chaotic.signal
whatever Phil it's just random crap
Bad Company 2 Wishlist
Nov 14th
I have been rather hooked on Battlefield Bad Company, when I saw the title in reviews and videos it just seemed like another BF2 and I wasn’t interested, but recently my brother in law was playing it and I was like “oooooh”. The game is great, it seems to have a good selection of weapons and that Battlefield feel to it, the same quality that made me love BF2 and BF2142. However after a while you start to get annoyed that certain aspects of the game are truly frustrating those aspects need to be fixed for Bad company 2, full low-down after the break…
Legendary (Xbox 360)
Nov 7th
I rented Legendary recently and managed to play it all the way through, whilst I enjoyed the game, there were many glaring problems with it, most notably the untapped potential. It seems like a trend lately, developers seem to do some things right but other things so terribly wrong. So I’ll start off with the good rather than the bad…
The graphics in Legendary whilst not ground-breaking are what you would expect from this generation of games and they do the imaginative world justice. The weapons are varied and pack the right amount of punch. Most of the enemies are a little different from your run of the mill run and shoot enemies, you’ll be fighting flying enemies which levitate items at you, werewolves that regenerate unless you chop off their heads and giant Minotaurs hell bent on bashing your skull in.
The story too is great, Pandora’s box has been found and opened and it has unleashed an army of mythical beasts that are completely tearing the world to pieces. And your character is linked to the box with the signet on his hand. Read the rest of this entry »
Gaming Soap
Jul 8th
Yes that is a NES controller made from soap! The great folks at Digital Soaps have made variety of fantastic gaming soaps for those that like to include their favourite console in their everyday life. Imagine getting a shower with your Xbox 360 controller. I can only imagine it may become a little confusing when you sit down at your friend’s house for a quick game of Halo and he’s wondering why you’re rubbing his controller all over yourself.
There are many different styles but my favourites are the Tetris soap pack, which you can create your own Tetris scene with. The SNES controller, which holds so many fond memories and of course the Xbox 360 controller, confuse your friends and yourself with these fantastic soaps. 
I’m thinking of ordering some myself, though the price tag is a little steep for some of them, it may be worth it to complete that geeky look you’ve been cultivating for all these years.
The tragedy of GTA IV
Jul 7th
I’ve been playing a lot more GTA IV, but mainly online and mainly just messing around in the city flying helicopters around. There’s something therapeutic about driving boats and helicopters around a city that seems so big and interactive. The main problem I’ve had with GTA IV is the lack of co-op missions, the game would have been twice as good if you could play the boring singleplayer experience with friends. But the real tragedy is that GTA IV is such a waste, the graphics engine, the world design and detail are all completely wasted on the stupid “Grand Theft Auto” theme.
Let me elaborate; you have this whole world where you could basically do anything and the game wants you to take virtual people to go bowling. The missions are so linear it makes the whole fantastic world they have created superfluous. Not only that but they’re generally “go here, shoot that” etc, or mundane things like smash a brick through some guys window. The main character is also terrible and hard to identify with, he has no real substance to him.
You take all this into account and you think “How could GTA IV be better?” well for a start it shouldn’t have been GTA IV, it should have been a different franchise, one which makes use of the power of new hardware and one which is as dynamic as the surroundings.
For example, my friend and I find it fun to dream up scenarios… This is going to sound like role-playing but it’s not, we simply think up situations which would be fun to defend or attack certain points or people. Like making roadblocks with stolen buses and holding out against the police for as long as we can, comically ended by the helicopter that I just shot down landing on my team-mates head.
Imagine this in a game scenario though, imagine you have to rob a high value bank… While your comrades are inside getting the money and shooting up the place, you’re outside holding out against the police with your ramshackle roadblock until you all get in your getaway vehicle spraying the pursuing police cars with automatic weapons fire. Best of all you can plan your own getaway route. It makes use of the open world and it makes use of your own ingenuity within that world, it’s fun and challenging. You can rob banks in GTA IV, but it’s just a linear scenario, anything you try to set up before the mission will be reset by the mission mechanics basically dumping you in a pre-set chain of events.
I hope that one day Rockstar will drop this GTA 4 crap and utilize the resources they have better. As I said I cannot fault the team for making a fantastic looking game with the lovely detailed city, but I can fault them for making such a limited game out of it.
Inside the Xbox
Jun 24th
To fill you in on the Xbox situation the towel trick only fixed the red ring for about 5 minutes and I ordered the parts to fix it from ebay for about £3. I set about dismantling the box but apparently my Torx screwdriver set does not go small enough (need a T8). So my Xbox currently looks like this:
So until I see if I can grab one tomorrow from town it’s sat half naked on a table and I decided to take a few photos, prepare to get to know your xbox a lot more intimitley. Read the rest of this entry »
Braid “Review”
May 7th
Imagine me airquoting “review” because I’m not very good at actually reviewing games, I find it hard to give games a score, or to say that X is better than Y. Because every review is subjective, there is no such thing as an objective review. So as usual, all I can do is to write down my experience of a game in the most coherent way possible, give you a recommendation. I won’t pretend I know it all, or that I am right, just that this was my experience of the game and this is what I thought of it.
So Braid; I’ve had a good play of it now and I have to say that I was more impressed with it than I thought I would be. I originally had a good look at it, watched videos and decided it was a derivative platformer with the ability to rewind time to put destroyed chandeliers back together. However I was quite wrong. You see, Braid is a game which is difficult to fully describe, it is hard to grasp even from videos how exactly a puzzle is solved with the manipulation of time. I will however try. Read the rest of this entry »
Turok (2008)
Feb 6th
I never played the original Turok much, but did play Turok 2 quite a bit and I found it brilliant. The graphics were awesome for the time and the universe it was set in was brilliant, you had a native American taken out of his tribe to fight mutant dinosaurs with space ships and a massive evil overlord. Not to mention very varied weapons that were a lot of fun.
Hong Kong Newspapers
Feb 5th
For some reason these came through my letterbox this morning, addressed to me in a brown envelope sent airmail from Hong Kong. I have no idea why, I can only imagine it’s some confusion on ebay or something from all the stuff I’ve bough from Hong Kong lately. Either way, there was some interesting stuff in them (more after the fold);
GTA 4
Feb 2nd
Well I finally gave it a stab, spent a good couple of hours playing. The first thing that struck me is that the game seems to want you to carry out Niko’s life in minute detail. You have to go play pool with people, take them to the “cabaret” and go for meals etcetera… I’m really surprised you don’t have to go to the toilet and wiggle the left stick to force out a big log. I’m sure it will be a part of GTA 5 or 6.
Halo 3 Panoramas
Jan 15th
Not feeling in the mood to actually play the game and having a short attention span I for some reason set about making some Halo 3 panoramas (or halorama if you will). I think I saw something about it on a halo website and as usual thought “oooh I’ll try that” and set about taking multiple screenshots to stitch together.
The program I used (Hugin) is quite brilliant for a free app, all you do is select all the images that you took and click go. After that it stitches them all together and shows you what it’s made, then all you do is select where the image should be centered and there’s your panorama. Just as a side note the images it creates are tif files and and be quite big, I stitched together 10 – 15 for one panorama and the output file was around 350MB!
After that it’s a simple task of cropping the picture as there’s no way to make a completely rectangular image without losing data. I also do a bit of post processing on the images too because the images that come down from the Bungie website are a little washed out I find. I’ll probably write a little tutorial on how to do it with pretty pictures and everything. Look for that soon 
More panoramas after the fold.
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