I had the pleasure of playing the Mirror’s Edge demo last night, I’ve been meaning to download it but forgot. I’m glad I did, the graphics look great, whilst not the most detailed around they have a lovely style to them, very clean and sharp, the city beyond the rooftops is suitably modelled too, towering buildings as far as the eye can see.

The gameplay is different, jumping and sliding becomes natural quite quickly and while you’re bounding over the rooftops you get into the flow of the game quite easily. One of the problems I had though was the margin for error, it seemed pretty small, jumping from one roof to another can have you falling a lot. I think this is mainly down to the FOV, you have to judge correctly how close your feet are to the edge when jumping (unless you look at them) something which makes the experience feel less tactile. I’m sure though that with more play time I’d get used to it and be able to make jumps flawlessly.

It’s very satisfying to run and jump your way out of harms way, though in the demo the readiness for the enemies to shoot at you was a little off-putting, though again, I get the feeling that disarming enemies and taking them out will get easier with practice. Either way I will be getting this game, if only to say I tried something new.

On another note, don’t you love the soundtrack, created for DICE by Lisa Miskovsky it’s fresh and different, there’s a CD out too with remixes from Paul Van Dyk, Armand Van Helden and more. Some of the best music I’ve heard all year. Yet again, another video.

I forgot how much I loved Gears of War, playing Gears 2 brings back all the awesome memories, sadly the beauty of the graphics is lost on me now, Gears 2 looks great, but partially due to the choice of scenes in Gears 2 and me being spoilt by all the latest games I didnt find myself saying “omg this game is beautiful” over and over as I did with the first.

What I did find myself saying was “omg this game is awesome” the action in gears is great and whilst keeping the general tactics and feel of the game the same, they’ve ramped up the action, there’s now a lot more going on and it doesn’t feel as much that it’s you against the world. Maybe a bad thing, I missed the atmosphere from the first game, but change is good. I didn’t make the following trailer, but I just like to put videos up, and I’m testing my other servers to see what kind of speed they get.

Not that this website gets enough hits (or ever will) for stats to be important or even relevant, but as usual this site is acting as a testing ground, I’ve been looking for a stats program that looks nice and has everything I need and assumed I did not have access to install stuff on my server, however, it appears I have shell access and set about installing the lovely AWSstats as I’ve used that before.

Took a little getting used to but I got it working perfectly, set up the hourly cron job to update the files and then found the fantastic JAWStats, which is a quick modification to make AWStats look and play very nicely, take a look, there’s not much in the way of statistics there at the moment as my host was only keeping a few days of stats at a time, now the stats program is up and running I would have continuous stats from now on, and I’ll be installing this stat package wherever I go as its probably the tidiest most complete one I’ve found.

I downloaded the Tomb Raider Underworld demo to give it a try. Below is a summary of the main bits (mainly made the video just to test out this new FLV player and it’s always nice to have a bit of editing practice), there was a lot of falling and figuring out cut out. Despite not having really played a Tomb Raider game before I kind of liked it, it was enjoyable, despite the bugs and problems. Legs moving strangely, tigers running through the ground, dodgy camera and a control system that makes you wrestle with the camera. Ooh and nice tits graphics 8)

After all this time working with websites and domains I’ve finally done something I’ve always wanted to but never really looked into much, I’ve forwarded one of my subdomains to a different server, not a massive achievement in itself, but it makes it easier to implement other features in the future and means that I can add redundancy to important projects, for example having a mirror for what may be an important link so that if this server gets too slow or goes down the other one is available to serve that link, for now the only subdomain pointing to another server is vandar.csignal.org, the space there is actually free.

I also decided to write a little guide to illustrate the above too, which I have done, but have not yet finalised the visual aspects of it, so for now it’s here, in very plain form.

In other news I was shopping the other day and decided to bring out the TOFF in me and actually try some caviar, I’ve heard so much about it, you know all those posh and rich types in movies ordering caviar and such. It wasn’t exactly expensive though, so maybe I’m not experiencing the full expensive caviar taste. I had it on Ritz crackers with Philadelphia, and it was… Errr… Different, I definitely wouldn’t choose to eat it, but I wouldn’t call it tasty, it just tasted fishy. Maybe next time I’ll go for the more expensive stuff and see what all the hoo-haa is about 😀 Tomorrow; Lobster.

Floorhorse is claiming more lives every second of the day, as you can see the domain has been registered, not by myself, I was too much of a pussy and have already registered way too many domains recently. Including another today, I finally bought my actual name and ill be using it as email, probably will not put a website up, not at least until I have got all my other domains back.

Now to set about making a floorhorse generator!

Edit: Floorhorse collection

Following on from the last post I registered another domain and basically used exactly the same code but changed the images and sound, so now we have a lovely Random DOH!, I prefer the family fortunes one, it just feels more slick, I might add a background to the new one though, just light doughnuts or something.

I’ve also abandoned another one of my website ideas because it just seems like it would take either too much effort and/or too many people to actually be involved. There’s also the question of the subject material (Aion), will it be popular enough to warrant the effort, or even the registration of the domain name. I think I may still do something similar in general rather than specifically Aion.

And then of course there’s the “you know what really grinds my gears” site which Anthony seems to love the idea of, and to be honest if I can get the layout right and a catchy name it might just be worthwhile, but as with most of my projects it doesn’t really have widespread appeal and is not the kind of site you would visit daily, dam I should have kept nupo’s old format with quirky news (it seemed to kinda work), it’s a shame that at nupo.org is incorporeal at the moment, I would totally bring that back now.

P.S. Floor horse is the new ceiling cat. 😀

Have just finished learning how to do a bit of flash, which was nice. I was trying to make a simple site which played a sound on clicking, as I knew nothing of flash I tried to find ways to do it via javascript, but that turned out to be very lame. I also tried a free button creator which worked (after lots of tinkering because of some random error) then when I uploaded it there was a big “unregistered” banner all over it… DOH!

Then I found Swish, which is a nice and easy flash creator of which there is a barely limited free trial… Again after having some random problems with the thing I managed to output a decent looking and working piece of flash. I then coded up a bit of HTML, added some “favourite links” and there you have it, thesurveysaid.com. Broll-o pads!