The Apology

No, I’m not talking about the last section of the book The Last Days of Socrates by Plato, that is of philosophical and literative intrigue, no, I’m talking about the apology from my neighbour. He apologised to me yesterday night and I’m rather glad he did. He’s one of the only nice people I’ve met here (along with the my other neighbour and the guy the other side of the noisy guy), so staying on good terms is good. It also showed to me that maybe my form of revenge was heard and understood. I’m just glad he got the message.

I would use this post to now write how I feel about the Banjo Kazooie Nuts and Bolts demo but I really can’t be arsed. It’s getting late and it’s not all that much to write about. Maybe tomorow yer.

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Shut the fuck up!

Last night I decided to go to bed relatively early (about 11ish) as I had to be up at 7:30 for early lectures. However, it turned out that I was denied sleep by some noisy cunt next door to me. Instead of snoozing for a good 8 hours or so, I only managed 4 and a half as I only finally got to sleep at about 3am. I know it wasn’t only me that was getting annoyed by the noise as I could hear the guy the other side of the noisy cunt banging on the walls too.

Well, since I had to go to bed when he decided to go to bed, it’s only fair that I returned the favour, meaning that if I’m getting up at 7:30, so is he. I dismantled my current speaker set up to move them across my room and against the wall that was seperating me from hurting him last night. I started out by maxing the volume on my speakers and iPod and then deciding what to play. I started off with some Avenged Sevenfold (2 or 3 tracks of this whilst I showered) and then moved onto some Slipknot, Before I Forget in fact.

I was happily screaming/singing along and realised that I didn’t feel so bad anymore. I could have stepped the music up another Metal-notch by playing some Bleeding Through but I decided against it. I realised that if he would be a repeat offender, I would need something heavier than the last piece of revenge. Keeping my cards close to my chest will pay off I’m sure. I stopped the music torture after Before I Forget as I still have another neighbour that is nice and didn’t want to annoy her too much, although most of the sound was being blasted into the cement seperating the cunt and I. It turns out that I didn’t need to go a step above Slipknot as after I turned it off, I could hear his grumbling, as if he had had only 4 hours sleep. The 4 hour sleep Club is great isn’t it.

I’m not usually ready to hit someone with revenge like I did this morning but I was so fucked off about not getting any sleep, I felt that it was my duty; hell, it was even just, to be a dick to the dick. I hope he knows that what I did was only fair and we can live and let live, if not, I’ll be ready with some Annotations for him…

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Shocking games

Yesterday a mate and I decided to buy some easy games to try and whore our gamerscores up a little. Since it was 4 for £20 and we were splitting the cost in half, it was a good idea. Our choice of games were:

King Kong

Bionicles

Stranglehold (Limited Edition!!!)

Monster Madness

The first three are pretty easy for gamerscore. The last one was picked by Matt as he said it was a fun game. I played MM for a little while and didnt think much of it. The UI was a bit all over the place and the voice acting sounded like something out of a very low budget porno, and not a good one at that. The first boss fight was extremely easy but I guess that might be because it was the first boss fight. I guess when it comes round to me next week I’ll have to give it a more extensive play through.

I played Bionicles round my mate’s house for a short while and it was shocking. To start with the controls are well off. The LS is for movement and to look around, and the RS is almost dumped completely as it controls the camera. That would be perfectly fine if the camera actually worked well but unfortunately they fucked that up. They also managed to bulls up the rest of the buttons. You have the LB, RB and Y button all for swapping masks. The RB scrolls one way, the LB the other and the Y goes the same way as the RB. I can understand the Bumpers being used by why bother with Y too? And then you get the overall game mechanics. There is one difficulty setting. This means one of two things, either (A) it will be insanely hard in some places and you are lumped with that difficulty, or (B) it’s all going to be mind numbingly fucking boring and easy. I don’t think I need to state which one it is, but i’ll treat you like the game treats the player: It’s B! Have a biscuit too!

The triggers apparently let you strafe, but to be honest, you won’t need them. Each mask changes your character to have a different weapon that you can hold down with A and clear every room with relative ease. Our favourite character was the blue one because the auto lock on along with a weapon similar to the Sentinal Beam made the game easier than your mum (ooooh!!!). I wondered why they littered the areas with masks that we already had, but we found out that if you die, you just lose the mask you were wearing. What made things easier was that if you collected x amount of lego bricks, you then became Godlike and could smite enemies without getting hurt. It’s going to be easy gamerscore, but I think my mind may regress a few years if I play it the whole way through.

I managed to take King Kong and Stranglehold for this week. Both aren’t entirely great and I could rant for a little while about them, but since I have some Halo to play for some rehabilitation. Maybe tomorow I’ll grace you all with how I’m finding King Kong and Stranglehold.

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VERY FAST!

Enough said.

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Faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaast

I am more than happy with this speed. Coming from my house that; if you were lucky, could manage a 120kB/s nearly consistently, this is very fast. This is from the connection in my room and this is the highest i’ve seen it hit. On campus yesterday I did manage 2.8mB/s which was just insanely awesome.

If you have really good eyes, you’ll be able to spot that what I’m downloading is the latest path for World of Warcraft. I think I might start playing again (maybe today if I get really bored) but it would be awesome if a few other friends could start again *HINT HINT ROB AND ELLIOT*. Anyways, I should probably get my ass in gear for the day, got a bit of clothes washing to do, yay!

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No Internet and no Halo…

…makes Loz go crazy!

(This first part was intended for tuesday, but my internet once again decided to give up)

I have been without internet for 3 days or so over the weekend and have only finally been able to get back online since monday night, hence the lack of posts. I managed to spend my time over the weekend to componsate the lack of internet by spending it with friends, otherwise I may have gone crazy. I went to see Rob during the day on saturday and then had another mate over later that night for some Rock Band. The plan orginally was to go out drinking, but my university really is lacking. We headed down a pub before going to the Student Union to do a bit of pre drinking, only to discover that they were doing some refurbing in one of the bars and the other was completely closed. So instead we walked back to mine and played a good 4 hours or so of Rock Band.

(Moving up to date)

So yes, my internet has been pulled away from under me and has left me with very little to do. I’ve started playing through Army of Two on the hardest difficulty and found it to be awfully unforgiving. There are certain encounters where it seems like you aren’t supposed to get through it. The encounters are long and difficult and checkpoints seem to be rarer than rocking horse shit. You find yourself playing a single encounter for 25minutes or so only to be screwed over by bad AI of your partner and then find out that you have to start over again. Very challenging, but it feels very satisfying to get a pistol shot to a guys head from 100ft away.

Asides from AoT, I’ve also borrowed Spaced series 1 and 2 from a friend and will be watching through some more of it over the weekend. He also leant me the Doom film. I don’t have high expectations for it so I’m not even going to give it too much time in this post. After seeing Sin City for the first time earlier this week, Doom doesn’t look to be adequate. I’ve also been up to date with Heroes and The Big Bang Theory, of which both are awesome. Heroes is moving very quickly in character and story progression and TBBT continues to be hillarious in its quirky way.

I think I’m going to be very busy this weekend. I have a load of uni related stuff to do, along with watch the rest of Spaced, watch Doom, finish AoT, play through GTA IV and Mass Effect aswell as the occasional sociable game of Halo 3.

I don’t think I’m going to be able to do all of that in 2 days…

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ROBOTICS YER!

Good evening. Today I spent a little while in my Robotics Lab building a sort of walking robot. It’s not entirely complicated; especially the code, but it was fun to do. It basically works on the same principles that a steam engine train does. With a steam engine train, a back motor rotates and pushes an arm that is attached to the wheels backwards and forwards, creating a cyclical motion moving the train forwards. Mine however already has motors moving the wheels, but the arms attached to the wheels are what move the robot. They come into contact with the ground and move it forwards. It’s not an original idea as I’m sure you will have probably already seen this before (mostly to mention the original cut of Star Wars: A New Hope. The AT-ATs (the 4 legged ones) were just models with this concept being used to move the legs). I’m just posting it up because it was fun to do and was far more interesting to build than the standard Lego NXT car.

So here you are, a really bad video of it aswell as some pictures.

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Lock Hand

Today has been a pretty awesome day. The day started with a couple of lectures, an hour off and then another lecture. I then decided to visit the Robotics Lab and spent a good 2 hours in there messing about with the LEJOS NXJ. Was good fun to see your code doing something and the accomplishment of messing about with parameters ever so slightly to make the robot be more precise was good. I started off with just a pretty simple program that made it move ever so slightly. This to be fair was just an example program we were given to just get our heads round the way the IDE; Eclipse, worked. Was pretty basic and having a fair amount of pre-programming experience made it pretty easy to just mess about and do more than what I was asked. After a bit of meddling, I managed to make it play Mary Had A Little Lamb. It sounded shit, but it was Mary Had A Little Lamb.

After the roboting, a mate came round and we played 5 hours of solid Rock Band. My left hand was locked in a claw like grip with very little strength left, and my right hand was suffering from severe “wanker’s cramp”. Although it was awesome… never again.

Well, maybe, but not any time soon.

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Death Race

So yes, today I decided to spend some money and visit ye olde cinema. I saw adverts for Death Race and had read news before it was released about it being made. Now being a fan of the original after watching it as a child; yes, I do have awesome parents, I couldn’t help but feel skeptical about how well this new version would go. The plot of a race to the death is pretty much the same (along with some original characters such as Frankenstein and Machine Gun Joe (Verturbo)), just everything else around it is different. The sweet filling of death-filled car-nage (haha, I make pun!) is unchanged; apart from CGI these days makes the original look really shit, but the casing and topping of this pie are different…. Ok, i’ll stop with the pie analogy.

I always found the original intriguing; and more so with age, but not because of the race, but because of the odd society in which a Death Race can be allowed. Death Race 2000 doesn’t explain about the society and just forces you to believe that in our growing crave for entertainment, this highly immoral race emerged. The new version of the film deals with this whole messed up society rather well. There’s a nice intro sequence in text form explaining how this has happened and it’s actually quite a believable premise. America has hit depression and has lost control of it’s employment levels, directly resulting in a rise in crime. Corporations now run prisons and rehabilitation camps for profit but the prisons are over subscribed. The quest for ratings and money has lead to the Death Race being created, but it also gave the public a hero to put their trust in, Frankenstein. The plot develops from here (although I don’t want to say too much as I don’t want to spoil anything) and the mayhem unravels.

A very good film with some nice links to the original. It’s easily watchable without seeing the original, but seeing the new versions of the classic characters is somewhat uplifting. Frankenstein as a character is similar to the original, along with his heated relationship with Machine Gun Joe. The action was a little disorientating towards the start, but it does ease up and becomes less head ache enducing. Some of the deaths in this film are just plain old brutal and even made me wince a little. I can recall two deaths in particular.

I definately recommend it for anyone, be it fans of the original, or for those that didn’t even know there was an original.

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Nothing

That’s precisely what I’ve done today. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Well, unless you count playing FlatOut Ultimate Carnage all day and then some Halo. But I don’t really think it counts. I’ve spent the entire day without going outside. That’s a first for me at Uni and it felt awesome but horrible at the same time. It felt awesome because if I were to do this at home a few months ago, I would have felt like I had wasted the day, but at Uni, I know I’m not alone in sitting about doing nothing. It felt horrible however because as humans, we crave contact with others, something I lacked somewhat today. But talking to people on MSN and sending a few texts out sorted that out. What’s worse however, I have nothing planned for tomorow either.

I guess it’s not that bad. I have plans for the rest of the week so I think I’m allowed some loser days. I do however need to reread some lecture notes some time tomorow and also go over some Robotics stuff. I’ve already said it, but I’m really enjoying my course. I’ve started talking to a few people off my course over facebook and they seem like nice enough guys. One of them started talking to me with “Are you that robot that finished in 63 minutes the other day!?”. Made me chuckle.

What also made me chuckle, was talking to my friend James about Vegas 2.

The thing is, although this is a humorous simile, it raises a very good point about games in general. There are alot of things that we don’t get to see, but we know subconciously that they’re happening, and until you see them happening when you shouldn’t, you completely forget them. One goal that all games studios aim for, is to make their games immersive. To do this, you need to seperate the player from all of these “Not to be seen” functions. Vegas 2 has completely failed here in basic ways to keep the player away from seeing the mechanics. In online games such as Halo where seeing players spawn is unavoidable, it’s fine. But when you are trying to tell a story, you’re shooting yourself in the foot.

These mechanics are dirty but necessary; and like masturbation, don’t show it off to who you’re trying to impress.

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