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 more…

This is a quick post just to add the video below and to link to some screenshots I’ve taken from the beta. I’ve been playing for a few hours and getting closer to level 10 (when you can get your wings I believe) I’m having fun and enjoying the combo system and the general feel of the game, it’s definitley well put together and thought out. Now I have to decide whether to play the Asian version which is out on Thursday or to wait another 6 months for the EU version. Peace out.

So as you may know from some of my other posts I have been looking forward to playing Aion for some time, there is now a Chinese open beta out and I’ve just got it downloaded, installed and patched it with the English patch. Most of the text is in English and it plays quite well. I need to get grinding though because it’s not fun being lvl 1 and using the same technique over and over lol. So far though I’m a little disappointed with the graphics, they don’t look as good as I thought they would… This is me playing at level 1 😛

Yeo that’s right, there’s nothing more time consuming than coding php and html for random stuff that no-one is ever going to see. But again that’s half the point of this site, to test things out and to see what is possible. It’s also fun to learn. Using this site and my own curiosity I have learned a great deal about php, flash, multimedia and more. I just wonder what use it will all be in the end.

The first thing of note is the directory script @ http://media.csignal.org I was only using this to store the files, but now it’s easy to browse them all too. The script originally used JavaScript code to pop FLV videos up and play them on the page. However I recoded the thing to generate an actual html page with the FLV inside it, I also modified it to play MP4 extension too. So now anyone can watch any of the FLV/MP4 files on the domain without having to download them and I don’t have to make an individual page for each file. All I do is upload the file and the script generates the html code of a page for me, oh I also used mod_rewrite to make the URIs short and make sense. Check it out if you want 😛

I also coded a quick index script for small images, namely sprites, I had a small collection and felt like uploading them and displaying them in a visual fashion. It’s extremely basic and all I really did was take a simple file listing script and put image tags in it, no formatting so it the page just wraps the images as needed. Very simple and very effective 😀 Finally I implemented a proxy script so I can browse sites without disclosing my ip address. I know there are proxy servers all over the place, but at least this way I know where it’s going to be and I can customize it as I wish.

Ever been to KFC and loved their popcorn chicken? Me too, so I was jumping when I found these popcorn chicken style nugget things in my local Iceland. They are shamelessly called “Chicken Pop Pops” and the packaging has a more than passing resemblance to KFC, it even says “SFC” on the box. Well the marketing worked because I bought a whole bunch of them, the best part about it is that they’re only £1 for the same number of nuggets you get in a “regular” box at KFC.

Just pop them in the oven for 10 minutes and they are yours to devour, they’re not exactly like KFC popcorn chicken but they’re close enough for me. They’re basically half the price too. Goes great with ice cold Pepsi/Coca-Cola. Be warned though, through a combination of scrummyness and value they are hard to quit. If you’re having trouble quitting popcorn chicken call our toll free number.

I’m not exactly sure why, but I dug the Dreamcast out of storage and hooked it up today. Last time I tried it wouldn’t work, just a blank screen, it did exactly the same thing this time, no video and no sound. Apparently there was some kind of gunk in the s-video prongs, once cleaned it worked a treat!

Had a quick game of SF Alpha 3, a few games of Soul Calibur and had a crack at Chaos Field, which reminded me how hard shootemups can be. It’s a joy to have the Dreamcast back out again, the only problems I have are that it has faded into some ugly beige colour in its old age and I forgot how big the DC jewel cases are. I set about moving them into smaller compact cases and they now take up one quarter of the space they used to. Made good use of my new printer too, printing off new labels 😀

I think I might have a punt around ebay and see if there are any Dreamcast bargains to be had. Wow, already had a look and there are loads, pads for £5, a rumble and VMU for £3! It’s almost too good to be true. I think I’ll post up some kind of Dreamcast tribute some time soon, it was one of the best consoles ever 🙂

Additionally, this guy > you.

This is aimed at those who build or fix PCs, their own or others. I would like to know what your hardware failures have been so we know which brands are doing well and which components people should avoid. I will be collating at least two lists; One for top product failures and the other for top components that fail.

All you have to do is post a comment on this article with the hardware failures you have experienced along with the make of the devices that failed (no registration required), I’ll post the first one below so you know what to expect. Use a real email address so I can get back to you if you win and arrange the prize to be sent out. Please limit the failures to a maximum of 10.

The competition will run for at least 1 – 2 weeks (depending on how many people respond) but feel free to add your failures even after the prize has been claimed.

There are a few stipulations to this contest;
» I will only ship the prize to the UK, USA and most of Europe.
» You must detail at least one piece of hardware including the manufacturer.
» I need to get at least 100 people to respond to get anything meaningful, so if you can spread the word about the “competition” that would be great. Therefore;
» The winner cannot be announced until there are at least 100 respondents.

Good luck everyone and look out for the results.

I was snooping through Google Webmaster tools I was intrigued by their 404 error page helper which tries to add useful links to your error pages. So I decided to set about making my own error page which was as helpful as possible, I know that it’s not the most popular or important site, but it’s nice to do things like this just to see how it works and to get practice.

Main features;
» Dropped the ‘404’ as a lot of people don’t know or care what ‘404’ is.
» The message ‘Page not found’ displayed in French, German, Japanese, Russian and Italian, it also links to Google translate pages to translate the error page.
» Links to popular pages.
» Links to the latest posts.
» Search within the blog and the entire site through Google custom search.
» A link to the archives.

I understand some of it may be superfluous, but I tried to keep is as simple looking as possible whilst adding as much function as possible. You can have a look at how it works here.

I also posted up the 3360×1050 wallpapers in a post so it would be easier for people to find, check it out here.

Here’s one I made earlier, I was going to edit up a video of different levels and stuff, but in the end I decided “fuck it” and just made a 20 minute video from raw footage. So here is a full 20 minutes of unedited Fear 2. Note that it is a little dark (I did already brighten the video a lot) as Fear 2 is a very dark game. I’m afraid though for now we’re stuck with Google video’s version as Youtube won’t let me upload more than 10 minues and for some reason my main rig still won’t encode any FLV, there is an AVI version though at ~170mb. I may add some narration at some point. Edit: Got a great quality flv version up now;

Download (SD): AVI 174MB (640×400/1.25mbps)