Monday

This post comes 1 year and 1 week after my last post, which by all accounts is pretty shocking. I'm hoping to start using this blog more and more though, especially while I'm off from University over Christmas.

Well yesterday there were two big pieces of news. Firstly, Rage Against The Machine beat X-Factor winner Joe McElderry to the UK Christmas Number 1 spot. This was fantastic news as it's the first time in 5 years that Darth Simon Cowell has been beaten to the coveted spot of Christmas Number 1. It all came about because of a Facebook group too, which shows how powerful social networking can be.

The other piece of big news was the sudden death of American actress Brittany Murphy. Naturally the news was mostly spread via Facebook status posts. And naturally it was hard to believe at first, 32 is such a young age to die from a heart-attack. Unless it was drug-induced, but we'll have to wait for the autopsy before we find out.

At the moment I hardly have any money, so I haven't bought a brand-new video game in some time. Because of this I'm trying not to read too much into video games, but I can't help feeling the buzz around Final Fantasy XIII. It's sold 1,516,532 copies in Japan in its first week of release. I really can't wait for it to hit these shores next year. And to pass the time I hear Final Fantasy VIII is being added to the PSN next week, a truly over-looked member of the Final Fantasy Series indeed.

I had the pleasure of seeing James Cameron's Avatar in 3D this week. I thoroughly enjoyed it and strongly urge anyone to view it, especially in 3D. The last time I saw a film in 3D it was some silly children's thing during a College trip to London. I was blown away by Avatar though, far more than I thought I would be actually. It was literally like looking out of a window at the beautiful planet of Pandora.

Accompanying the film was a 3D trailer for Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland. When I saw the first trailer I was pretty disappointed; it just didn't look like the film I thought it was going to be. But after seeing the new trailer, and in 3D, I'm much more looking forward to it. Originally I was disappointed with the over-use of Special effects, distorting the appearances of some of today's most prominent actors. But after seeing a little more of Burton's world and hearing a little more about the storyline I'm back on the Alice in Wonderland bandwagon.

Carpe Diem

This entry was originally going to wait until tomorrow morning. Today being Sunday night, even though now it's no fewer than 25 minutes past midnight so should technically be referred to as "Monday". But fuck that shit, it's Sunday!


Okay back to business. Spam. We're all aware of it. We all receive it from time to time. We all scream its name in a high pitched voice to replicate that infamous Monty Python sketch. And I'm pretty sure we all fucking hate it.

Over the last 24 hours I have received the same stupid chain letter in my inbox from roughly 4 different people. The thing is some chain letters are so obviously stupid that people just forward them along. But it's ones like the one I got today (4 times) that really piss me off.

I'm sure you're all aware of it. It reads:

"Hi,
This is Tara and John, the directors of MSN,

Sorry for the interruption but MSN is closing down. This is because too many inconsiderate people are taking up all the name (e.g. Making up lots of different accounts for just one person, etc.), we only have 578 names left. If you would like to close your account, DO NOT SEND THIS MESSAGE ON. If you would like to keep your
Account, then SEND THIS MESSAGE TO EVERYONE ON YOUR CONTACT LIST. This is no
joke, we will be shutting down the servers.
Send it on, thanks.

P.S.
WHO EVER DOES NOT SEND THIS MESSAGE, YOUR ACCOUNT WILL BE CLOSED AND IT WILL COST YOU 10.00 A MONTH TO USE. SEND THIS TO EVERYONE ON YOUR CONTACT LIST. NOW YOU
KNOW WHAT TO DO. PLEASE DO NOT FORWARD THIS or REPLAY. COPY THE WHOLE EMAIL.
GO BACK TO YOUR INBOX AND CLICK ON NEW. AND PASTE
THANK YOU FOR YOUR
ATTENTION."

What really annoys me about this email is that the reason I have received it is because some people actually seem to believe it, or at least half-believe, enough to forward it on anyway. There are a number of things wrong with this email:

1) If MSN really was going to close down I am pretty sure that Microsoft, one of the richest corporations in the known universe would have the resources to personally let all of their users know. Why send an email out to a few select people and get them to circulate it amongst themselves. It's madness!
2) If Microsoft really were to personally email you they would not start the email with "Hi".
3) If "Tara" and "John" really are the top brass at MSN and were gracious enough to email us they would not refer to themselves as merely "Tara and John"
4) If one of the richest corporations in the known universe can't cope with duplicate accounts and lacking number of domain names then who the fuck can?!

I'll leave it there because the list could go on forever. But I'm sure you get the point.


The only other thing I want to mention is the fact that Lily Allen has apparently covered Britney Spear's new single "Womanizer".

Jesus Christ, if it's anything like Lily's last cover (Oh My God, of Kaiser Chiefs fame) then we'll be smashing our heads against our ipods as her dreary, tone-deaf screeches emit from our headphones.

The weekly BRITNEY SPEARS round-up of CREDIT CRUNCH gaming OASIS news.

So the last time I did a round-up I mentioned LittleBigPlanet and Dead Space. Both are games that I've been following for quite some time and both are games I had hoped (with all my heard) would deliver. And it seems like i was right.

IGN posted a nice 6 page review of LittleBigPlanet and also in the form of a video review. They award it a 9.5, which is a very, very good score indeed! And judging on other reviews (OPM have given the game 10 out of 10) the LBP sounds like the exclusive PS3 owners have been waiting for!

I seriously can't wait to get my hands on this game now, and the release date is only a couple of weeks away!!

The other game i mentioned was Sci-Fi Survival Horror game Dead Space. This game also gets a good write-up, with IGN's review here. And the video review here. I admit I didn't have as much faith with this one, I could just see it becoming another Haze. But I am happy admit I was wrong. I really hope they put a demo up on the PSN, just because I want to play it so badly. I haven't played a sci-fi game in a long time and am glad that someone has tried a new twist on the genre. The twist being the awesome decapitations you can do to kill or be killed! It looks bloody as hell, which (being a Tarantino fan) is always a good thing for me!)

I am also impressed with the new soundtrack for Motorstorm Pacific Drift:

Alex Metric – In Your Machine
Amon Tobin – Trickstep (Pacific Rift Remix) Exclusive!
Animal Alpha – Fire Fire Fire
Aphex Twin - Come To Daddy (Pappy Mix)
Black Daniel – Gimme What You Got (Alex Metric Remix)
Black Sun Empire & State Of Mind – Red Velvet VIP
Black Tide – Show Me The Way
Bodysnatchers – Twist Up
Boys Noize – Lava Lava
Queens Of The Stone Age - Sick Sick Sick
Bullets and Octane – I Ain’t Your Savior
Cut In The Hill Gang – Soul To Waste (MotorStorm Edit) Exclusive!
Hervé – Zombie Dance (MotorStorm Edit) Exclusive!
The Exploders - Wolf Cub (Pacific Rift Edit) Exclusive!
Ministry - Jesus Built My Hotrod
Nirvana – Swap Meet (Diplo MotorStorm remix) Exclusive!
Pendulum - Tarantula (ft Fresh, $pyda & Tenor Fly)
The Qemists – Stompbox
The Qemists - Speed Freak (MotorStorm Remix) Exclusive!
Saving Abel – New Tattoo
Slipknot – Sulfur
Simian Mobile Disco – Parachute
Supa Bajo - Lalula (instrumental)
Ulterior - Weapons
Noisia - Groundhog (MotorStorm re-edit) Exclusive!
Clutch – Pure Rock Fury
David Bowie – Queen Bitch
Death From Above 1979 – Blood On Our Hands (Justice Remix)
Death From Above 1979 – Romantic Rights (Erol Alkins Re-Edit)
DJ Fresh – Chainsaw
Fatboy Slim - Everybody Needs A 303 (Plump DJs remix)
Goose – Black Glove (Bloody Beetroots Remix)
Hadouken! - Liquid Lives (Noisa instrumental mix)
The Hives - No Pun Intended
In Flames - Move Through Me
Leftfield - Phat Planet
Machine Head – Davidian
March – Influence Exclusive!
Megadeth - Sleepwalker
Nick Thayer - Mind Control
Parker - Western Soul featuring Rasco (Aphrodite Remix – MotorStorm Dub)
The Planets – Slasher Exclusive!
Primal Scream - Necro Hex Blues
Saviours – Caverns Of Mind
South Central – Golden Dawn
The Whip – Trash

I really loved the music on the last game, thought that the inclusion of 'Woman' by Wolfmother was a stroke of genius!

Currently though my PS3 is out of action. My hard drive has gone and my new one still hasn't arrived yet. I'm hoping I can find a way to save my precious GTAIV and MGS4 game data though, spent the last 6 months of my life on those darn games!!

Epic FAIL? Erm, actually no.

Since starting my Journalism degree at UCLan I have started to analyse and correct any spelling or grammatical errors I happen to come across. This could be in a newspaper, on an advertising board or even in some writing a friend may have done 6 years ago at High School. It's not always good being this picky for punctuation, my friends tell me to "Piss off" when I point out their missing commas. But I just think at least it will help me in the long run on the road to becoming a Journalist.

Now I also spend a lot of time on Internet forums. Usually for gaming purposes or for simply looking up/talking about the latest news articles. One of my usual haunts first thing in a morning is the website Digg. I like it because it's like a community spreading news from all over the world. Well it's meant to be, mostly it's just people pointing out the mistakes of others. Followed by heated comments below which usually end up in someone having to take a time-out.

A news item caught my eye, not because of the story or picture, but because the headline contained the words: 'Ironic FAIL'.

Here is the Digg story entitled: 'Ironic Fail [pic]'

This isn't going to be a post about the misuse of the word irony, no, that's for another blog. Instead this post is more to do with the FAIL.

FAIL is the new Internet buzzword which joins words like pwned which are thrown around the Internet for more than they should.

There are even sites entirely devoted to this kind of thing: Here

I'm not against the use of this word, but I am in this case because the article it describes is not a FAIL at all. The article in question is a picture of a newspaper clipping which shows the headline: 'Missippi's literacy program shows improvement'. With the word 'Missippi's' marked in yellow marker, as a spelling mistake. The comments for this story are flooded with people laughing at the irony of an article about an improvement in literacy including a spelling error.

But is it actually an error? No, it's not. Missippi is actually Southern slang for Mississippi, and so gives the writer a much shorter word to fit into their headline than having to write out 'Mississippi'. Yes nobody seems to care, they're all caught up in the joke to notice they don't really have anything to joke about.

*Update*
I posted a comment on the aforementioned article basically saying what I just said (but in the space of one line) and also noticed that 1 or 2 other people have also pointed out that this isn't a misspelling. I just re-checked the comments and all of our comments have been Dugg-down, which just goes to show how idiotic some people are. They'd rather discard the truth so they can carry on having a laugh.

"Is thumbelina size 10, On a Wednesday"

It's Wednesday, so for people seriously interested in video games that means only one thing. Yes folks, Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw has a new video review. This week his chosen game to demean, humiliate and destroy is... Mercenaries 2: World in Flames.

You can watch the review here: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/231-Mercenaries-2

Now for those of you who don't know who Yahtzee is, he's a Brit currently living in Australia who works for a website called The Escapist. He's notorious for hating virtually every game he reviews, and is extremely apt at picking at every minuscule flaw. Oh and he's fucking hilarious!

To say he rips most games to pieces, I usually do tend to agree with most of his criticisms. Yes, the face that you can loose the cops on GTA IV by simply driving in a straight line is silly. Yes, 90% of the Oblivion world is boring and the AI of most of its inhabitants is insane. And yes, Fantasy Land Dizzy is the best game ever!!

There has been, however, one instance where I didn't agree with Yahtzee. That was regarding his review of Metal Gear Solid 4. I game which, in my opinion, is one of the top 5 games EVER.

Yahtzee tends to pick on games from 2 categories of games:

1) The really high profile games. Games like GTA IV, MGS 4, Halo 3 and Super Smash Bro's

and

2) Games that really, really, really suck. Games like Too Human, Haze, The Witcher and.. Mercenaries 2.

If the particular game is from the second pile then you know you're in for a treat. If you thought it was bad, just wait until Yahtzee has ripped it up, spat on it, wiped his ass on it and used it to clobber paedophiles over the head.

Anyway you really should check him out! While your at it watch the rest of his reviews so you're up to speed for next week.


Now on to a quick look back at what's happened in the gaming industry in the last week.

The release date for LittleBigPlanet has changed a few times. At the moment, Media Molecule are set on a 24th October release. Which gives us all just over 3 weeks to get our filthy little paws on it. And I for one cannot wait!! This game really is going to be a benchmark in video game production and user content capabilities. Do yourself a favour and pre-order your copy now from Play.com.

Meanwhile Fallout 3 and WWE Smackdown vs Raw 2009 are building up to be really great games. The former being an FPS/RPG set in apocalyptic Washington DC and the later being the latest installment of Yukes' ever popular wrestling franchise.

Also, Dead Space is still looking great too. For thos of you who are out of the loop, Dead Space is a third-person action game which puts you at the controls of engineer, Isaac Clarke as he battles a polymorphic alien species called the 'Necromorphs' on board an interstellar mining ship. The fact that this guy is basically a miner.. in space.. makes me immediately think of Red Dwarf. And then you read the word 'polymorphic' and again are reminded of that episode- Polymorphs, in Series III of the sci-fi sitcom. There's nothing like a bit of nostalgia to intensify the hype around a video game!!

I really do hope it turns out to be a solid title, though with it being made by EA I'm not entirely confident. Still, it looks beautiful (in a blood and gore, alien spaceship kinda way) and the next-gen consoles are in dire need of a decent space-horror game. It reminds me a lot of the first Alien film, which is always a good thing! I personally can't wait to get my hands on it and scare myself shitless!

Over and out.

"What makes a man a man? Am I a man? Yes, technically, I am"

For some reason, when I think about myself, I think of myself as a boy. Even though I am 19 years old. I certainly don't think of myself as a man anyways! Which is strange, because I obviously am, well, at least in the UK I am. You reach manhood at 18 here, so really I have been a man for well over a year now! But I still don't see it..

In countries like the US, I use this as an example because we all look to the US to lead by example, even though they are pretty fucked at the moment. Fucked, meaning that their economy is in decay, and their choice of leader is generally idiotic. Well in America you are legally a man when you turn 21. Which is a good number of years later than us Brits! Why the reason for such a difference? We only live across the pond from each other but somehow, legally, us Brits walk around being all manly a good 3 years before our American counterparts.

So I got to thinking, if I'm 19 and still think I'm a boy, when will I actually agree with my body and refer to myself as a man? It's likely to happen when writing an 'About Me' section on some random social networking site I think. Like when people put: "I'm an out-going man from Leeds, with an interest in pencils and mellow lights." Obviously something major may have to happen for me to change my opinion of myself. I can't still think of myself as a boy when I'm 25, because it's so obvious that I'm not!

When looking who's to blame for my predicament I looked to literature. Or, never actually having read the book I shall refer to, the movies. One in particular- Peter Pan. Yes, blame Peter Pan and his band of Lost Boys- the bastards! Obviously all this talk of never growing up has been embedded into my mind as a small, and impressionable child. Now I am older, and far less impressionable (well I like to think anyway) so how come it's magic hasn't worn off?

So instead of growing old and accepting manhood I shall reject it. I think you should all too! Even the girls, cast off the shackles of womanhood and live forever as a child! You know you want to. We shall start a revolution!! March on Washington (or whichever your local authority may be) and we can live together in a childish, idocincratic world created by J.M. Barrie.

Over and out.

I'm going to hell.

Ellie Arroway: Why did you do it?
Palmer Joss: Our job was to select someone to speak for everybody. And I just couldn't in good conscience vote for a person who doesn't believe in God. Someone who honestly thinks the other 95% of us suffer from some form of mass delusion.
Ellie Arroway: I told the truth up there. And Drumlin told you exactly what you wanted to hear.

(Contact - 1995)

Religion. It's a controversial topic. But a topic none-the-less. At this point in my life, I would have to agree with Dr. Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster).

I went to a Methodist Primary School, and went to church most Sundays. Not out of faith, but because my parents wanted me to be able to go to the best High School in my area. I got in, it was a Church of England High School. And even though I was always pretty good at RE (Religous Education) I think it was sometime during the first years of High School when I started to question what I'd been told since I was young.

When confronted with all the options, I just have to agree with what science has told us.

Which takes me to a book I read recently. I'm sure you've either read it our atleast heard of it- Dan Brown's 'Angels & Demons'. It's a really good book, and I actually enjoyed it slightly more than I enjoyed The Da Vincie Code. It was strange while reading A&D, at one point I was sat there, I was maybe around haldway through the book, and I thought "Wait a minute, I actually wouldn't mind if the bad guy won, if he managed to blow up The Vatican- I've always had a dislike for Catholasism. It seems like an archaec religion, full of silly traditions and corrupt priests.

While having a dislike for religion, it's funny that the majority of films and books I enjoy have religion as a concurrent under-tone: The Devils Advocate (1997), Dogma (1999), City of Angels (1998),The Da Vinci Code (2003) and His Dark Materials Trilogy (1995-2000). Most of these films and books test the boundaries of religion, they question what we have been told. What we have been forced to beleive.

I don't have anything against people who are religous. Nothing at all. I just think they suffer from some form of mass delusion. I think that people are so terrified of death, that the only way they can live their hum-drum, boring, non-existent lives in piece is by beleiveing in a better place. Somewhere they will go when it's all over. Somewhere they will be free of the shackles of pain and be happy.

In the words of Lieutenant Colonel Frank Slade (Al Pacino) in Scent of a woman (1995): "Charlie, it's all shit."

Over and out.