Tech, Gaming and Bile!
video games
feeding my frankenstein – spore creature creator demo leaked
Sep 14th
The net is awash with news of EA accidently (or was it?) leaking the demo for Spore creature creator tool onto their site before a webmaster noticed and yoinked it back off again. The place I first heard about this was over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun whose thread is full of gigantor-dongs and and frilly things!
Sadly, it didn’t do much to stop the file from being shared as it’s all over the torrents and many sites have it available for direct download now!
One such link is here at FragLand.
I tried installing it on my vista business machine, only for it to bork out and demand DX9. A quick install of that and it worked without a problem.
DX9 redist link.
After a few minutes of playing around, I can see this game is going to be masses of fun… Say hello to Dublavay *waves*
You can take pics of your creations and it has built in video recording – both of which work without so much as a dent on system performance!
There’s a few options for video and photo size, so don’t forget to have a play about with them. Using the default settings my 43 second clip running at 320×240 (very small, I know) came in at 11mb.
It has no problems with alt-tabbing out and appears to be running alright on my work machine using its integrated graphics – sure it’s not pretty but it works. I’ll take some screen caps at home on my gaming rig to see how much better the graphics are on that.
Even though the demo has only a fraction of the options available to you in the full blown title, there’s enough here to keep you amused for a while. If the rest of the game is this good, I’m going to be plumbed into spore for quite some time to come!
Please send me links to your own creations, the best of which I’ll feature on the site 
For now, I’ll leave you with some video footage of my adorable frankenbeast…
If you fancy adding him to your world, download this file and save it to your creatures folder. Podcast subscribers will be getting him automatically through the feed 
Then, of course a trip to youtube unearths the really disturbed…
Goatse sees all. And apparently it sees nothing but massive cock monsters, there goes any shred of maturity from the PC gaming community.
One complaint.. I don’t get to choose my name, it automatically pics your username that was used to log into windows with – bit of a potential security issue there!
And the final edit for the day… a couple more creations!
Here we have nafaal – download it
And meet Zatri – Download it
And of course, the final videos
games republic panel event
Sep 14th
On the 28th of May, I attended a panel discussion event hosted by Game Republic at the carriage works in Leeds.
The panel of developers, publishers and journalists touched on subjects such as casual games/gamers, girl gamers and the future of gaming as well as taking a few questions from the audience.
I only recorded the panel section, and I’m sorry for the occasional blurry picture as my camcorder is a pile of shite.
After the event, I got to socialise with a number of people including developers from Rockstar Leeds and the guys that run the Orange games portal. Definately worth attending.
I would have posted this sooner but it turned out to be the video from hell that simply didn’t want to encode >.<
After plenty of messing about I finally managed to get the panel discussion in full and a brief clip reel that includes the introduction of the panel members plus a few choice clips.
In the media section at the bottom of this post, you can download the full copy of the video, or you can subscribe to the feed and get the monster 500mb file direct to your podcast catcher.
Drop your comments, creations and whatnot into here:
drop.io: simple private sharing
Media:
stream: Boobtube |
Download: WMV | MP4
subscribe: wmv feed | mp4 feed
how easy is it to hack your PSP?
Sep 14th
Well, my pandoras battery finally turned up and I had a 1gb memory stick kicking around.. time to show how easy it is to hack your PSP to run a custom firmware and open up its capabilities.
Blast Processing has a fantastic step by step guide, I used it get my flashing card set up and to find plenty of little apps for use with your newly hacked PSP.
Drop your comments, creations and whatnot into here:
drop.io: simple private sharing
Media:
stream: Boobtube |
Download: WMV | MP4
subscribe: wmv feed | mp4 feed
buttonmasher test 12
Sep 14th
mainstream media gets it wrong again!
Sep 14th
Well, I asked a few people “how long before the news media bullshits about GTA4?” since the overly hyped release on Tuesday/wed morning.
You know what? I didn’t have to wait long at all.
Reading a copy of the metro on my wed morning trip to hell work, what do I find?
A story about a stabbing that took place in a queue for the game.. Since the metro is run by the daily hatemail this didn’t surprise me one bit – check out the original item here.
Of course, with the prevailence of the “copy and paste” journalism that appears to be rife in the mainstream, we get to see the same story crop up in the times, the bbc, the telegraph… even the register published this story, for shame!
A pretty sad state of affairs, I thought this practice was only meant to exist in the “unprofessional” realm of blogs, not the university trained and real journalism focused establishment!
Of course, you will always find exceptions to the rule and this one is provided by the Croyden Guardian in this story.
Not only were they first to branch away from the “they were in the queue” slant spouted by the sloppy workers above, they also show why you need to speak to more than one “eye witness” due to how many different versions of events you get from the very people who all watched the exact same incident. As can be seen further down when they recall another eye witness report that a man came out of a nearby pub and proceeded to stab someone in the queue.
A slight modicum of journalism would have uncovered these discrepencies and the story being read by many would be a truer representation of what actually happened that night. Instead, we find ourselves in the rediculous position of getting more information from the comments section than from the article above it!
Surely it’s your job to investigate this information before you put the story to press. Are the people in the comments recounting a more accurate version of what happened? how about the police, what did they have to say?
Instead we see a willfull glee to jump onto anything involving violence with video games tenuously close to the event without even stopping to get any facts yourselves. You bandwagon jumping, scapegoating tosspots.
And they still have the gaul to claim they are better than blogging.. Here’s an uncomfortable truth for you:
You’re no better than bloggers yet, because of your prominence and position of trust you often end up being worse.
DS crap fountain – educating the new to gaming
Sep 14th
OK, so the DS has been the hands down winner in this generation of consoles, if you disagree may I point you to the 64million consoles sold in just about 3 years (let’s put this in perspective, the ps2 sold 120 million in 7 years).
And of course, anything popular will get a steady stream of crap titles flooding out the decent ones.
I mean, just how many more “brain training” and loveable animal nappy swapping games can we take?
It’s nice that a platform is testing new grounds, and some titles such as the language training ones are certainly great ideas.
However, it’s your gamers duty to “educate” anyone you see picking up titles like “I did it mum!” without making howls of derision by thwapping them round the back of the head with a Final Fantasy or Mario Kart DS box!
Show them what they really mean by “touch generations”
buttonmasher test 11
Sep 14th
buttonmasher test 10
Sep 14th
my poor psp..
Sep 14th
Back in november/december time, a friend of mine came over from japan to see us and brought his copy of crisis core with him. Being the FF7 freak that I am, I began drooling and pining for a PSP and a copy of said game.
Christmas Eve came around and I finally caved in and bought myself a PSP, but with practically no games to grab my attention, it has been spurned in favour for my DS. Just waiting for an english version of crisis core to be released.
This Wed I noticed that one of the game stores in Leeds (called PlayTime.. recommend them for you Leeds based people) had an american copy – as it had been released late last month – on their shelves; which lead to £35 flying out of my wallet before I knew what had happened >.< There goes the money I was going to use for a meal out with the GF!
I began sneaking little plays of the game at work and have to admit that the game has its hooks into me already - and pretty damn deep too. The only niggle being the whiney nature of Zack, he was so cool in the Japanese version. Instead we get this irritating kid who, by the sound of it, is yet to begin the path down puberty road.
However, late wed night I began to notice a strange effect happening on the right hand side of my PSP screen - it was almost like a hi-fi equaliser, bouncing up and down the side of the screen in a single column. This slowly developed into a solid block of grey running the height of my poor screen. No amount of pressing down on the chassis changed anything and it has since spread into 3 columns of this grey distortion. Not a happy puppy 
As you can see from the blurry picture (come on, this is the net.. nothing is meant to be in focus! well, that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it – unless you’re willing to donate a decent digicam my way!).
My guess is that this is to do with the data ribbon connecting the tft panel to the system, but I am hesitant to crack the thing open in order to fix it myself considering Sony’s fickle warranty nature.
So, I called up Sony UK and spelled out my alarming problem. A swift hold break later and I now have an RMA on my hands… This seems like a known problem with the way that they didn’t question anything and offered to swap it straight out.
I’m left wondering how common this is, I haven’t seen anything similar to it on the net. Any of you guys had this problem?
If you do have this problem then I recommend giving sony a quick bell and demand a replacement – just make sure you have the original battery and charger for the swap out.
Update – 11/04/08
The courier sent out by Sony turned up with a brand new PSP and happily swapped over. Problem now theirs.
Have to compliment Sony on how speedy they sorted this out for me, big thumbs up… I can now continue my crisis core addiction!
One juicy bit of info I was given tho is that quite a few PS3’s are being returned to Sony in order to fix various problems. So, any of you guys having issues with your PS3?
PSP hacking – a comprehensive guide
Sep 14th
Posted by alphaxion in commentary
No comments
Do you own a PSP?
Ever thought about hacking it so that you can play around with all those homebrew titles and use the flash memory to store your games on rather than the clunky UMD disks?
Do you have no fucking clue where to begin?
Well, blast processing have come up with the best PSP hacking guide that I have ever seen.
Browse on over to their site and have a read and breathe a bit of life into your dusty and attention starved PSP!