gaming

• Wanking over the iPhone
• Spending all week fixing a software fault and then being told by someone who installed the software "oh!  I thought you knew about changing that obscure registry setting to make it work!!"
• Not sleeping much due to ill children

Apart from these things that also happened this week, I have also got my hands on a Nintendo DS Pass Card and a 1gb microSD memory card to go with it!

What?  What's one of them I hear you cry?

Imagine that most games you buy for a Nintendo DS are really about 64mb in size.  Drop images or "ROMS" of those games onto a memory card and use the adaptor to put it into your Nintendo DS and then boot from the "Pass Card" to allow access to the ROMS on the card in a nice presentable list.

Basically the same as the one I bought for my GBA a while back but an updated version for the Nintendo DS Lite.  And this one has rumble capability too!

It's nice to know that any game is within my grasp and I have been playing the following:

Animal Crossing Wild World
Its like a little cutesy version of second life and I have been trying to insert as may swearwords as possible and make star constellations that are shaped like phalic symbols.  I am still trying to pay off my mortgage by selling fish I have caught to the local pimp, Tom Nook and waiting for the Mysterious Cat to arrive!

Under The Knife
The is actually quite a brilliant game!  You play the role of a junior surgeon and have to perform operations on people!  Last night I was extracting a tumor from someones stomach and then removing polyps from a singers vocal chords with a laser!  Very clever and very good fun.  Can't wait to get to the level where I get to have sex with sedated patients!  I wonder if they will be male or female?

Electroplankton
A clever little "mini-game" where you can play god with these little creatures that make noises and you perform different things to make them move etc.  Hard to describe really, but it would be great after a few spliffs!

Mariokart
I was losing playing this online last night for the first time and it is really cool.  Still a classic type of game, what ever console it is on!

Catz
I have a real cat that lives in the garden and comes for food and then fecks off again - so at least this little chappy i named "Bonzo" actually allows me to beat the crap out of it without getting too annoyed!  This type of game is often refered to as promoting caring and empathy in children.  I think it would be better utilised as anger management!

What?  That Xbox360 I got ?  Thats just sitting in the corner doing nothing.  Well… not nothing!  Its got my little toolkit balanced on top of it!  Tsk!  Silly! 

If I was to re-marry, this is the kind of girl I will be looking for!

Check out the last pic in particular!

Honey… where did you put my games and my camera?

NSFW by the way!

I have been playing multiplayer Gears Of War over the weekend and it’s amazing! Certainly better than Halo2 multiplayer (IMO). Check out the video above!

The only problem is that I am really crap at it and get killed all the time.

Last night I was playing on a team against a 4 guys who all worked in a video store by the sounds of it. They were all pretty good at the game too!

In the game, when you shoot someone, you can “down” them where they are crouched on their knees, bleeding, until a team mate comes and gives them help and they can play again.

I was hiding behind a tombstone on a map when one of the enemy sneaked up behind me and show me enough to put me down but not kill me. Then, as I was stuck, bleeding and pleasing for assistance from my (silent) team mates, all 4 of the enemy team surrounded me in a circle, revving their chainsaws maniacly before all slicing me into a bloody gush which splattered my screen .

That was real online intimidation!

Bullies!

Gonna get you after school…..

Geezus!

This thing is bright! Like a fallen star embedded in my forehead, slowly cooking my retinas and microwaving my brain!

It’s a Samsung LE23R71WX LCD TV .  23 inches of 3000:1 contrast ratio lovliness, with an enhanced “game mode” with an 8ms response rate.  Blah blah blah….

I decided to go all hi-def with my XBox 360 and purchased this TV from Costco at a very reasonable price. I have my 360 hooked up to the composite connection, running at 1080i resolution and my PC plugged into the VGA connector running at 1024×768.

The 360 has been given a new lease of life and the PC looks amazing, bright, clear and detailed. When if I get my Mac Mini, there is a HDMI port on the back too, so I can hook that up.

I stopped at buying a wireless adapter for the 360 (£60!!!) and hooked it up via Internet Connection Sharing on my XP Media Centre PC which is right next door. 

Now… where’s me shades gone?

Make me a console that costs £1000 and I will scoff at it.

Make me a 3rd generation console that costs £1000 and features online play, gold plated connectors, built in teas-made and blow job machine and I will still scoff and scorn.

Make me a console that does all the above and then bring out a new Tony Hawk skateboarding game for it…

SOLD!

I have been playing the demo of Tony Hawks Project 8 since it came out on my XBOX360 and its freakin good!  Every spare 20 minutes I have has been given to this game.

Well worth getting my 360 firmware cracked for! 

The BBC News Technology team recently took off for the day to explore the new free wifi connection in Norwich.  Since I have moved jobs and my internet connection appears to be monitored more heavily, it started me thinking about what a local city wide free wifi connection would do for me.  Lunchtime would be the best opportunity to use it.

Armed with my trusty Macbook - here’s my list of top 5 possible uses.

Skype
I could call people cheaply, for free or just for the hell of it.  Many smaller devies are starting to use Wifi too - so I could realisticly chat to friends at lunchtime for free.  Chatting to the wife at lunchtime via the webcam could start a whole new aspect of our (sex) life.

Surfing
Well, this one is obvious really.  A monitored (and blocked) internet connection can be quite restricting.  "Business Use Only" can be a term applied to quite a few websites, but the ones I mainly frequent such as my Gmail, Bloglines, Digg and Del.icio.us accounts cannot always be brought under that term.  A bit of lunchtime pr0n could be fun, as could MSN messenger, B3ta and most of the other sites that I get blocked from!  I hope the next place I work is a little less tense about it all.

Torrents
So, you are at work, your laptop is in your car, downloading torrents all the time!  I’m sure there’s a dirty way to hook a laptop up to a spare car battery and leave it running in the boot.  Come out at lunchtime to check the progress and tweak you upload/download settings!

Gaming
I own (pwn) a Nintendo DS Lite and would love a bit of free city wide Wifi gaming action! I would play it more and would probably be inclinded to buy more games as a result.  I could also get gaming on my Mac too if I wanted.  World Of Warcraft anyone?  Bring along your Xbox360 and get it hooked up online for a lunchtime Texas Hold-em tournament!

Blogging
I purposely stay away from using my blog at work.  Not that I don’t want them to find it or anything, or that I am ashamed of what I put on here, it’s just better to be safe than sorry these days.  I still read and comment on other blogs via my Bloglines account and some of the content on there seems to sneak past their web filtering systems which normally blocks sites to do with Games, web-based email, Tasteless, Proxy Avoidance and Entertainment.  I miss being able to blog from work.

I might actually take my laptop out for a walk with me at lunchtime - or for a drive.  There is a housing estate next to where I am working and I bet there is somewhere I could get an unrestricted connection if I wanted.  It might look a bit odd though if I stand outside their house with my laptop!  I might to be a little more discrete.

Tags: wifi, blogging, gaming, macbook, web, bittorrent, laptop, free, city, skype, MSN

Sony have had their Pre-E3 conference last night and have given more details and demos of their upcoming Playstation3 console.

In my opinion, Sony are going to wipe the Xbox360 and Nintendo Wii off the floor with their new console but probably only based on the established user base they already have. Also, Sony and the Playstation have always seemed to appeal to younger gamers more than the Xbox so they will immediately have the upcoming generation to rely on buying their console.

They have also stolen copied used the same motion detection techniques that Nintendo are planning to include in their new Wii console which leaves Microsoft as the only “next gen” console maker not to have this capability - yet.  Microsoft are due to launch details of their external USB HD DVD player at the E3 conference too though - whoppee!… not.

The “Sony Hub” will take on the might of XBox live too but contrary to early information, it will not all be free and will probably follow the same pricing structure of free access to somethings, but pay-to-play access to multiplayer gaming.

The real kick in the nuts for this console is going to be the price which has been announced at the conference too.  The console will be launched worldwide in early November and will come in 2 flavours, one with a 20gb hard disk and one with a 60gb hard disk.  Pricing will be set at $499 and $599.  Expect that to translate to £499 and £599 here in the UK.

Would you want to pay nearly £600 for a console?  And as we have found out with the Xbox360, the games are’nt cheap either with some of the recent flagship titles like Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter retailling for nearly £50!  How much are the Blu-Ray based games going to be on the new PS3?  £70?  Reports on the capabilities of the PS3 versus the Xbox360 are also revealing that they will be more similar than first revealed and it may become difficult to tell the consoles graphics apart.

Sony will win.  I have no doubt about that.  But if Microsoft drop their console price then things may be different come christmas 2006.  And if Microsoft can realease Halo3 at the same time, things will get really nasty and all sorts of name calling and hair pulling will ensue.

The wife was watching Disparate Whorebags and I was playing my first 5 or 6 games of FIFA RTWC on XBox live, sat at my PC monitor.

In all apart from one of the games did anyone talk, until I played a very chatty American who ended up beating me on penalties, or “shoot out” as he called it.  Actually, someone else did pipe up to appologise for scoring in a flukey way.  On the whole I lost every game I played - but it was still fun!

On a game that I was winning 3-1 my opponent quit the game just after I had scored the third goal with a cheeky Michael Owen chip shot past a defender and over the goalie as he rushed out to hack me down.

He could have at least pretended he needed a poo or something!
I left him a bad feedback anyway…..

Wow!

Just wow.

I received my Joytech VGA Cable for my 360 yesterday and after suffering the planned outage of XBOX Live and the intense double episode start of the new series of LOST, I was ready to play.

Now, my AOC branded LCD monitor is not a recent piece of hardware.  In fact i’m sure that I have seen it pictured on the bayeux tapestry, just next to the knight listening to that £250 Rio MP3 player with 64mb of memory I used to own.

I was concerned that with a low response time, my attempts at FIFA RTWC would just turn to a mushy blur instead of a sharp, Hi Def graphics experience.

I had to cycle via Maplin on the way home from work to obtain a £4.99 VGA Gender Bender as the monitor connection on the Joytech cable is male and my AOC display does not allow me to remove the cable from it at the back.  See, I told you it was old!

I plugged in the VGA cable from the 360, into the gender bender and then into my monitor and booted the 360.  I was pleasantly suprised to see the 360 logo spinning onto my display in lush 640×480.  After getting into the dashboard and setting the display to 1280×1024 I was nearly wetting my pants in anticipation as I loaded a game.  The quality is amazing!  As an old-hat PC gamer, I was half expecting the game to slow down as the 360 tried to pump out the higher res graphics but it was just the same - but better.

After XBox LIVE came back online at midnight I got online using Internet Connection Sharing on my PC and got beaten 2-0 by someone playing as Argentina on FIFA RTWC.  Still, it was nearly half past one in the morning and I was only testing it….

Honest!