BBC News – A distant Earth-like exoplanet ‘could have life’

BBC News – A distant Earth-like exoplanet ‘could have life’

this is just really cool i find a planet 3 times the size of our own earth with water and all other kinds of stuff i just wish we had the sort of technology to get there and explore who knows what we could find

Castlevania – Lords of Shadows Demo – ps3

it has felt like A while that I have been waiting to hear some real news about this game and get my hands onto it, the demo eventually came out today here are my impressions of it.

The Demo starts off with patrick stewart reading the back story now normally i would just read it and then ignore the rest but due to the simple fact that its patrick stewart reading it out makes me want to stop and listen to every syllable of the back story the game is set in the 11th century, but you do not play as Simon Belmont bit of a down there as he is the main character of most of the decent castlevania’s

the Demo has a very familiar feel to anyone who has played games like god of war, where you go through the stages you try and do combo with your weapons with loads of weird monsters around you, it doesnt strike me as the most revolotionary games out there but the demo when i wask walking around killing some weird werewolves was quite fun then as i was getting deeper into the demo a talking horse came out of nowhere to talk to me, which just took me back thinking what on earths going on…. maybe its me not knowing the plot etc but it just seemed out of context in the demo, also then you have to ride this horse killing some small werewolves riding what looked like big werewolves it seemed ok.

in conclusion i will proberbly pick this game up when it gets a bit cheaper and i have completed the god of war games that i have backlogged to play

Heavy Rain – ps3

I saw this the other day in my latest pre-owned shop for £20, id heard so many good things about this game but had waited till it hit the £20 mark before buying and started playing it on Wednesday, and completed my personal story today.  however there was some big ass download before i was able to play it to allow move support which i guess this game could add a different dimension playing it with playstation move although I doubt I will buy move unless it become dirt cheap

the good thing about Heavy rain is that there are multiple endings for the players so it is the scenario that once you complete the game you do text / facebook/ twitter/ social network / or what other forms of communication you have with your freinds and ask them how they played the game and you laugh as you tell them indiana jones IV helped you when you hid a character in a fridge where as they tell you they did X Y and Z.

The Game is very different in a way to most other games I have ever played it is quite refreshing to have such a different game out there with multiple endings and a system that if a character doesn’t do something in the right way you get the game over screen mearly the storyline changes to fit with your game I do get the impression that this game has its roots firmly in the point and click variety such as monkey island and broken sword but with a 2010 take on a much forgotten genre.

 However I do fear that there is a limited replay value of the game, as having played it once I know who the murderer is and the twists and high and lows I experienced first time simply wont be replicated by replaying it,  but that’s probably down to the great plot that was crafted by the writers

I suppose if I was being critical I would say that some of the handling of the characters are a bit poor and stiff but as the game is more about cut-scenes and clues this does not really matter as much

In conclusion I would say definitely give this game a go perhaps dont pay full price for it but wait till it become a bit cheaper for you ( unless you have money to burn) but once you do get your hands on it dont read spoilers just enjoy it and play it naturally its the sort of game where there is no wrong answers, I wouldn’t say this was my game of the year, most initiative game of the year definitely id give it 8.75/10

I finally get to play super Contra

for ages on the internet I havee been seeing people play contra and super contra and have been looking for my copy over here in europe search Amazon and virtual console to no avail but hell the game looked fun i just figured it was super rare cue my amazement the other day when i was on the virtual console when i saw a game tittled Super Probotector: Alien Rebels and began thinking what on earth is this when i begun checking it on wikipedia i find out it was the european version of contra was called Probotector and the version i was looking for on the snes was called Super probotector: alien rebels. It makes me wonder what was going through the marketing departs min in the ”pal region” when they decided to use this bizarre name all around the world it was called Contra with an add on I just cant understand why anyone would change that name and why they would use the name probotector i could just see the young me struggling to even say that name heaven help me writing it on a list to father Christmas,

anyway i have only played the game breifly and another thing we europeans got screwed over on is there is not cheat code  to help us get more lives this game is already well known for its hard difficulty and you remove the one life line some beginners have heres a video of someone playing it for the first time with the 30 level cheat

http://v.giantrealm.com/saf/272828ab50091da6eb1ae85133def12ae9a44eb4

but its rock hard i admit i have as much chance of completing this as I do waking up in the morning having both my girlfreind and Ezri Dax and Ace from doctor who wanting me with a winning lottery ticket for £1000000000000000000 , but it is fun

the Decline of IM’s

I remember years ago when i was at school all the rage was going on IM’s every group of friends seemed to have the service they preferred some like myself liked msn others yahoo and then there were those people who thought they were smart by using trillian.

Its a shame today when ever I log on to msn there never seems to be any one online where as 5 or so years ago there would always be plenty of people now im amazed if i see 1 or 2 people, it seems sad in away that everyone just goes online to facebook chat these days which I have never really gotten on well with although I use it, I just feel it is very inferior to the alternatives, I guess it was not the fault of the social networks themselves but the companies for the IM who failed to evolve the product beyond the means of mealy talk but the whole social interaction and networking for doing stuff like sharing photos which kind of eventually spelt the downfall of the IM’s.

 I have recently downloaded AIM messenger which allows me to have a messenger client to talk over facebook which i guess in a way is a bit of a win. Maybe im just looking back at the whole era with some sort of rose tinted glasses like the SNES, but hell it was good and I am a bit sad that its gone

Match Of The Day

Stan Collymore criticises match of the day

Earlier on today I found this article and i really think it has a lot of truths and is something that needs to be said about the so called flag ship show of football in Britain, but in its current state the show is not fit for purpose and that’s why I and many other people I know have been leaving the MOTD viewer-ship to watch football highlights else where

First of all I need to say in my opinion the show is to stuff and dry for my liking, for example the pundits you normally have Hansen and Shearer waxing lyrical about matters football, yet how many of them have actually managed a club successfully ? the answer is 0 yes none of them yet week in week out where here were current managers are going wrong. what gives these pundits the knowledge to say how to organise successfully training and drills to make sure that errors are corrected. and as we are on pundits Hansen and Shearer one word that comes to mind when i see these two on tv DULL, they never say anything risky or controversial about how a team plays and just almost seem to tow a line

As well the pundits need to have more knowledge of who they are watching ok they cant be an all seeing and all knowing but there were times on match of the day and during the world cup where you hear people saying ‘ we dont know much about ben afra’ or I didnt know Veron is still playing for Argentina its ridiculous that its such a narrow ill informed view to football and how its played on a global stage is an insult to the viewers

Another thing that is wrong with match of the day at the moment would have to be the running order and how they analyse as a charlton fan we haven’t been on MOTD since we got relegated but i all to well remember the sheer  annoyance of having to trall through the big 4’s 20 mins of highlights to get to see 30 seconds of Charlton footage, then if a team out side of the big 4 beat a big 4 normally one of the first questions asked is ‘ so then what went wrong for Liverpool today then’  which in that one question wipes out and devalues all the good work that the other team has done.

so what needs to happen is a new host of motd id hope james richardson would get a good look in as he always seems to do well dating back to the football italia days on channel 4 then add some people to the panel with a bit of experience and who aren’t afraid to say something else, and chose which games you are going to show not about which team has the most fans but which is the best football match and try to make the highlights seem fair.

Video Game Review – Portotype – PS3

So for 9 hours spread out over a couple of weeks I have been playing prototype and have completed it ( according to the games stats) all though thinking back it has felt much much longer than that.

So what this is a game where you go around a big city in which some zombie virus has been leaked and is turning the populace of this city zombie like, you play a man called Alex i think who has had the virus some how but has not turned him into a zombie but instead gives him super powers to give him hammer fists etc. the story line is pretty generic for many people who have see Zombie films in the past you can kind of guess what to expect.

however this game has been the most frustrating game that I have played this generation, with many a time my self wanting to drive my head into a wall for the sheer randomness of some of the stuff that was happening in the game. There are plenty examples of this sheer mind numbing aggravation that i experienced one of the main things that fucked me off would have to be what happens when you die instead of giving you full health from the last check point the game gives you what seems like 1/3 health, many times i was shouting at the screen i couldn’t do this level with all my health bar what makes this game think i can do it with 1/3 of a bar !!!!!!!. so then you have a choice to try and battle on with 1/3 of a health bar or recharge your health bar by eating civilians however if you try this you run the risk of a soldier seeing you then all hell kicking off as he calls for 15 helicopters to hit you with missiles causing you to lose more health than you started with, and this is and all to common occurrence for my liking. This is not however my only problem with the game many a times i was doing missions in which i was helping the Army  it seemed however one soldier sees me with a car above my head and bang i have helicopters from the same army im helping coming after me….. Also at times it feels that you are punished trying to build a clever strategy and all to often you will succeed more in this game if you just go in all guns blazing. 

The story line is very basic and is not to fleshed out it seems in much details you normally get a 1 min cut scene before every mission to tell you why you are doing something and that’s it, you can consume additional people round the map to flesh it up a bit but it still feels weak for my liking.

one thing I did like about this game however are the boss battles yes they were ridiculously hard and yes they were frustrating and had me shouting at the tv ‘thats not fucking fear you ass clown’  but it was like in the old days of playing video games were the bosses were really hard and you had to keep coming back for more punishment but when you do beat them you get  A huge boost, its so much more refreshing than as it is in some games one crack at the boss you win, one boss in this game took me 40 mins to complete i reckon and if i only played the game for about 9 hours lol. of course i do feel they have increased the difficulty of the bosses to get away sometimes from the bland repetitive nature of the other missions in the game which are often easy  and involve you ether catching someone or destroying someone

In conclusion I could think of worse ways to spend a couple of hours however this game has some huge irritations but it only cost me about £7 I think. the people who made the game said that if it sold well it would be a trilogy well a year has past since its been realised and I have heard nothing about potential sequels so who knows. if you liked spiderman web of shadows then give this a try or vice versa

id give this A 5/10