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);

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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.

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Just a short post, but I’ve added a plugin which tracks stuff I do around the web like on Facebook, Youtube and bookmarks I make, thought it might be halpful to those few who read my blog to keep up to date with other stuff I do 🙂

You can get to it by clicking the link at top there ^ that says “lifestream” or by following this link: http://chaoticsignal.com/lifestream 🙂 Or as I have just enabled in the menu on the right somewhere. Not that anyone cares 😮

Anyone else not like the defrag tool in vista, not only does it not show you any kind of visual representation of the fragmentation of your disk or the fragmentation percentage, but it seems to take forever to complete it’s run, infact, on my laptop [250GB HDD] even after leaving it run for 10+ hours it have not once finished or said it was done de-fragmenting. Even after running another defrag tool it still would never finish. So here’s a little alternative, if you want to have a defrag done in a timeframe that suits you and not Zeus himself then give AUSlogics defrag a go, it gives you a visual image of the data on your disk, completes quickly and even tells you an estimate of the % it will speed up your disk when it has finished it’s run. Best of all it’s free! 😀 Try out their registry defrag tool too.

Yep, that’s right, get used to looking at air vents and dingy enclosed areas if you’re going to play Mirror’s Edge. In my older post I wsa very impressed with the Mirror’s Edge demo, it looked and felt brilliant. However the full game for me was a big disappointment;

Firstly you can forget leaping from rooftop to rooftop with grace and a feeling of ‘flow’, after the first few levels you’re pretty much confined to subways, sewers, air vents and cramped buildings full of the worst AI EA have on offer. The game seemed to tout this ‘flow’ thing as a way to enjoy the game, using runner vision to guide you effortlessly making you feel free. That would be great if runner vision actually worked but after the first few levels on rooftops it’s mostly lacking, obvious anyway or completely misleading. For example, there was on [cramped] bit where runner vision indicated I should go up some pipes, after a good while trying to make the jump from where the pipes were I had a good look around and found it actually possible to do it another way. Nice.

The other major problem is the margin for error, after I had played the demo I conluded it was me being a noob that caused me to drop off rooftops like a lemming, alas the entire game is filled with relentless and unforgiving jumps. There are places where you could make is straight away but they were trumped by jumps I had to try more than 3 times, there was even one instance where I had to try a jump way over 50x and when I finally made it i had done nothing different than the million times before, yet somehow made it with room to spare. This leads me on to another problem: Consistency the game seems to decide on it’s own which jumps are high enough for you to have to make a hard landing, which falls mean you “die” and normal landings. There are many examples throughout the game where I could fall from a really high platform and land fine and ones where I jumped from a low platform and either did a hard (ow it hurts) or it all went dark and I had to start again.

The other major problem I had with it is combat, it was completely and utterly superfluous. I can count the times I had to actually fight anyone on my fingers, having guns was completely pointless and the AI for the most part was just the following algorithm;

10 Get closer
20 Shoot
30 Goto 10

The bits I found good were the first few levels where Faith was placed on rooftops and where they deployed unarmed enemies that could jump across rooftops after you. That’s it really.

If you liked the demo of Mirror’s Edge then keep that, do not buy the full game because you’ve got some of the best levels right there. Rent it maybe, but you won’t rent it for long either because the game is so short. As in my first post about Mirror’s Edge I applaud the uniqueness of the game, but I feel that something went wrong right around the time the developers decided to swap beautiful outdoor cityscapes, leaping from roof to roof with dark, sewers and enclosed spaces.

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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I couldn’t think of 24 reasons so here are 24/2 reasons why I’m really not liking the latest series of 24, if you haven’t watched any of it yet you may want to look away now;

1: CTU – It’s gone, but people like Chloe have just been given new bodies, everyone in CTU has an almost direct analog in the FBI.

2: Kim Bauer – I miss her… Errr… Acting!

3: Tony Almeida – Not anywhere near as uber as he should be at the moment, seems like he’s just a plot device to bring Jack back.

4: Jack – 24 has become way too focused on him and he’s such a martyr!

5: Moles – There’s always a mole!

6: Terrorist threat – It’s Die Hard 4, no deadly weaponized virus, no bombs, nothing scary.

7: New President – Emotional range of a wet flannel.

8: CIP firewall – Surely there’s a contingency plan in case this is breached? If not… WTF!?

9: Dialogue – “We got bumped, it came from the kernel”, “The kernel, but that’s protected” LOL!! Almost as bad as a previous series’ “It looks like someone is trying to corrupt the Internet”.

10: Tony again – Who was conveniently “whisked away by emergency services” but no one noticed and Tony managed to escape these emergency personnel with them thinking he was dead? What, that makes no sense whatsoever.

11: Whitehouse – Total change, no one left from the old series’. I miss Novak and pals.

12: Tony AGAIN – Why did his picture have to slowly come up on the screen?! We all knew who it was!

Anyone got anymore?

Stumbled across this on Youtube earlier, it’s a radio controlled car that drives up walls! First I thought it was a joke. But no, these things work by sucking air through the bottom sticking to the wall. I want one! But it’s totally only a fad, the fascination would last all of 10 minutes, if I can get one for less than £10 I might, anything over is definitley not worth it, same with those radio controlled helicopters. The cars were also on Top Gear here, quite funnny.

I have been bugging Tony to play some halo 3 and we finally got round to it again. It’s as much fun as it ever was, but there’s still those moments where you shout in disbelief as you can’t figure out what on earth just happened. There’s also the cries of joy when you throw a sticky grenade, it bounces off a wall and attaches itself firmly to the enemy’s babymaker (picture of that soon if it’s still on the box).

No Halo 3 post would be complete without a picture of us doing what we do best… “Hoggin’ the Hog”, those noobs didn’t stand a chance (game details);

I was a huuuuge fan of Loco Roco on the PSP, have been toying with the idea of getting another one (would be my third). In the meantime though I found this lovely minigame based on Loco Roco, the music brings back the memories!