripped by everyone because its fantastic.

An arms race on par with World war 2 has struck gaming in teh past month with now even Konami throwing it down, plastic instruments.
At the forefront of this is drums:

Now this all came from arcades but what really kicked this off was Guitar hero, that started a chian of events of a brand new guitar and then Harmonix falling out with Red Octane and creating Rockband.Then we end up with a guitar band game and now Konami feeling disgust taht they didnt bring drum mania over sooner.Its getting to saturation point in my oppinion, 3 differant band games, all with seperate peripherals independant of each others for now, we suddenly have an arms race on our hands.

This E3 we got announcements from EA that you can acquire access to create youre own Rock Band peripherals and showcased guitars made from real parts costing $120 and the guitar case shaped like a coffin and with "tasteful" zebra printfurnishing.Or the madcats smoke machine that interacts with the game.

Where going to reach a point where this whole market implodes on itself because people arent going to want to spend so much on plastic instruments which are being iterated on constantly and especially when we have a volatile world enconomy.

This is why i think wii music has the chance to change this whole scene and make the publishers think twice about releasing a coffin shaped guitar case...Just using what is stanadard with the console and what is readily available like Wii music is doingsuddenly makes rythm games more mainstream even if it doesnt sound so great.You could go further and use the camera which all the consoles now have for some kind of air guitar game, imagine just bing able to air guitar and music suddenly become created, it could become a sensation and not break the bank .

Personally i have only invested in Guitar Hero, i intended to with Rock Band but now seeing the new offerings from guitar hero and rock band im going to hold back.Also ive got to eat and the price of food is soaring, i dont wnat to resort to that staple of baked beans.

So its that time of the year Summer!
Personally i hate summer, if only for its inconveniances.im going to make a good british list:

1)No amount of suncream prevents sunburn, the brits have somekind of adverse reaction to the sun that it cannot be stopped by conventional methods...
2)When you go from 20 degree's of weather to 70/80 in a day it really opens up your sweat glands, nothing worse than suddenly pouring with sweat because you walked down the garden
3)Its an absolute nightmare to get to sleep.Seriousley this is the reason i am typing this because ive gone 48 hours with 3 hours sleep, and because its even warmer today round my neck of the woods it doenst look like ill get any more sleep either.
4)I suffer from hayfever and this is when the pollen count go's absoluteley crazy and i need to take 4 tablet's to prevent my immune system shorting out, deteriorating and getting flu.
5)This is when the younger kids are off school.I love colege purely because i can relax and make some time without little jimmy riding around and being a nusiance.
6)Media Entertainment just gives up the ghost, ok i like Monty python reruns as much as anyone else but i would like to see something new and interestingwhile i have a designated holiday.

I hate summer, this is why when i went o my european excursion earlier this year i made a point to go in the winter season when it was a refreshing breeze, the joy's of crisp snow and cool air.Oh just thinking about the autumn and winter season puts a smile on my face.Those days where your inside and you really appreciate the solitude that the 4 walls of your house give and you can sleep for hours on end in youre warm and toasty bed, something not to my fancy in the summer.

So now its another night without sleep, i think im going to play some psychonauts again, its on 1up FM's backlog segment and i's always nice to have a referance to draw from, its also one of my favourite ever games,

Kris