A couple of weeks ago now I bought Super Mario Galaxy. The first real Mario outing on the Wii. I spent Tuesday night playing it for a while (my brother had been hogging it last week).
Image from Wikipedia’s article on Super Mario Galaxy [Wikipedia.com]
I recently watched a film called Contact, from 1997. It’s to do with the SETI project actually finding a signal and the human race building some kind of wormhole generator. Anyway, that day I came up with a couple of really short poem things that were sort of related to the film. Lacking anything else to post today, here they are:
We send our rockets into space;
carrying a message from the human race;
we scan the skies for big brother;
but right now we have each other
We take our first steps to the stars;
first on luna; then on mars;
flying outwards from our home;
what a shame if we are all alone
Finally a retailer that understands me! I want online prices in-store with the shop experience of speaking to staff (and the ability to take things back easily). PC World will now match selected online retailers (and apparently have been doing for a couple of years according to a forum post).
In case you can’t read that, PC World will match against the websites of Amazon, Argos, Asda, B & Q, Comet, Dabs, Dell, Evesham, Game, Gamestation, Halfords, HMV, Jessops, John Lewis, Maplin, Misco, Play, Staples, Tesco, Toys r Us, Virgin and Woolworths. They may match others at the managers discretion. The item has to be in stock, and the price has to include delivery, which is free on most of those listed.
Since 15th of November this is PC Worlds price match policy. I picked up Super Mario Galaxy for £25.50 last weekend, after price matching it from Toys R’ Us (it was a limited offer for the four days 16th to the 19th Novemeber). Ideally take a print out of the website you want to price match, or save the page to your mobile phone. This speeds up price matching, saving the staff from having to look up the price on their machines. Hope you can save some money on your future gadget purchases!
Happy Price matching!
When I started this blog, I swore to myself I wouldn’t post loads of random USB devices like I did on my old blog.
But sometimes you see something that is just too mind blowing to not tell people about.
A 4 port USB hub shaped like a Christmas cake? Incredible. Also those strawberries dont just look good, but they each store 1 Gigabyte of data. Can be yours for 50,000 Yen (around £230). Free shipping.
Source [Engadget.com]
For what has got to have been one of the most hyped games for a while I am disappointed. This weekend I’ve been playing Metroid and Super Mario Galaxy more.
Crysis is let down by a retarded AI (they’d stare at walls in the hope that I don’t shoot them), invisible landmines and trees (due to a short draw distance), poor physics (something that Crysis was meant to do well, but all you get is buildings that peel apart into panels). Maybe Crysis is better under DX10 (I’m playing on XP SP2 atm with DX9), but this won’t fix the stupid AI. The thing that has annoyed me most though? YOU CAN’T SHOOT THROUGH WALLS. Or fences. Or FISHING NETS?!
The game looks *gorgeous*, but I’m not one of the “graphics are teh best” generation (or maybe I’m just odd?). I’m a gamer I like to play games. Something a lot of companies seem to have forgotten, instead just churning out the same old titles with new graphics. FFXII, GT:HD, Halo. All continuations of old franchises, that don’t add anything new except some shiny graphical effects. Nintendo are just as guilty (Mario, Metroid, Super Smash Bros, all old franchises), but at least they’ve tried something new. Metroid has you interact by twisting the remote. Gimicky? Yes. Something different? Certainly. I understand you can’t change a franchise too much, I mean Metroid 3 wouldn’t be a Metroid game without the morphball or the missile launcher. But please add something new. Metroid has some new ziplining sections, new bad guys, some use of the Wiis new functionality. I enjoyed all of these. By all means keep the characters, or the premise of the game, but make it something different.
Mario is mind-boggling at first, running around a planet and flying through space. It’s a nice change.
Don’t know how you can help GT:HD though, maybe add more cars, more tracks? More parts to tinker with? Okay, maybe some franchises are limited.
I realize I’ve just jumped onto a huge tangent, but this happens when you’re passionate about something.
Anyway I’m off to play Space Invaders or Pac Man on my Atari. Probably not Pac Man as the ghosts hurt my eyes. But the gameplay on these games are great. Simple, addictive. I’ll close now before I go off onto another tangent.
Keep gaming,
Jason
Well, one of the above anyway. This week I’ll be looking at my newest purchase, the Panasonic DMC-FZ8.
The FZ8 7.2 Megapixel superzoom, featuring the next version ‘Venus III’ image processing engine, a large 2.5″ LCD (and a high resolution viewfinder LCD) and of course a 12x optical zoom lens. (more…)
When most people hear the phrase “the sky at night” they think of Patrick Moore sitting in his armchair. Or they might do if they were always interested in the sky and have seen him on his show and various other shows, normally if a comet or some such is passing by.
Some of you might be sitting there thinking “Who the fuck is Patrick Moore?”
But anyway, I was out with my new camera last night hoping to photograph some stars. But it was cloudy. However I noticed that the light pollution thrown up from a nearby town illuminated the clouds. So I set up my camera on it’s tripod and took some long exposures (15 seconds or so, which is why the clouds have blurred a little).
They turned out spectacular (well I think), even if they are a little eerie, with the hedges in the foreground looking like ruined buildings. There are actually stars visible in a couple of shot, so I did capture what I set out for.
Click “Read the rest of this entry” below for a couple of resized pictures, otherwise see the gallery for more pictures (be warned if you view them in full size as these are about 3Mbyte each, you can change size using the little drop down in the top right corner). I never thought I’d say it, but light pollution can be beautiful.
The UK government tempt fate once again, as they launched their second Skynet satellite on Friday.
As we all know from the Terminator movies, Skynet will at some point in the near future become sentient and take over all our computers, before unleashing wave after wave of robots to kill all humanity.
So prepare your shelter now, while we still have time.
Source: The Register
(Edit: Okay, okay, the Skynet program has been going since 1969, as pointed out by a comment on The Register, which does make it less funny.)
Nothing to do with the video game, but a High ALtitude Object flight. I was browsing the web, reading some blogs that I occasionally read, and saw this page.
It’s well laid out, and documents and exciting project (as well as proving the earth is round).
Nice pictures and videos too. Check it out.
