By Tom Fotherby on February 1, 2004
XBox,Rally Driving,7/10 – January 2004
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I’m into racing games like burnout and as a consequence I initially found Colin Mcrae impossibly slow and difficult due to it’s realism – It simulates the driving of a real rally car so well that you have to be an expert rally driver.
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The reason I stuck at it was because codemasters were running a competition to win a 10000 pound Citroen Xsara car. Australia Stage 1 is now ingrained in my brain. I must have played the track 500 times to get my time of 258.333, sliding over the bridge in the Peugeot 205 using manual gearbox and the analog stick for gradual acceleration and breaking. Brake as late as possible but don’t floor it half way through a corner . Get the power on gently, any sideways driving or wheelspinning might look cool but it slows you down dramatically. Keep the back of the car under control and avoid wheelspin whenever possible. I could dictate the co-drivers comments. Competing for the prize was an awesome experience even if I only ended up 20th. I got a pretty good glimpse of the games depth but can you imagine how deep the competition winners went? I’ll answer for you – No – this game has depth that only hundreds of hours of play reveal.
Posted in Game Reviews |
By Tom Fotherby on January 1, 2004
XBox,Flight shoot-em-up,4/10 – December 2003
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This game reminded me of “star fox” on the N64 but with considerably more complex controls and hugely stunning visuals. The graphics are why I got this game, I wanted to see what an XBox was capable of and the weird alien landscapes provide a good jaw dropping demonstration.
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The game is a typical battle-your-way-to-the-boss-and then-find-the-bosses-weakness type of game but to avoid health reduction you need to understand a view things. Firstly you need to learn that you can boost backwards and forwards to circle around a boss so when his weapon faces you, you boost to a different side. Then your need to learn how to morph to the correct dragoon depending on whether you need speed, firepower or the lock-on ability. I can appreciate the depth the game has on it’s gendre but I didn’t find it very engaging. I managed to get to level 10 and kill the final 3 bosses but I didn’t follow the trippy storyline and I won’t play it again.
Posted in Game Reviews |
By Tom Fotherby on January 1, 2004
We rented a tiny one-up-one-down house in Egham near Stains. The novelty with this house was that it had stairs! we’d never had stairs before because we’ve lived in a London flat. Living in Egham was nice because I could cycle to work at Heathrow airport.
Upstairs
Downstairs
Posted in Journal |
By Tom Fotherby on December 28, 2003
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I feel a loyalty towards Nintendo since it was part my childhood diet and the gameCube seems to be in trouble so I decided I would rescue Nintendo by getting a gameCube for Kix’s birthday. I know she’ll like Zelda and I don’t feel like a proper gamer unless I can criticise Mario Kart Double Dash first hand.
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Posted in Toys |
By Tom Fotherby on December 25, 2003
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It was easy to setup and gave vastly improved reception. We don’t watch many of the extra channels except the music ones (TMF and the Hits) and ITV2. We sometimes have a laugh at the shopping channels.
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Posted in Toys |
By Tom Fotherby on December 1, 2003
XBox,Adventure,7/10 – November 2003
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This is an excellent game but I nearly didn’t complete it because it’s often really unclear what the-next-thing-to-do is. It’s not so much the doing, it’s more the figuring out how to do it in the first place (which really cheeses me off). You need to learn levels to get around quickly – it’s often a mission to get from A to B but the beautiful cel-shaded scenery is very cool.
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Cool is the right word for a lot of the game, all the characters dance constantly and the dance music keeps you going through the night. My favourite level is “Kibogaoka Hill” – I love grinding power cables over a sprawing shanty town. I completed the game in around 20 hours but get the feeling I’ve left a lot of stones unturned. I never understood the trick mecanism and didn’t get all the characters, graffiti souls, tags or speed runs – I just didn’t need to, it’s not Tony Hawks, it’s a speedy adventure game.
Posted in Game Reviews |
By Tom Fotherby on October 11, 2003
I wrote a “codebrowser” maintenance tool to make things a bit easier at work:
- A HTML syntax highlighter for C, SabreTalk and S390 assembler programs.
- A script that uses Graphviz to draw transaction path diagrams to show the program flow through a piece of code.
- A search tool to find components and files across various code-libraries.
- A website to link all the codebrowser components together.
Posted in Tech Journal |
By Tom Fotherby on October 1, 2003
XBox,Hack&Slash,5/10 – September 2003
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This game takes scenes from the 1st two LOTR’s films and turns them into interactive battles. Each scene blends with DVD film footage smoothly and impressively. I think they did a great job of doing what they intended i.e. creating a film/video game couple however I didn’t like it at all.
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Without having seen the two films I’m sure you’d have no idea what’s going on. I view it as lazy game design, i.e. there is no design, they just took a bunch of interesting scenes and converted them into a bunch of levels where you battle your way to the boss, find it’s weakness and beat it. There’s no lull in the action, you finish a scene and save the game and then go straight into the next scene. I’m wondering why I don’t like the constant action. I think it’s because it’s too linear, there’s no chance to explore the scenery, no options, no build-up and it’s all too rushed. Without time and freedom the game doesn’t add to the LOTR’s world and so is disappointing even though the technology of the programming is of a high standard.
Posted in Game Reviews |
By Tom Fotherby on October 1, 2003
Sci-Fi, 4/10 – September 2003
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A culture novel with a few good bits but otherwise a weird story cut into incoherent ribbons that kept skipping here and there just as the boring part of the latest skip was coming to an end. The main character is a depressing guy called Cheradenine Zakalwe, with many dark secrets and unhealed scars. He’s a non-citizen of the Culture, who has been employed by the Special Circumstances branch of the Culture’s Contact section as a mercenary, trying to influence conflicts on a variety of planets to be resolved in the direction the Culture prefers.
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As the main action of the story opens, Zakalwe has “retired” from SC. Diziet Sma, a Culture citizen who has been Zakalwe’s “control” in the past, is rudely summoned from her latest (quite pleasurable) assignment in order to find Zakalwe and recruit him for one more emergency mission (involving a situation with which Zakalwe was previously involved). The main problem for me was the many flashbacks of low-tech worlds outside the Culture proper: because that is where the stories are. (The Culture is a utopia, so at least to a first approximation, everyone is happy, and there isn’t much in the way of story-generating conflicts.)
Posted in Book Reviews | Tagged Ian M Banks, Sci-fi |
By Tom Fotherby on August 31, 2003
We had a hamster called Hantario. He got this name from a mix up by Chloe’s brother of Hamtaro, a cartoon hamster. He’s now gone to the big cage in the sky but his memory lives on. RIP Hanty.
Posted in Journal |
By Tom Fotherby on August 1, 2003
XBox,,5/10 – July 2003
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You have to get a piece of the arcade game action now that it’s possible on a console, I mean it’s a way of saving money isn’t it? This was the first game on the XBox to come packaged with a light-gun (a MadCatz Blaster) which is the only way to play it.
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I thought House of the Dead 2 was better but it’s ok because when you complete the game it unlocks a XBox version of House of the Dead 2.
Killing Zombies is a good way to de-stress after a day at the office. The HOTD series is notorious for having the worst voice acting ever, however HOTD III was actually disappointing; they improved the voice acting to the point that I’m not laughing anymore. This is a real loss in my opinion.
The big let down with this game is the light gun configeration screen which seems to routinely crash my XBox so that I laugh every time I reach for the reset button (Microsoft went through some perverted though process which must have gone: “our system will be so robust that we don’t need a reset button”).
Posted in Game Reviews |
By Tom Fotherby on August 1, 2003
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I don’t have a mobile phone yet and I often get asked why?
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I like being totally cut off from the world knowing that I can’t talk to anyone or anyone talk to me. I could get one and leave it off but then I may as well save money and not get one. Mobile phones invade privacy and let people evade meeting times and put an end to set meeting places. Mobiles have transformed the world into a louder, more obnoxious, more annoying place!
Posted in Journal |
By Tom Fotherby on August 1, 2003
Rodrigo gave me the idea to make Chloe two necklaces out of a LED and a Capacitor:
Posted in Tech Journal |
By Tom Fotherby on August 1, 2003
Sci-Fi, 9/10 – July 2003
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This book is the second in the series of Banks’ Culture novels, set in a futuristic human/machine symbiotic society. Player of Games submerges itself in the society of the Game Players, those whose soul occupation is to play games to the best of their abilities, formulating new strategies, quite akin to champion chess players. Bored with success, Gurgel – The Player of Games – travels to the Empire of Azad, cruel and incredibly wealthy, to try their fabulous game. This is a game so complex, so like life itself, that the winner becomes emperor.
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‘Player’ is quite technology intensive. We learn much about hyperspace, fields, and Banks’ own obsession with Three-Letter-Acronyms – GSV, MSV, LSV, ROU, GCU, LOU, all ships, all broken down into classes as well. The game world that the hero visits is a backwards planet but with many traits that I think Banks might see in earth’s future. This book is utterly brilliant as well as more than a little disturbing.
Posted in Book Reviews | Tagged Ian M Banks, Sci-fi |
By Tom Fotherby on August 1, 2003
With a bit of imagination there’s loads of food one can enjoy on a diet. Welcome to the unreal meal:
Breakfast:
- A Ethereal egg on ghost toast
- A Nothing muffin or a None bun (served with begone butter).
- or how about some Fantasy fruit?
Lunch:
- A Fake steak with zip chips (or Mystical mash)
- A Ghost roast (either scam lamb, sham ham or missin’ chicken)
- Black Hole Spag Bol or Mystic meatballs
- Spectral stew with dream dumplings
Pudding:
- Air eclair
- zero belly jelly
- Fake cake
Tea-Time:
- Temporary tea or con coffee (minus milk & invisible sugarballs)
- Calorie-free cream-tea: “Non-scone, unseen cream & scam jam”
- Tease cheese
- Wisp Crisps
Drinks:
- Nada lager
- Joke coke
- Phantom fanta
- Clear beer
The phantom food Poem by Jerry Bridge-Butler:
Whenever you’re hungry or famished,
and all the food in your fridge has vanished.
Dream up a great feast to consume
with my secret ingredient: Vacuum.
Don’t laugh, its not pie in the sky,
There’s a host aplenty not there to try.
Mix 5ml of noise and with the breeze
and that’s how you make tease cheese.
Put a void in the oven and bake,
and what you’ll get is fake cake.
Kneed faux dough in with the air
and you’ll have an eclair that’s not there.
One of the best meals to try is ghost roast,
but you’ll need your imagination the most.
You must find a whole pint of blank space,
before you can bow down and say Grace.
But the rewards are really worth the wait,
when the scam lamb comes out on a plate.
Or if you think you’d prefer paltry poultry,
the missing chicken is one you should see.
And before your mind goes doolally
finish it all off with no belly jelly
If all this is too much to swallow,
Don’t try this last mint –
Its hollow.
Posted in Journal |
