The Museum Of Modern Thinking

Nothing much to report, I’ve just added my PlayStation Portable ID to the footer, have a look.

And yes, I know I’m not much of a gamer :p

If, like me, you’re on the T-Mobile network (formerly known as One to No-one), they’ve teamed up with Blockbuster for a great night in offer, presumably to counter Orange Wednesdays.

Simply text “night in” (without the quotes, natch) to 3000, and you’ll be sent a code. Go to your local Blockbuster store, show it to the chap / chapette behind the counter and you’ll get a film and a game (or two films), some cola, a bag of popcorn and a bag of sweets for just £5 – for two nights.

There are some restrictions, namely the code is only good for Mondays to Thursdays, but if you rent on a Thursday, you can return the film late on Saturday. Also, the cola, popcorn and sweets are all Blockbuster’s own-branded, but I can recommend the popcorn

Further details on T-Mobile’s Night In microsite, if I wasn’t so busy painting my house, I’d be taking advantage of this…

Just because I think it’s fun

Get your Portable ID!

Add me for some Tekken 6 matches where you’ll probably kick my arse, everyone else does!

Well, I never finished Nija Gaiden II on the Xbox 360 as I found it rock-hard, but this is a clever piece of advertising:

H/T to Kotaku

Seriously, you think you’ve seen it all, and yet people still come up with creative, amazing ways of entertaining everyone. This, from the Swedish techno-pop duo called Rymdreglage, is a real “retro” blast. If you grew up with loading games off tape, you’ll enjoy it:

H/T to Kotaku

Invincible Tiger is an upcoming game for PS3 and XBox 360, and the trailer below is great – it does an excellent job of capturing the 70′s Kung Fu film feel, which I remember well. My favourite beginning to a Kung Fu movie was Jackie Chan’s Snake In The Eagle’s Shadow, where he does a snake form over the titles, very cool. Anyhoo, here’s the trailer:

I reckon I’ll take a look at the game, looks like a bit of fun

I recently bought (ok, on the first day it came out) Soul Calibur IV on my Xbox 360. I used to play a lot of Soul Calibur II at work with a good friend and colleague, and enjoying handing her arse to her on a regular basis (hi, Victoria ). After a l-o-n-g drought of decent fighting games on the Xbox 360 (i.e. no Tekken), I was looking forward to it.

I’m pleased to say I’m not disappointed in it. Ok, so it’s missing a couple of gameplay modes, some fighters are overpowered, some are cheap, some are cheap and overpowered (I’m looking at you, Apprentice from The Force Unleashed), but it’s still a rollicking good time. I’m currently enjoying making my son cry by battering his wizened little Yoda into smush with my Kilik character – it’s fun

What I’m enjoying a lot, and what I didn’t expect to, is the character creation mode. You can create either male or female characters, based on existing fighting styles, and then go nuts accessorising them with hats, monocles(!), neck wear, underwear(!!), head gear, spiky shoulder pads, metal greaves, ninja tabi, etc. It’s a lot of fun, and practical too: some items carry points to be added to your character’s traits, e.g. Power, Impact and Gauge. Attributes include useful things like Nullify Ring Out so you can’t be ringed out (oo-er), or Soul Vamp which takes your opponent’s health and giives it to you on a successful hit. These attributes are used in the Tower Of Souls mode in which you battle up a tower to get more items to improve your character so they can battle higher up the tower, ad infinitum (or at least until floor 60). The extra attributes can also be used in two-player versus matches, which makes for a lot of fun.

Anyhoo, it was mentioned by Victoria that she and her boyfriend Daz both created likenesses of themselves in the game, so I thought I’d do the same:

It’s meant to be me:

My son’s Gandalf (in his earlier years), and his The Bad Guy:

My custom Ivy and Hellacious (hey, shut up, it’s art! )

Ok, ok, so the last three are a bit questionable, but there you go Here’s what someone with far more talent than me can achieve (i.e. M. freakin’ Bison!):

After playing the trial game of N+ on my XBox 360, I had such a blast I had to buy the whole thing from XBox Live Arcade – which I rarely do. Myself and my son had a great time playing as rivals on the trial, so I was looking forward to beating him on the full game as well (yes, yes, I’m Competitive Dad, I know).

So I get home, pay the money to MS for my points, download the full version and play for a bit. My wife and son come home, I switch XBox off, have dinner, switch XBox back on – and I’m screwed. The dreaded RROD shows up, putting paid to victory over my eight year old son, and also stuffing the hope for some quality Bioshock time while my wife’s away with work. Man, that makes me sound like a geek, but there ya go

Anyhoo, the returns procedure from MS is very simple, but I guess they’ve had the practice, what with their 19% RROD failure rates I logged a call on the XBox website, got emailed a UPS label, stuck XBox in a box, put label on box and dropped it off at a local UPS depot – done. I’m now going cold turkey, which probably explains my blog postings I’ll get my XBox back in time for my birthday I hope, and Devil May Cry 4 is on my list – the demo of that was also great, I even got used to playing as Nero…

One area I am rather happy with in the XBox 360 Fall Update is support for DivX / XVid. After applying the update tonight, I then attempted to play (via Media Center on the Xbox) some DivX movies I had. Much to my dismay, I kept on getting a message saying the codec was missing. After much faffing about with trying to discover the DivX codec used (for it to work on the XBox it needs to be encided with DivX 5 or higher), I hit the XBox forums.

Eventually, I found the answer in a thread, and I thought I’d post up my steps here in case it assists someone:

1. Installed Fall update (of course)
2. Installed Optional Media Update (Games blade – All Games – Optional Media Update)
3. On my PC, set up Media Sharing in Windows Media Player 11 (Library – Media Sharing…) – it recognised my 360 as being present
4. On the 360, on Media – Videos, hit X to change Source to Computer (unsurprisingly, it recognised my PC)
5. Marvel at the list of movies from PC on your 360 (not 100% if you can “go higher” in the folder tree from My Videos) – play one!

It’s rather good to be able to stream my DivX files from PC to XBox so I can watch them on a proper TV, it’s certainly something I could have done with during my recent convalescence following my (not my fault!) car crash That aside, I can now turn my laptop into a DVR with the help of a TV tuner USB stick, GB-PVR (PVR software) and an aerial splitter. I always miss a few shows that I like (My Name Is Earl, Scrubs, Dispatches, etc.), so this will be a good solution until we upgrade all the TV-related gubbins.

I’m a big John Woo fan, but to be honest I do find his Hollywood films a bit overdone – I believe he was ruined slightly by Hollywood, and it took some of the nuttiness of his style, although Broken Arrow came close to his earlier films.

I much prefer his earlier work, films like God of Gamblers, The Killer and Hard Boiled. All three films star Chow Yun Fat, one of the largest Asian movie stars, and in Hard Boiled, he played an Inspector nick-named Tequila, working with an undercover cop to take down some gun-running mobsters.

Being a John Woo film, it is filled with slo-mo gunplay, slo-mo pigeons, unspeakably evil bad guys (although Mad Dog, though obviously Mad, had honour) and lots of two-gun leaps and rolls. I remember seeing Hard Boiled in a cinema in London’s Chinatown (the Prince Charles cinema, I think), and loving every minute of it’s hyper-kinetic balletic ballistics. Being young and impressionable, I guess some part of me wanted to be Chow Yun Fat…

Fifteen years later, thanks to next-gen consoles (and high-specced PCs), talented developers and the involvement of certain people, we have Midway publishing John Woo’s Stranglehold, where you take the role of Inspector Tequila and what can be best described as a sequel to Hard Boiled. I could give plot details, but what’s more fun is the gunplay, the dives, the totally outrageous action, Tequila-time (ok, ok, bullet time), the cutscenes, it’s all good Here’s the trailer via YouTube showing some great gameplay footage, as it will explain it much better than I can:

So, the demo was available last week sometime, so I downloaded it and had a go. Loved it. LOVED IT. Just total mayhem, jumping around, doing my best to take down the bad guys as I’m flying through the air / sliding on the floor / running up railings. The Tequila bombs are a lot of fun as well – the more stylish kills you get, the fuller the Tequila bomb gauge gets. When certain icons are highlighted, nifty abilities come into play: Health heals you, natch; Precision shot lets you target certain parts of enemies’ anatomy from a distance; Barrage just lets you cut loose for a period of time with unlimited; and the final bomb is sort of a smart bomb, sending Tequila spinning around with his guns blazing, taking out all the bad guys – with slo-mo pigeons in the background, of course.

Just a tip – you have to play through the demo twice (without powering off the console) to unlock the last two Tequila bombs and the extra difficulty levels. There’s also one-shot-kill pistols in the demo, along with some SMGs hidden in the last section behind a broken fence on the left-hand side.

In summation, I’ll be buying it – the demo has pulled me in good and proper, and the game’s a lot of bloody fun

So, playing Guitar Hero II on my Xbox 360. Having no natural talent whatsoever, I used the code to unlock all the songs. I’ve played (or tried to), Sweet Child Of Mine, The Trooper, Misrlou and Freebird (love that song ) I naturally drop notes all over the shop, but hey, I’m rocking out, having fun.

Flicking down through all the extra songs, I happen across “Less Talk More Rokk” [sic]. I like the sound of the sample, so I start playing it. Great tune, I’m a big fan of Electro, so this Electro / Metal crossover is just dandy. Check it out if you have Guitar Hero II. I’m off to find out more about the band Freezepop, and perhaps have a minute’s silence for the passing of my previous favourite song, Woman by Wolfmother.

Then again, just one more go on Woman…

I’m still having a lot of fun playing Dead Rising on the XBox360 – it’s a very deep game, with lots of different ways to tackle a task or two. I’ve finally taken care of some pesky snipers after some trial and error: rather than mix up a QuickStep juice, or arm myself to the teeth, I just hid in a store, waited until the snipers came in (stupid snipers!) and had at them with my baseball bat

 (Note: I’m fully aware that this is a game, I will not be battering people to death with a baseball bat in a shopping centre, though most people do appear like zombies in them, dawdling along with no purpose, hope or clue. I’m looking forward to the day when using cattle-prods on people like that will be ok )

 Anyway, I’ve just tried another mission (A Strange Group) where you have to go and sort out the leader of an apocalyptical cult, but I’m having trouble getting through his minions - I’ll just have One More Go ™

Well, finally made the jump from my PS2 to an XBox 360 after playing one this week. That, and my wife buying a HD tv and having no “HD source” (geddit?). Suffice to say, I’m impressed and even had Jacky playing Burnout:Revenge and laughing at the crashes

I went to GameStation in Derby for the deal, trading in my PS2, games, controllers, and half a kidney. GameStation have a fantastic deal at the moment where you can get an XBox 360 plus any three games, plus one selected game from a choice of five or six. The cost? A incredibly inexpensive £340 – bargain.

 I’ve got Gears Of War, Burnout:Revenge, Dead Rising and Lego Star Wars: The Original Trilogy – loving all of ‘em. Stay tuned for further thoughts on it from a ex-PS2 chap…