I’ve discovered that I have a psychosomatic response to what I read before bed. I’ve had fuck all sleep this week, waking up freezing at 4am and shivering in a half sleep state until morning. Admittedly it is still cold, but it’s no worse than the rest of the winter.
Turns out Ranulph Fiennes’ autobiographical tales of Arctic man hauling have had a negative effect on my internal thermostat. I refused to read it last night and slept like a baby. That’s all the proof I need 
I’m delaying reading his book about Captain Scott until it’s full on summer.
And in other, more exciting news:
Steam on OS X? Man, I really hope so. I’d quite happily pay for some games to play at lunchtime. Fingers crossed Valve would clean up…
Nice timing. It’s four five (man, learn to count) years, to the week, since I left Climax
So, BallZup is running in the iPad simulator. No big surprise. Except it’s running as a native app, which is quite nice.
I had to do some quick hackery as, stupidly, I set up the glOrtho for the iPhone version with fixed pixel dimenions, rather than going from 0 to 1.0. Once that was in, and the new .nib created, the app was up and running, albeit a tad slowly. The only real change left to make is to sort out the touch controls, as they’re fixed to pixel positions as well. Doh
Anyway, having played about, for BZ to really be any cop I’d need to produce some higher rez versions of the graphics – they’re looking a bit fuzzy scaled that large… Not a massive job, but work I haven’t got time for atm. Given that I need to get rid of the krufty rendering stuff, which was cobbled together at super short notice from the early SDK examples, and badly at that, I’m wondering if it’s worth it.
What I *really* want to do, is dump all the cruft and take all the good bits and make an RTS for the iPad (and the phone). I have a fairly good idea that’s been bubbling away for ages and I’d love to have a go at some AI.
On the plus side, at least I have enough to just go straight for the iPad and have an iPhone version fall out of that. Something to cogitate on.
Followers of my Twitter will know that I impulse purchased a Sega Saturn the other week. Mainly for shooters and the odd beat-em-up, but for 20 quid, with a bundle of games that I used to drool over, it seemed rude not to. I hate eBay for that.
I’ve also ended up getting a Megadrive with 15 games (15 quid!). And I’m in on a Snes after narrowly missing one for 9 earth pounds. I might get an N64 as well, but we’ll see… It’ll have to have Ocarina of Time with it. And be less than 20 nicker. Erk.
But the Saturn is here, and it’s working. Pap’s sage Sega advice was to stick a mod chip in the Saturn, but Play Asia had a load of fresh Action Replay’s in stock, so I’ve plumped for one of those instead. It’s cheaper, has the 4mb memory expansion in – meaning more beat-em-up graphics – and with eBay prices being what they are it’s not tooooo much of a heart-ache to grab any of the shooters that I really, really fancy, except Radiant Silver Gun. Which may yet force more modage when I give up and download the ISO…
One thing that does need doing though, is the 60hz mod. So with that in mind, I’ve broken the habit of a lifetime and bought myself a soldering iron. This isn’t as cool as my laser sighted Jigsaw, which I’ve still not used btw, but it’s a new tool and that’s always fun.
You might think that with my nerdery degree I’d be well stocked in this area, but sticking things to other things with hot pokey implements has never featured on my skill list. I had a huge Optimus Prime and a fucking amazing Millennium Falcon instead of the My First Electronics Set when I was a kid and they were definitely the right choice…
Thinking about it, I also don’t know how to use an oscilloscope (they’re always on the same workbench as the soldering iron, aren’t they?) despite sticking the little probes on anything that looks shiny, and making sci-fi gurgling sounds… Maybe I should get a Vectrex and pretend.
Anyway, this’ll either mean that my next blog post will be about my shiny new Japanese Saturn – as I’ve burnt a hole through the motherboard of this one – or a load of pictures of the inside of a Saturn.
Place your bets…
Lolling massively to @for_a_dollar.
It’s christmas, which means a few days away from the studio. Normally this would be an opportunity to sit in my pants and play Modern Warfare, but I decided to fly in the face of laziness and Get Random Shit Down.
First up was a trip through the snow to Chav-land for Xmas day booze and a new cat flap, the fitting of which required some powertool purchasing. Cos I’m fucked if I’m screwing anything together by hand…
Amazingly, Wickes had a special offer: two power tools for the price of one. So I ended up with a drill and a jigsaw. For 20 quid! 20 whole earth pounds! I only wanted a drill
The best bit: the jigsaw has a laser sight so you can cut in straight lines. But I’ve not got any wood to cut, so I’ve yet to experience the excitement of that. Owning powertools is probably as excited as I should get atm.
Everything else about the trip wasn’t too hot. Asda, snow and chavs equals fucking mayhem. I picked the wrong day to get any decent booze. And the catflap I bought was big enough for me to crawl through, so I had to make a return journey for something cat sized. Doh.
Anyway, it’s fitted. It’s 100% less drafty in the kitchen (which means warmer) and my mahoosive cat can squeeze through it a little easier. And I have a jigsaw with frickin’ lazor beams. Win.
Today though, I’ve mostly been spoding:
I tried to resurrect my original A500 (I know, I know) after discovering that the keyboard on it was knackered and the disc drive seemed a bit flakey. I only want it to test code on it, but it’s my A500 that I’ve had for years so saving it seemed like a good idea.
To save you reading and to max out the spod quotient, I even took pictures
So, here it is...
And here's the box of spare parts...
The keyboard was full of shit. A lot of which were smaller versions of this
But I got the drive fitted...
and replaced the keyboard so everything was working...
And after all that, it’s *almost* fine. The PSU doesn’t seem pokey enough for it, which is a problem I’ve always had with this Amiga, and it’s still getting read errors. So I need to google up and see what might be causing the disc woes… (the power issues I know all about – Commodore’s PSUs were piss weak and my A500 has never run on one of them).
The next level of spod was setting up my A1200. I’ve got a compact flash card and PCMCIA adaptor/USB reader, so I can mount and copy stuff from WinUAE over to my A1200. But I forgot that I trashed my A1200 while trying to install OS3.9 on it years ago (the CD-ROM died halfway through the install. Long story.)
But the CF turned out to be a life saver. I’ve just bodged together a nice new WB install by nicking everything from my WinUAE HDFs, repartitioned the old SCSI drive and scoured the net for all the old tools I used to use. My A1200 is all minted with Stuff , booting, and compiling code again.
I’ve not tried Japseye out on it yet – I’ll probably pull it down from SVN tonight and see what state it’s in. But at least I know what I’m doing works on real hardware.
If I wanted to keep any semblance of Cool then I probably should have sat in my pants and played CoD. Or stopped myself from posting this…
I’ve been back up in Scotland a year. We bundled up on the 7th, last year, sleeping on the floor as we waited for the removals men to painfully cart our shit up.
Suffice to say, a helluva lot has happened in the last year. I’ve got skinnier, the cat’s got fatter, life’s been good and bad but Ruffian’s been great. And since that was the point of the move I’ve no complaints with being back.
Wonder what I’ll be up to this time next year…
DJs probably represent the snobbyist bunch of fucks you’ll ever meet. I think I can say that with some qualification.
You have to use the right needles, in the right shell, on the right decks, spinning the right format (vinyl, obviously) or you just ain’t keeping it real. CDs may be barely acceptable to most, but if you even look at a laptop you’re going to spend the rest of your life pretending that you’re as busy as you used to be, before you turned heretic and gave up the beatmatching.
So I’m not sure if DJ Hero was ever really targeting anyone with a pair of technics, despite all the old school cred of Jazzy Jeff and DJ Shadow. And I’ll admit, when I saw the controller I really thought “Oh No. That’s cock.” But, as was pointed out on the ALDJ forum, if someone hacked it into a midi controller for Ableton Live, it’d probably jump up a couple of notches and sell by the bucket load.
Anyway, I was going to skip the game and be a complete snob about it. But I started hearing good things. And Tesco were selling it pretty cheap, so I bought it. And my god, I’ve really started to love it.
Yes, some of the music is shit. And for the first hour I really didn’t gel with it – it was a bit too easy and a little bit boring – but when I went back to it and started playing with the difficulty cranked up, I had a bit of a revelation with it. It’s actually really, really good.
Free-styling with the Flavor Flav samples (or old skool Rave, I can never decide), nailing the scratch directions, while cutting the cross fader like a loon all starts feeling pretty damn good, pretty damn quickly. And on the cross fading action alone, it’s pretty much like the real thing.
So, I’m back at the beginning, starting to go through on expert. I’m about 10 tunes in atm, and it’s making me sweat, but I can’t help but smile when I nail a really long scratch, then rewind the fucker for a second helping. Christ knows if I’ll ever get through the high intensity tracks on expert – Atomic already slaps me about – but it’s a good laff with the stereo cranked up. And dare I say, it probably deserves to do a whole lot better than it is atm.
I’m still not sure if owners of 10 year old Technics will ever really admit to liking it. Or even have a pop on it. It’d just turn into an argument about the lack of beatmatching…
Anyway, I’ve got that off my chest. Time to talk about Modern Warfare 2.
This contains mild spoilers, so don’t read if you’re still crawling through it.
I might as well be honest here and just get this out in the open. The first 2.5 hours are, well, a bit shit.
As Jim said on IRC, it’s like they let Treyarch make the first couple of hours. Or the juniors. Or, they cut a couple of chapters out. Cos frankly, it doesn’t make much sense, it’s piss poorly balanced and all a little bit confusing. I very nearly put the game down when it hit South America, I hated those shanty levels with such intensity that I’m angry just thinking about them now. People shouting, getting shot in the back of the fucking head for fucking hours. Trying to work out where the fuck to go. Gngngngng.
And I’ll skip over burger town.
But from the Gulag onward, IW find their feet again. It’s like none of the other levels happened. There’s variety, some cracking voice acting, some lovely set pieces and the return of everyone’s fav. character from CoD4. I started to give a fuck and really wanted to see what was up ahead. Suddenly the Ranger levels started to tie up, the game started to make sense and I was progressing and enjoying myself.
And then they get out of first gear.
The kick in the nuts from Shepard is breath taking. I didn’t expect it, I was genuinely a little shocked and I wasn’t going to bed until I’d got some payback for Ghost. It was relentless and I’ve never wanted to kill someone in a game so badly. It made me feel genuinely angry.
That’s a pretty good achievement for a game, chaps at Infinity Ward. Cos I don’t normally get sucked into them like that. Except maybe Zelda
So I pushed on and the end was a pay off in a very big way. It teased the expectations of the people that had completed CoD4. It made me shout at the screen when Pricey didn’t kick arse. It made me hammer the X button like a maniac. And I got the cunt, right in the eye. No skill involved, no hesitation – like in CoD4 – just an immediate shot as soon as I could. Man, was I satisfied.
And then I was treated to a lovely, probably quite expensive, credits section. That I watched all of
So, I thought about those last two hours for a couple of days afterward. And I love the game as much, if not more, than CoD4.
What’s got me thinking the most though, is how they’ve split the game and how it’ll play out differently in the ‘States vs here in the UK. Our American chums get to save their country from the Ruskies, seeing lots of familiar sites, but in a brutal and fairly hardcore depiction of war. It’s depressing – and meant to be – so I’m fairly sure every Hooah will take a different meaning across the pond. The game will be remembered for that monumental section in Washington. The rangers are out numbered, out gunned but plug on regardless. It’s over quickly, but the detail lavished on the whole section is impressive, to say the least.
But for me, the SAS still manage to resonate the most strongly. The Brits do something crazy to try and stop the invasion, get utterly fucking shafted, then go on a vengence mission just to take down the real bad guy in the game. That happens to be American?! It’s a great play on what are probably just cultural biases, but I reckon IW shoot for it and in the end they managed to play me like a fiddle. I can’t wait to see what happens if those two end up rogue!
So yeah, it is easily a 9 out of 10. Despite the first couple of hours and without me having to even mention anything about the PVP… Push through those first few levels and there’s a rewarding, clever, varied and exciting FPS that takes the peaks from CoD4 and pushes them just the little bit further. It’s high budget, high detail, serious stuff that’d be hard for anyone to match anytime soon.
Infinity Ward had me worried for a bit though.
Funny fuckers. Stick with it, the Techno Viking reference made me do a snotlol.
Even after the big re-rip of my CD collection, I’ve got about 2000 tracks that have duff ID3 tags, for one reason or another, so I had a quick look about for something to tidy them up with. I stumbled upon this handy little apptoid: Tune Up and it’s worth the dollars.
I’ve chucked about 1k tracks through it in the last hour and it’s done an amazingly good job. Apparently it “listens” to the tracks as well, so it’s fairly accurate, and for run of the mill singles it’s done a pretty bang up job.
It makes a complete balls up of mixes and I don’t dare let it anywhere near the tunes that I DJ with, but for tidying up those loose ends you have in your collection, I can pretty much give it two thumbs up.
It takes a couple of seconds per track for the analysis and a few more to save (which I’m doing now), but it’s done a sterling job so far. Even going so far as to update iTunes with the new info as well.
I might give it a few of the tracks I’ve bought off Beatport for a chuckle, but I’m guessing it won’t have a fucking clue about them. I could do with Beatport having a track cover service that wasn’t tied to Traktor.
Jima and Steve are in Tokyo talking to the world about our progress in the Ruffibunker. Mum and Mark are in the states blagging free copies of Game Informer. And we’ve just delivered a milestone and a build for TGS in the space of a week.
Knackering, but fun.
Especially when you cruise around some of the reactions on the web… Top quote from the Gaf today:
Dude, they fucking delivered. HARD.
They just laid that cock out there on the table and the table broke.They made a slingshot out of a truck.
A GIANT SLINGSHOT OUT OF A TRUCK!Who comes up with this stuff?
IGN also have a nice article about what they’ve seen on their website.
I’ve not seen many vids yet, but there’re a couple of the good ones below.
I’m officially chilling out this weekend
John found this on the Gaf
