darkflamejam

I’ve just finished playing Rainbow six, which really was a fantastically well done first person shooter on the 360. Not once did I wish I was playing it on the PC, everything flowed so easily. And also the storylines half decent… well except for the “TO BE CONTINUED” displayed just as the game started to get interesting, gits!

You can tell when I really enjoyed doing something because the post is short   The only downside to the game is the cliff hanger ending, and the inability to make your allies advance, you tell them to take cover on one side of lets say some slot machines, you go down the other, As as your advancing along your side their stationary. But other than that, fantasticly good fun of a game

I do believe that the best thing to hit the internet is the intelligent persons myspace, otherwise known as Last.fm. Everytime they update this site I’m amazed by its new features, new webpage content, its wiki gig listings (which has actually upped my number of gigs I goto by a good four per month instead of the one per quarter).

Anyway the reason for this post is… They’ve now added the funky little webapp, called the album quilt; which you can now see at the bottom of the sidebar. What its actually done is taken all the tracks I’ve listened to, worked out the albums their from and so generated my most listened to albums! Well done you last.fm guys.

This was the gig I’ve been waiting for, for almost 3 months. The Decemberists, doing 3 gigs in the UK one of them, thankfully one of which was in Manchester. They have a unique way of intertwining simple melodies with fantastical tales, that will quite happily stay in your head and keep you swaying and singing for hours on end.

Lavender Diamond opened the show with an very high (both musically and possibly chemically) folky show, the lead singeress (yeah I’m inventing words), some really good which I obviously didn’t know, but found myself swaying along and transfixed by her kookie charisma.

Lavender Diamond finished, and after roughly a half hour, Colin Meloy and his band of musical misfits wandered onto the stage, under a fantastical pre recorded introduction. They played a varied selection of songs from Picturesque and Castaways and Cutouts, playing such classics as We both go down together and The Legionnaire’s Lament but the emphasis, rather unsurprisingly was on their new album The Crane Wife, playing everything on the album except for The Perfect Crime No. 2 and When The War Came (which to be fair sounds like a bad Morrissey song).

It was truly amazing to watch the entire band on stage, they were loving every moment they were on. Colin Meloy played games with those of us in the audience, spent the moments in between the songs bantering with the audience and the other people on stage. The best moments of croud interaction was the battle between the two sides of the audience singing “La di da di dadadada” (doesn’t translate well to text) from 16 Military Wives, at each other with Grimace in our faces. Before the band left the stage an amazing crescendo of Sons and Daughters‘ chorus, where Lavender Diamond joined them on stage, to sing along with us the final words of “These are the bombs that fade away”.

They returned for the encore coming back with Eli the Barrow Boy, and of since their in Manchester and a big fan of The Smiths and Morrissey, the smiths classic “Please, Please, Please, Let me get what I want”, They finished with a track which no one knew apart the band, but we all rocked away as the band had the time of their lives on stage.

Overall I think its the best gig I’ve been to And should you wish to hear the wonders all of us at that gig did, you can visit NPR for the gig they played in October

For that small number of you who read this you may have noticed that the sidebar’s been fooked for the past week or so… Well I finally fixed it, I replaced the entire Kubric theme to the website (and losing some of my old stuff) and that didn’t fix it… after a bit of investigative post removal, I discovered that the bugs for Tomb Raider legend, don’t just stay in the game, a rogue div appeared in the text which fooked the entire stylesheet. But its fixed now. Woohoo!

Whenever I’m in Newport, Wales I always wander into a bookshop which on its windows written in big white letters reads “Adult Content Upstairs”. Its hidden from the main shopping streets of Newport, but its a fantastic source for cheap Sci Fi books, I have to admit I’ve never actually wandered upstairs and since its run by two old ladies, I think if I did venture upstairs I would never be able to buy anything from them again! Anyway its in this shop where I’ve bought most of previous Sci Fi reads, I am Legend, various Alistair Reynolds and Michael Moorcock books. And this book Flowers For Algernon, picked up for a measly £3, was my latest purchase from there.

The book is about a retarded 32 year old janitor named Charlie Gordon, who goes under an experimental treatment which almost triples Charlie’s IQ, allowing him to remember his childhood, realise that everyone around him who he thinks are friends make fun of him, his mother disowned him… all these memories come back to him, as he learns to read, write, research and develop. Eventually becoming more intelligent than the people who performed the operation on him.

The story is told via Charlies’ written progress reports both before and after the experiment. Through these journals you get to see his spelling and grammer improve, as well as hear his innermost thoughts about developing emotionally, surpassing everyone he knows intellectually, his fears, and then his final grasps as you read the final month as he slowly loses his intellect and returns to the original Charlie of the IQ 68. It really is a moving book, which really makes you ponder on the society around us , and the way cope with people with mental handicaps but not physical…

Now lets see if the film is as good as the book…

While on the book to film conversion… Will Smith is definatly the wrong man to play Robert Neville in the film for I am Legend

I got sent the following link by a friend of mine…

http://www.eveningservice.com/Video

Now I was watching, and thinking this is simply a joke but upon further browsing of the website it actually is real. This idiot (like most people who actually attend church regularly) believes being gay is wrong, and makes homosexuals out to be not ordinary people (CHOPS). Its shocking what the church can force upon people….. thankfully I doubt anyone with an internet connection will actually take any notice of this crap, as they will see it for exactly what it is.

What is quite funny though is the site it links to and the parent site

http://www.lovegodsway.org/

Which is great fun to read through the safe bands list which has all of 16 bands your allowed to listen to, while the “gay bands list” is incredibly long. Remember kids bands, computer games, videos, muslim’s they’ll make you gay!

I have to admit though, I only know one religious person who is actually fully against gays, and I know a lot of people of varying religious beliefs so its not everyone.

I’m also 98% sure that Oscar Wilde was still gay when he died…

I’ve always seen the shiny cover of 30 Days of Night in shops, and always been quite intrigued by the artwork. So after a good few months of ignoring it when coming to buy comics… I actually bought it.

I thought that it may be something along the lines of The Walking Dead, which is fantastically laid out, and all about survival and the people coping. Well it is, and it isn’t. Its based on a fantastic premise based in the town of Barrow, which due to its location in north Alaska has 30 days of night at certain points of the year, and so is a perfect vampire feeding ground. The story is all about the towns survival as the first lot of vampires gorge themselves in the town.

The artwork is fantastic, and really suits the atmosphere, although the story is rushed, as I say its a great premise, but misses a middle. Theres no sense of timeline in there. You see the first attack on the town. Theres a tiny subplot that adds nothing to the story. But after what I thought was a only a single nights events (or two at max), the 30 days are over. And theres a very quick fight, with a really daft disregard for vampiric tradition, and most of them survive.

It could have been good, if there was a bit more background on the vampiric mythology of the world, and a middle to the book. And a timeline… The arts nice.

I don’t think I’ll be buying any of the follow up books.

I really want to like this game…But I can’t, maybe its because I’m trying to play it after playing such great games such as Gears of War, Dead Rising and Fight Night Round 3. But its awful! I know Will really enjoyed the game, and thought it really did re-invent the franchise… it really could, if the core mechanics of the game worked. Now before I start, I’ll admit I’ve only played one level and a bit of the manor which according to the game complete is 12% complete So it may get better later on, but I’m putting it down now.

First off, I’m playing it on the 360, and I know its really not a 360 title, its basically a PS2 port, with a few horrid shader effects added (which does nothing other than to annoy the crap out of you while your trying to use the useless binoculars). So I’ll put up with the lack of hi res graphics, or even an attempt to support something other than the basic tv output, and as we all know games arn’t about the graphics. The thing that lets this game down the most is the core mechanics, level design, camera angles, well pretty much everything. The controls really are not intuitive for anyone who has played on a 360 before. And since its a third person game, you’ve got to control your camera using the right analogue stick, which dead rising manages quite well, but Tomb Raider sucks at, the movements to slow, when people are shooting at you, you can’t turn around fast enough to see them, and while your trying to rotate the camera to see something useful your fighting the inbuilt level camera, which wants you to sort of look in the direction the level goes. Making it very hard to see what your doing. So the controls are crap, next lets goto the level layout. Its a very linear game with little deviations off the main route, you still don’t know where your going, the number of times I’ve been looking around trying to work out where I’m meant to be heading, and since theres no radar or map of some kind you never find it until you stumble quite literally upon a rock in the dark. Which the entire game is! Not the gritty kind of dark the kind of dark where you can’t see where your going. We all understand that caverns, caves and tombs are dark, so we expect it and so does Lara as she has a torch… which is useless because it runs out every bloody minute, its a game mechanic which is used in every single game which needs a torch. You need it so often, it doesn’t affect gameplay or hinder your performance, or remove the tension, so just don’t bother turning it off with a timer! And honestly, why should I be needing to use the torch in my Croft Manor, when there are lights bulbs, windows and other paraphernalia of modern technology lurking inside a house?
Puzzles, don’t get me started on puzzles, so I’ll just say move box in dark room to here in dark room, shoot box with magnet in a dark room. And the very first puzzle your left on, is suffering a major design flaw in that IT DEFIES THE LAWS OF PHYSICS! And not in an ok it will help. Its just blatantly unintuitive. Infact the entire game is completely unintuitive. I can’t believe that after an entire development process, none of these bugs got fixed, but at the same time being on the developer side of a fence, we all know we get used to the minor things and at the end of a project we hope the public will to.
The only redeeming feature this game has is the storyline, but it doesn’t really make me want to put the disc back in my drive. So the real defining feature of this game is I’ll probably get a £15 for it at gamestation.

Oh yeah, and before I go, Lara Croft is the worlds most selfish archaeologist in the world. I’m pretty sure they would at least care about some of the treasures other than the one their searching for. (i.e. Oh theres a security turret up ahead, I know I’ll use this priceless incan 6ft ball to move behind while the ball gets shot to shit.

Bad I know, but I liked it on a very morbid level

Click here, then click on the pronunciation. and I dare you not to giggle,

“Genital Herpes”

“Bacterial Vaginosis”

Before you ask, no I have none of the above, but I clicked a link on MSN and I started giggling like a 12 year old in a sex ed class. What I really like though, and retarded as this is… Click the hide button on the top right! hehe, hide the webpage! Just incase mum and dad walk by.

Although with my childlike giggles out the way, Its a really nicely designed site, with a colour scheme that really shouldn’t work, quick to navigate, well thought out and using some nicely polished systems in (just answer the first question on the quiz).
“Chlamydia”, hehe. Yes I have the mentality of a child. And yes, I have even done this far to many times.