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What YOU have said about TMSD: The Website of James C.T. Plant.

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The £150 Mac Challenge..

Do you remember when you were younger, and sent off for items via mail-order? Do you remember how that item would be the only thing you could think, read, or speak about for the 4-6 days until it was delivered? It turns out seventeen is not too old for this, as I’m now going to blather on at length about my latest purchase from afar. This is a big deal too, as come a few days, for the first time, I will be a Mac owner! Turtleneck jumper not included!

For this momentous occasion to take place, I set myself a challenge to track down a used Mac within my budget of £145. After several somewhat poor eBay bids and a bit of auction watching, I found quickly that my initial target of the PowerPC G4 based Mac Mini was not going to be particularly feasible under my budget, with most auctions ending at £180 or more. I had initially chosen a Mac Mini due to a lack of storage space over at TMSD HQ, and that I don’t really have room for another tower. Therefore, the blue-and-white G4 or a G5 were out. My budget also constrained me, as you may have guessed, to PowerPC based units rather than the newer – and considerably more expensive – Intel models. This may or may not prove to be a problem in the long term, but at least for now it ticks another architecture off my list.

I was sure from the start that I was looking for a desktop model as opposed to a laptop. While a laptop would be nice, the performance hit and the fact that the battery was likely to be knackered led me towards a desktop alternative. Second hand laptops also tend to have more cosmetic damage where the previous owner had placed their wrists or used the trackpad. In any case, most were priced too highly.

I had initially considered an all-in-one G3 iMac, but the hardware in those is somewhat antiquated by modern standards. I also find the iMac G3’s design (Which is a design classic, and I can appreciate that) somewhat dated these days, and I also would have been landed with the dreaded “Hockey Puck” mouse which has gone down in history for heralding a new age for RSI lawyers. One of those iMacs with the anglepoise lamp style connection between the base and the screen would have been nice, but again, my budget  reared it’s ugly head.

After eBay proved useless, I turned my gaze to Amazon.co.uk, which in the past has served me well for second-hand items (Namely Super Nintendo cartridges) and had a little look around. For some reason or other, they only sell brand new Macs. Failing that, I glanced down and saw an advert, among the “FREE iPH0nE N0W” and “CLICK TEH WII 4 LO LO RATES”, I saw a tiny box of text that advertised Studio Macs, a UK company that resells used and refurbished Apple products. I clicked on it – something which I ordinarily never would have done – and was swiftly directed to a web page typical of Apple resellers, with lots of white backgrounds and promo pictures. 

I was intruiged. After a quick poke around I found it: a 1.25 GHz Combo drive eMac for sale at £125 including shipping and handling to mainland UK. I had not previously considered an eMac due to the large size of the unit and the aforementioned space constraints, but this price was too good to miss. I eagerly cleared off a spare desk that was covered in crap and bought it.

I have had to make a few sacrifices for the arrival of the eMac – for instance, TMSD HQ no longer contains a television – but in the face of all that, I’m sure the eMac will be excellent, and even if it isn’t, I can finally call myself a Mac owner.

Now all I need to do is grow a goatee.

-James

 

 

An example of how to eat your own words.. And a review of the Disgo 3000.

Well, after sitting here for several minutes, not writing anything, I’ve finally decided how to start this one off: with an apology. You see, last time around I might just have said that the iPod touch was a bit silly and not a very good music player. Well, one birthday later, I now own one. And I like it. A lot. You see, my only previous experience – which was tremendously limited – was based entirely on short times I test-drove my brothers. The sound quality out of the thing, especially using my HESH DJ-style headphones, is phenomenally good compared to the compact players I’ve previously had. The games are also wonderful – especially Rolando – and Apple don’t lie when they say there is an App for almost anything. Handheld PC? I’d take this handheld Mac over it any day.

While I love the iPod, it naturally suffers from the same problem all of these handheld computers suffer from: It has no keyboard. Well, it does actually have an onscreen keyboard, with which Apple have tried to relieve the common problems which onscreen keyboards face. However, no matter how good an onscreen keyboard is – and the iPod’s is the best I’ve seen – I always prefer a physical keyboard with space for both hands and feedback from the keys. Hence we segue nicely into another birthday-related item: My shiny new Disgo 3000 series netbook, on which I’m typing this now. With a 266 MHz ARM processor and 64 MB of RAM, it’s not exactly a computing powerhouse, but it does provide a copy of Wordpad and a keyboard in a bundle about the size of an A5 sheet of paper. The aforementioned keyboard is a little cramped, but seeing as that’s a problem with all netbooks the Disgo can hardly be singled out to be shot at dawn. It’s main selling point – indeed, its box labels it as the “Disgo web browser” – is that, you guessed it, it surfs the internet. It can do this pretty well, but again succumbs to netbook syndrome and some pages – but only exceptionally large ones – may appear a little cramped on the screen. However, the small screen size is a reasonable forfeit for the excellent portability. It’ll fit in pretty much any bag and still leave room for the compact power adaptor, which is built into its plug in a compact unit that you’d probabbly expect for charging a mobile phone.

Again, because we love a good segue here on TMSD, we come on to the battery life. The computer will last for four hours on a single charge, which is much longer than it sounds. Put this thing on at lunch and it’ll still be ready to go at dinner time. Charging the device is also incredibly fast, even while it’s in use. If you do run out of battery, plug it in and it’ll be fully charged in less than 30 minutes. I’ve had it on today for transferring files, writing this over my lunch hour and taking notes in a biology class and even now the unit is showing over 40% charge: Well over an hour. It is also handy should your iPod run low on power, especially if you haven’t got around to buying a mains adapter which, as far as I know, Apple have yet to release a model for British plug sockets. While the device won’t run iTunes, the iPod will charge anyway.

However, this is a netbook, and it’ll have all gone to waste if it can’t do the internet. As said before, small screen size rears it’s head occasionally and in addition pages can take a little while to load. Neither of these are show-stopping problems, but it should be expected that it will not provide the same experience as a full desktop.

A minor irritation is that some websites will recognise that the device runs Windows CE and switch to their mobile version. Both Google and Facebook do this, but it’s easy enough to switch to the full site for most. Unfortunately, while full Facebook will load, it slowed the device down very noticably, as will large pages or pages with lots of images. Because of this, you’re better off using the mobile version of the likes of Facebook, which are far more managable. You may be able to use the iPhone version, but I haven’t tried it.

Something that might pose a problem to some is that there is no in-browser flash support. I haven’t found this as a problem so far, but to those who might a flash player for downloaded files is included. Youtube support is also available through a third-party player application. However, quality is slightly reduced even from the Youtube norm and it is questionable whether this falls within Youtube’s terms of service.

Included with addition to the web browsing facilites are Wordpad, which I’m using right now, and a spreadsheet application which is fully compatible with older versions of Excel. It also comes with Windows CE Messenger for your IM needs, a Powerpoint viewer, a PDF viewer and three (!) media players, one of which seems to be an older version of one of the others. This does bring me to a point which initially presented a problem to me: It cannot install additional applications, even those for Windows CE. As a result of this you can only use the ones packaged but these will do pretty much anything you will ever want to do with it that the hardware can physically support.

As a web browser, the Disgo 3000 is a worthy companion to a more powerful and less portable computer. With portability far in excess of even a small laptop, it’s well worth picking one up if you want to browse the internet in public or need to take notes in a lesson. And while I recieved mine as a gift, at a price of £95 I wouldn’t hesitate for a second to buy one.

 

-James

All Trademarks are the properties of their respective owners.

Nano? Sure, why not..

Apple are somewhat of a curiosity in the tech world. Only six people actually use their computers, yet whenever they release a new product the entire world takes notice. The fact is that Macs are the utter embodiment of style in computing. They encompass droolingly good looks with fantastic build quality. Indeed, I love Apple design so much that I bought an iMac keyboard for this computer to replace the cheap hunk of melted-down tupperware containers Packard Bell shipped with it. Apple products have come to symbolise style in the tech world.

So here we go with yet another iteration of the iPod nano. First of all, I would like to be anything but the first person to point out that Apple’s design team have been getting lazy with the iPod line, as this looks exactly the same as the old one. None of that whatever-the-hell-they-did with that nano that suddenly became short and fat. As far as I can tell, they’ve shoehorned in some new features, but the only ones I’ve heard about seem pretty redundant;

• Built in voice recorder - You can tell that somebody at Apple has finally cracked over whatever was preventing them from putting one of these in in the first place. Which was nothing.
• FM Radio - You can tell that somebody at Apple has finally cracked over whatever was preventing them from putting one of these in in the first place. Which was nothing.
• A built in speaker - Why, Apple? Why must you do this to us? We do not need another gadget which enables dopy teenagers to play their f*ck-awful  rap music through a hideous tinny speaker.
• And the piéce de resistance, A video camera. – This seems to me to be completely redundant. Anybody who is anybody these days has a mobile phone, and it’s damned hard these days to find a phone that doesn’t have a video camera built into it*. So why does the average Joe need two video recorders on their person at all times? I was thinking that maybe you could take it somewhere you wouldn’t want to take your phone in case of damage or something, but this is again a moot point when you consider that this costs as much as, if not considerably more than any mobile which isn’t a new release.

It’s pretty clear that both the microphone and speaker features stem from the video camera – as a microphone for recording sound and a speaker for playing back video without headphones. Why it even needs a microphone is a mystery to me, because every video I’ve ever shot on any of these compact integrated cameras has always had an identical people background of people talking indecipherably rising to a laugh when somebody has been kicked in the groin/fallen over/fallen over onto their groin.

I hear the FM radio has a neat feature where you can rewind up to 15 minutes – a bit like Sky+ – but remember just how crap these tiny radios are and that any interference that you encounter will doubtless be on the recording too.

Don’t see this as a review of the latest nano, because it ain’t. I don’t have one and I don’t intend to get one. But I think I speak for most people when I say that there really isn’t much more Apple can do with an MP3 player. I mean, look at the iPod touch. It was essentially an iPhone without the phone, making it a little strange to use if you’re used to your phone being the centre of your computing away from home, especially when you realise you can’t actually phone anyone. In short, there’s only so much you can do to a product before it becomes a completely different product altogether, and I think Apple seem to have lost the plot a little. Maybe they should just concentrate on making the iPod a really good music player instead of a more average jack of all trades.

-James

*Although it is possible, bearing in mind you can buy a mobile for £8 these days.

Black Knight, Black Knight, I need no Black Knight..

Well, here’s a surprise. You buy any game these days and you expect it to have at least the bare bones of functionality, unless, of course, you know it’s going to be bad, in which case you don’t buy the game. Well, here’s one that truly surprised me, but I guess it shouldn’t have, thinking about it more deeply.

Sonic and the Black Knight.

I mean, Wow, this one is bad.

Despite the fact it has had some pretty positive reviews over the last few months, I refuse to believe that this game even can exist. I mean, Sonic the Hedgehog is a well-known, popular figurehead of gaming who has stood the test of time. So what the hell do Sega think they’re up to with things like this? I mean, Sonic the Hedgehog in the Arthurian Legends with a SWORD? It doesn’t even SOUND good on paper! But oh God, it gets worse than that. Let’s dive in.

To start with, Sonic is summoned into the legend of King Arthur by Merlina, who wants to defend the land from.. well, I think  it’s supposed to be King Arthur gone evil, but he looks more like a crappy rejected design for Sauron more than anything else. What he does is ride around on a flying horse striking terror into the hearts of all the innocent little green people – yes, the story has just lost all credibility. When I say it’s based on the Arthurian Legends.. Sega took the oppurtunity to try and make it a stupid as they possibly could. I mean seriously, this bears no resemblance to the original legends at all. It’s the same as Sonic and the Secret Rings which is a somewhat skewed adaptation of  the Arabian Nights, the only difference being that SatSR was actually good, where as Black Knight falls flat on it’s face story-wise. Of course, Merlina summons Sonic for.. no real reason, to defeat evil King Arthur. Why she chose to summon a friggin’ hedgehog with no battle skills whatsoever is beyond me. Why, if the land needed protection so badly, didn’t she summon, oh I don’t know, A KNIGHT? I don’t know, it makes no sense to me either.

And this is just the start of this game’s problems. The controls are awful, and I mean awful. Cast your mind back to Secret Rings and remember the thing of tilting the Wii remote to move Sonic left or right on a pre-determined track of a fixed width. This worked okay. Not fantastically, but okay. Now fast forward to the Wii version of Sonic Unleased. I really think they’d nailed 3D Sonic controls with this one. There was a fantastic sense of speed, the levels just let you run and run and the whole time you felt as if you were in control. The levels flowed and kept the pace. The problem with Black Knight is that it tries too hard to give a sense of speed. It tries to combine the controls of Secret Rings and Unleased to form.. Well, this.  Basically you run on a predetermined path like in Secret Rings, but instead of tilting the Wii remote to move left and right, you use the analogue stick, which really doesn’t work. Why? The controls are too damn sensitive! You move left and he whips to the left side. You let go and he springs back to the centre. You move right and in a flash he’s graunching against the stonework. There is just no middle ground. And another problem? He accelerates at utter random. Now, in SatSR the acceleration was automatic, but it was steady and under control. In Black Knight Sonic simply moves forward slowly, slowly, slowl-OHMYGODWTFTOOSODDINGFAST. And while again, this sounds okay – it is, after all, a Sonic game, where speed is the game’s raison d’etre – It just doesn’t work in practice.

In practice what happens is that literally, every two or three seconds of running is brought to a sudden and jarring halt as you hit a group of enemies that actually appear from nowhere without warning. It’s a huge pity as some stages, such as Titanic Plain, have real potential for an Unleased-style system where you can just run and run and run. I could go so far as to say this utterly ruins most of the gameplay, but no. There’s far worse things to be addressed. Like the sword controls. Now, again, this sounds good on paper. Sonic can swing his sword at anything he can run at and use another move which creates some kind of sheild in front of him. How? I don’t know. The swordfighting sounds like a decent system, where you can move the Wii remote in different ways to perform different moves and combo attacks, but it succumbs to the same deadly ebola as the Werehog stges in Unleashed where instead of pulling off a series of calculated moves you quite literally end up flailing your arms wildly until everything around you is dead.

And still there’s more. As far as I got into the game there are parts in sub-missions – and even main missions – where you have to stop, do that thing where you press the however many buttons in order before the timer runs out, and then you actually have to give the little green townspeople some of your rings. Why? Again, I don’t know, it’s not really explained. And then we come to probably the main problem with this game. The stages and the game’s environments are dull, uninspired and completely un-immersive. As far as I got there was a generic forest, a generic castle and then a generic plain. There was no thought for any real originality in any of these levels.. and it shows. It’s not only the design of the levels that is dull, but the layout also falls flat as it follows the same generic formula of run, run, enemies, run, corner, stop, enemies with nothing really exciting to break up the monotony.

Although it’s already clear this game is an absolute train wreck, what really nails the coffin for me is the voice acting. And I’m not saying it’s bad, oh no. It’s worse than that. It is absolutely honest-to-God the worst voice acting I’ve ever heard in my entire life. While I’ve always thought voice acotrs in the Sonic francise have been more than a little dodgy, this just takes the cake. And the worst part is I can’t even figure out why. I don’t think they’ve changed the voice actors, so why do they suddenly sound so bad? I think it’s probably more to do with the dialogue than anything, which is worse than Sonic Underground. I am not kidding. Even a crappy Saturday-morning cartoon beats this into the dirt and this thing cost me £25, as opposed to my DVD of Sonic Underground which cost me 99p. Even Tails sounds even worse than normal, and this is just as I was starting to get used to his hideous voice. I mean, he sounded okay in Unleashed, so what the hell happened? I don’t know, and I don’t really want to know.

So yes, there is an utter myriad of flaws in Sonic and the Black Knight. It’s so bad that it’s the only Sonic game – and probably the first game – that I’ve ever taken back to the shop for a refund out of sheer poor quality. I mean, damn.

Perhaps this is a bad sign for the Sonic franchise. After Unleased, which I thought was pretty good, we’re being presented with the likes of this, showing that Sonic Team simply hasn’t learnt its lesson. So am I still a Sonic fan? Of course, just of the older games, that’s all, and not absolute heaps of the likes of this, and I think I speak for a large majority of the Sonic fan community when I say that.

Project Needlemouse had better be damned good, Sega. You owe it to us.

-James

We’re back on the air, been a while, eh?

Wow.

Oh wow.

Now, I know I’ve said this millions of times before, but that was far too long between updates. I mean, Jeez.

Now for the reason why.

And another line so I can press the enter key again.

This site started out as a site for my personal witticisms and musings. When it became apparent that nobody cared – in the same way that I refuse to read blogs about people’s cats and what they ate for breakfast that morking – I switched to computing, namely Linux and why it was king of everything. Then I switched to being a gamer blog, after I realised that computer news around here is slow and generally dull. And who wants to read about how I finally managed to get that piece of an Oreo out from under my shift key?

Well, now is the time for yet another rebrand, with a lengthy story why.

I’ve had quite a lot of computers in my time, but they’ve always been clogged with crap as soon as I got them to the point where they barely functioned as computers. However, after spending £500 – which is a $%&*ing huge amount of money for me – I’m now the owner of a shiny new Packard Bell iMedia, which I shall now grandly read out the specs of:

• AMD Phenom X4 Quad-Core processor
• 512MB nVidia G100 graphics card – an entry-level card, yet still light years beyond anything I’ve owned before.
• 4GB of RAM, although not all of it is usable as Vista came pre-installed as 32-bit.
• 640GB Hard Disk Drive.
• Blu-Ray playback
• Support for surround sound, alas I don’t own a speaker system that can utilise it’s full potential as of yet.
• 22″ Acer monitor at 1680×1050, which I actually had anyway – see the last Christmas post for more on how great that is.
• 32-bit Windows Vista Home Premium edition, with a free upgrade to Seven when it’s released.
• Other little nick-nacks, like a card reader, and soon it’ll have a beautiful Apple keyboard, which after extensive research I know will work with Windows.

Well, I’m certainly massively impressed with this beast, and it’s in no danger of becoming obsolete any time soon, it would appear. There is one huge bonus here, however:

It can play PC games.

And I mean, proper PC games you go and buy from a shop, with some of the finest visuals I’ve ever seen.

Now, I’ve had reasonably powerful computers before this. My Packard Bell iExtreme with it’s 128MB PNY Verto 5200 was pretty good in it’s day, alas I simply wasn’t into PC games at that time beyond Microsoft Flight Simulator and Auran Trainz. Next up was my lappie, which is still a brilliant little computer and is always my companion wherever it can be. This had a 384MB ATi Radeon 200M GPU, which wasn’t bad. It suffered from a major Achilles heel however, or more like a broken leg. Why? ATi’s driver support for this chip is GOD AWFUL. It’s a huge pity, as when it did run it ran very nicely. It’s downfall was that there was no OpenGL support at all. And really, I mean absolute zero. Even though that’s not such a problem with most high-end games these days, it was a vast issue with most games I had, which didn’t run at all or at best ran at less than one frame per second. This wasn’t such an issue when I bought a second drive for it which runs Ubuntu Linux, as I have never really tried any Linux games on it.

Upon purchase of this new computer – which has Windows on it, which I don’t plan to change any time soon – I realised I could suddenly play all of these titles that had been out of reach. Things like Portal, and Mirror’s Edge were now accessible to me without having to swallow my pride and buy an Xbox or Playstation 3 – which at least in my opinion are inferior to a PC for a lot of games.

YOU MAY STOP TL-DR’ing NOW AND CONTINUE TO READ

So yes, the jist of this little backstory is that I can now play PC games. And since TMSD has been both a gaming blog and a computer site, I’m going to smoosh the two together and see what Frankenstein creation results.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fig. A: It’s alive! ALIIIIVE!

Anyway, I’m off to France for a week starting tomorrow, so the Frankenstein shenanigans will have to wait. Goodnight!

-James

STOP PRESS: I’ve actually updated the graphics card to a model that isn’t hanging off the bottom of nVidia’s range. You’ll be sure to hear about that sometime.

 

What I’m Playing #1 – 26th June 2009

To celebrate one year since tmSd’s official opening, I’m introducing a new feature I’m going to call “What I’m Playing”. And it is, of course, a short review of whatever game I happen to be playing at the time of writing. And, to kick us off here, I’m presenting the wonderful Within a Deep Forest from Nicklas Nygren. I’m sure that if this feature continues we shall hear much more from Mr. Nygren as his games are simply that good. Within a Deep Forest is not about action, or blowing stuff up, but rather it’s enveloping atmosphere which draws the player in with beautiful pixel art graphics and ambient music and sound as you explore vast expanses of scenery. As another bonus, it’s also completely free and easily available on the internet – so there is no excuse for not going and downloading it right now.

Website- http://nifflas.ni2.se

-James

Game image copyright Nicklas Nygren. Fair use assumed.

R.I.P Michael Jackson

Short post here, but I’ve just heard that it’s been confirmed that the king of pop Michael Jackson has died at the ago of 50. Rest in Peace. In commemoration I’ve put on Moonwalker on the Mega Drive.

RIP.

James Plant’s Personal Pick of the Internet

Scroll down for a much better post…

Well, it’s been a while since I last said anything about computers here on tmSd. Nothing much to do with them has really happened over the last few months. The most interesting thing that’s happened is that I got another old computer from school which I sold to my brother, whereupon it immediately and catastropically broke. I’ve also gone back to GNOME for the time being, simply because it feels so much nicer to use.

So to keep the computer theme going here, I’m going to give you a list of my top however-many-it-turns-out-to-be websites which you simply must visit.

These aren’t in any particular order, by the way.

xkcd

Warning: contains some language and slightly mature themes.

Of all the webcomics I’ve seen, this one has it all. It’s aimed at those with a little grey matter, so some of the jokes might not be immedately obvious to non-”nerds”. It’s a good read, and manages to be incredibly entertaining even with no real characters in it. Go there!

Fat-Pie

Warning: some cartoons are creepy as Hell and contain blood and gore.

Unless you’ve been living in a hole, you’ll have heard of Salad Fingers at least once. If you havent, it’s about a green chap who lives on his own.. somewhere.. and, well, it’s kind of creepy but good fun to watch. The animator, David Firth, has a whole site full of cartoons like this, some are creepy, some are dark, some are funny as Hell (Especially Burnt Face Man, which has it’s own website) and all of them are well worth a good look. Go there!

The FAILblog

If you live on the internet, you’ll have likely heard of something called “Epic Fail”. This is an entire site dedicated to Fails, and it is absolutely hilarious. Go there!

The I Can Has Cheezburger Network

The parent network of the above-mentioned FAILblog, this site has sections on LOLcats, LOLdogs, political humour and much much more. Go there!

Questionable Content

Another webcomic, and this one’s simply about some indie people. And that’s it. It’s incredibly fun to read and I recommend it any day. I suggest starting at issue #1, as it is a sequential webcomic, as opposed to xkcd, which isn’t. Go there!

That Guy With The Glasses

This guy is FANTASTICALLY funny, especially his Nostalgia Critic and Ask That Guy With The Glasses shows. Go there!

The Angry Video Game Nerd

Warning: Incredibly frequent foul language and some quite disgusting similies.

The Angry Video Game Nerd, or AVGN as he is often referred to as, is a very funny reviewer of old video games. Recently he’s branched out into movies as well, but the game reviews are the best by far. Go there! (Click on the Angry Video Game Nerd tab)

Doctor Ashen

A reviewer of “Retro Tat” as he puts it, Dr. Ashen perfectly delivers a wonderful dollop of dry British humour with over-the-shoulder reviewing action. Go there!

The Daily Click

A website where people submit indie games they have made for the general public to download. Some are actually really good, especially Darkside Adventures and the fantastic Knytt Stories. You HAVE to download these two. HAVE to. They are so much fun to play. Go there!

And that’s that! That’s a pick of my top sites in no particular order. Go check them out!

-James

How to get hacked to pieces by Ninjas or Vampires… and pay for it!

The video arcade as an entity is almost dead in the traditional sense. I mean, think about it. You go into an arcade these days and every single game has either a steering wheel, a gun, or one of those massive fibreglass motorcycles that exist only as a distraction to the actual game. The progress of home video games means that the games have to have something which can’t be done at home – at least, not without a hideously expensive add-on. So, I went in to the Bright Spot arcade – my local – today with a £5 note and plenty of cheer, hoping to blast the Hell out of some baddies on the gnarled old Time Crisis 2 machine.

Namco really got things right with Time Crisis 2. Now, I’ve never actually played any of the other ones – I’d love to, though – but TC2 has it all. It’s cheap to play, it’s not stupidly hard, and it’s good value for money as you’ll get a fair amount of play time for your 30p. The pedal thing is a nice feature too, as you can actually defend yourself from enemy fire. Namco really got it right, which is why TC2 is so damned good.

Now, I went to the Bright Spot, money in hand, cheery as a drunken Saturday morning cartoon character and… The sodding Time Crisis 2 machine was out of order. I couldn’t believe it. The only half decent game in that place and it was wrapped in danger tape with a black screen. Well, thanks a lot, fate.

With money burning a towering inferno in my pocket, I decided to try out the other shooting games in there. I mean, Time Crisis 2 was good, right? Surely these other games – which were also made by Namco, just for the record – couldn’t be TOO bad, right?

Wrong, man. Wrong.

The first one I tried was Ninja Assault and.. oh my God. I paid 50p for this and died within seconds. It was bad. Now, I know the idea with these games is that once you die you’re simply supposed to pop in another 50p and keep playing. But no. I died so fast, and so easily, I might add, that I might as well have put 50p into the box to have a huge notice flash up telling me to never put any money in the box again. After a quick look I found the problem: The player has so few hit points, and the enemies come so quickly, that the player has literally no time to react to the sword strikes which simply do not cease.

Thinking that things couldn’t get worse, I slid another 50p into the Vampire Night machine which was next to Ninja Assault. Picking up the gun – which was pink for some reason – I thought: “Hell yes. A game where I can blow Edward Cullen’s head off. How could this POSSIBLY be bad?”. Bloody Hell, it found a way. The exact same problem in Ninja assault was present here too. The player is simply drowned in enemies – that don’t even LOOK like vampires, they look like blue zombies – that can’t be killed fast enough. And with only 3 hit points, I was dead again within seconds.

Now that’s just terrible.

Namco need to take a hint from this. Time Crisis II was good. These two, which came afterwards, simply were not. Namco need to learn: A shooting game needs to be easy, fun, and above all, cheap to play. If you must have the player die after just three hits, at least make it cheap to get more life. Players aren’t going to pay another 50p if they know they’re just going to get clobbered in the same amount of time. Just give the player value for money, and they’ll keep coming back. Piss them off and nick their money and they won’t.

And for F**k’s sake, let the player actually defend themselves!

-James

What rocks about the Super Nintendo..

I’m not exactly sure how this article should begin. Y’see, finally owning a Super Nintendo is a big deal for me. As a lover of classic games, it’s great to finally be able to own what is considered by many to be the embodiment of the Golden Age of Video Gaming.

I’ve bought some more games for the system – I now have exactly four, with Earthworm Jim arriving soon as a fifth. This is the smallest library of games I have for any of my consoles.. well, apart from the Game Boy Colour, but my original Game Boy games compensate for that. I was initially surprised to learn that the SNES doesn’t actually play NES games semi-natively, in the same way that the Mega Drive would still play Master System games by use of the power base converter*, but it’s fair enough, and even if it did I’d only end up buying an NES anyway.

We’re drifting a little here. The SNES is a superb console, and I love it. At the moment I have these games:

• Super Mario World
• Super Mario All-Stars
• Starwing/Starfox
• NBA All-star-basketball-men-running-around-nonsensical-mess
  
• Oh, and Earthworm Jim in the post. Haven’t played it yet. Duh.

They’re good fun, with the exception of the basketball game, but I’ve already written about that. Fricking LJN. I can see why the AVGN hates them so much. Why do I keep spelling already with two ‘L’s? Hooray for spellcheckers.

I kind of like Super Mario World, which is surprising as being a long-time Sonic fan I thought I’d automatically hate it. It’s good fun, it’s what you think of as a platformer, it’s.. just Mario, really.

I still prefer Sonic.

Now, I’m most certainly looking forward to the arrival of my Earthworm Jim cart. The game is made by Shiny, a studio that made one of my all-time favourites: Wild 9 on the Playstation. I know I haven’t mentioned it before, but it has been one of my firm favourites for a long time. It deserves an article to itself and that’s what it’ll get in time. Anyway, I expect similar awesomeness from Earthworm Jim. It certainly looks great, in any case.

One other thing has actually surprised me about the Super Nintendo. After reading about it’s technical superiority over the Mega Drive, I was expecting the games to be considerably different in look and feel from the Mega Drive. Quite thankfully, it feels like a 16-bit system, and I love it.

-James

*Now that’s something that’s gone from video gaming – the silly names for a “Console”.. could you imagine a Wii “Power Base” or a 360 “Control Deck”?