DS Lite

Well, it's been a good few months since the DS was out, so I guess it's time for a redesign.
Apart from looking like the bastard spawn of an iPod, it looks quite good, with larger and prettier screens, and the body is also smaller and lighter. They're also tying the looks into the Revolution: the d-pad has the same markings and the general look is similar to the Rev controller.
It is too soon for this though, the SP was released a good 2 years after the GBA; I would be quite pissed off if i'd bought a DS at full price recently. I think Nintendo also recently quashed rumours of a redesign, which is slightly underhand.

The point is, they should revise their hardware before manufacture, not test out a prototype on the public (while raking in the early adopters' money) and then announce a new version. It's the equivalent to launching hardware and then slashing the price by £100 within a few months like they did with N64, (and MS with Xbox, but they did offer free games) it lowers your reputation as a solid, trustworthy company. I mean, that's a fair part of Nintendo's appeal- you expect better from them.

Google Video

Now i'm sure this is not new for you lot, but wow. As you may know I just got broadband, then I stumbled across this, i'm blown away. The videos aren't very high quality, but they're good enough, and it is only a beta version. The videos range from everything from smooth press-release style ones by companies, to fanboy-made compilations of stuff they got off IGN, but the range is amazing. Here are some fun ones I found (been mostly looking at games vids).

An advert for the first Zelda on NES, featuring appalling 80's white-boy rap.

The Revolution trailer, you may have already seen this, but I thought it was really well done and showcases the new controller in a clever and funny way.

Some nerds in a choir singing NES songs, very funny.

Again, this was on the net before, on the original site; Smash my Xbox (.com) but oh so satisfying. And thank god there are some guys out there not suckered into paying $499 for a buggy, unfinished hardware launch with crap games. I love the part where the guy nonchalantly walks out of a hardware store with a massive sledgehammer slung over his shoulder! And rather telling that the guys in the line are playing PSPs, know what i'm saying?

Finally, some emo retards who need a baseball bat/mouth interface.

Post any cool or funny vids you have found on the comments. Cheers!

New pc bits!!

Getting them today; 2x1GB DDR400 and an ATi Radeon 9600 Pro. That's probably upgraded my Sempron 2600+ as far as it will go, so i'll have to buss out some X2 goodness next time.

Still, this setup will play recent games pretty well at medium/low settings i'm guessing, so is plenty good enough for now. I've got BF2+ Special Forces and Eve Online to play on it, should keep me busy for a nice long time! :)
Also combined with 2mbps and Azureus, whoa! That HD is gonna fill up pretty fast!

Ok, see you.

Tales of Symphonia

Format: GC| Developer: Namco Tales Studios| Publisher: Namco| Released (PAL UK): 19/11/04
Spoilers!!!

Tales of Symphonia tells the story of Collette, the 'Chosen' of the world of Sylvarant, and her friends Lloyd and Raine, who set out to regenerate the failing world by praying seals scattered throughout the land at temples. Once Collette has prayed at all the seals, she will awaken as an angel and heal the world. However; once they get to the last seal it turns out that the angels aren't angels, and are in fact a shadowy organisation of mortals endowed with the power of the 'Cruxis Crystals'. It's then revealed that there is another world; Tethe'alla, that is linked to Sylvarant by mana flow. The two worlds are competing for energy- one is always in decline and by regenerating one world, you would kill the other. Lloyd and party set off to Tethe'alla to find a way to break the link between them and find out about the 'angels'.

The story is quite engaging intially and to the middle section, and has moments of real pathos, like when a character is showing off the Tethe'alla bridge which he proudly explains is powered by 10,000 energy crystals called Exspheres. What he doesn't know is that a human life was used to produce each one.

So the gameplay is typical console RPG fare; travel between towns, go through dungeons and beat the boss, level up and learn new skills and then buy better weapons and armour from your battle winnings.

What isn't typical however, is the battle system which operates on a realtime basis. Once you enter a battle; you directly control one character, while the other three are computer-controlled. You can set up fairly complex strategies for them such as guard settings, all-out attack, reserve magic, heal and support, or general attack. You can also set them to target enemies who are targeting your lowest health players, or to follow your lead, or to do their own thing.
Play as a melee fighter and it plays like a fast, simplified beat-em up- with standard attacks and blocks, and special moves via control stick and c-stick shortcuts. While this sounds too simple, it's quite satisfying to time when to attack or run out of the way of the super-death move, and there are various combos to try for.

Or you can be a long-range attacker and sit back and cast spells while the cpu characters get stuck in. This isn't as fun as playing close attack however; and while computer casters are autonomous during battles (you set which moves they can use), they can be commanded to perform a specific spell, which makes actively controlling them slightly redundant. Added complexity comes from Unison Attacks, where you combine your characters' special moves to produce various compound attacks which deal major damage. Also; out of battle, aside from the bog-standard weapon/armour system (although there are some clever rings/charms) of knife>sword>big sword>magical sword>Demonic Blade of Ultimate Destruction: there is a system called EX Skills.

Your characters can learn these from special crystals they find, and equip them. They have 4 levels, 1 is basic health/defense/attack etc increases, 2 is stronger versions of these, and some esoteric stuff, 3 and 4 are more powerful and some only work in conjuntion with others. When you set your four available slots, after a few battles with them, you may learn an Ex Skill on top of the increases from just the stones alone. Obviously the more good combos you have, the better skill you'll get. I had Genis the 'black-mage' type on heavy mana regen, heavily increased magic attack, and low health regen.

Altogether it works well and is a fun and fast-paced system, meaning that hacking through waves of enemies never gets too monotonous. Up to three other players can control the other characters in battles. I haven't been able to try this feature, but I assume it would add another layer of depth and fun as you shout out for help, or berate someone for not covering you etc.

Also fairly novel is the cooking system; instead of being limited to your standard potions/herbs, you can learn recipes. They are composed of two or three main ingredients and a few extras that will increase the food's effect. 'Tenderloin Stew' for example needs a type of meat (there are many, also many fish types), carrot and onion. Other vegetables and black satay sauce can be then be added. Recipes restore HP or TP (technique points; magic basically), cure status effects or increase defense/attack/resistance etc for the next battle. This means timing is also involved, you want to power up your squad right before you see the boss. (This may require saving often and seeing when a boss appears so that if you die, you can do better next time with a little home-brew style powerup!)

The towns that you visit are quite empty- in that there's not much to do apart from shop for stuff and go in a few houses and talk to some NPCs who deliver a few lines of boring, pointless dialogue. Consequently, the game can feel a bit hollow, you're just forever going from one dungeon to the next. It would have been nice to have some Zelda-style minigames and more interesting NPCs to chat to, to break up the gameplay. Well, and the fact that the 'world map' style of things isn't exactly condusive to looking at a distant mountain and going there, jumping over fences with your horse. I'm not comparing this infavourably to Zelda (completely different games), but you get the point. The map-world graphics are terrible, barely above PS1 level, which is really lazy. Or if it was a data space thing, they should have rendered a nice 2d map, with paths and cities as buttons on it. Incidentally, Baten Kaitos, also a traditional RPG on Gamecube does this.

The dungeons themselves are not great; they're generally quite short (though lengthed by respawning enemies). The puzzles are generic block pushing, or light all the torches, match up the statues etc. (Please Nintendo don't do this again in Twilight Princess!!!) They leave an unsatisfied feeling, and because they're over relatively quickly, you are then forced to go to the next location as there's nothing much else to do.
Actually, the whole game is like that- there are too many locations and not enough functionality and interest in each one.

The graphics on the main characters are pretty good; sharp and colourful anime-styled cel shading. Enemies in battle are also presented well, in the same style. Town graphics are not so good, a strange mixture of muted colours and pre-rendered, but soft-focus style which doesn't pay off. Irritatingly, there are almost no cutscenes of any kind, apart from when the characters are standing around talking-but seeing as the general graphics are poor, the few ones there are leave little impact.
Which is very bizarre, seeing as ToS has a fantastic pre-title screen sequence. Proper, quality anime with rousing orchestral music and a fantastic visual flair and energy. There are a couple more near the end, but they're quite short. Weird, because they neither followed the FF convention in this, or the action style of ingame graphics cutscenes. Disappointing.

The music is quite 'meh' as well, a few tunes are repeated throughout the dungeons, and the town music is forgettable background stuff.

Tales of Symphonia is a fairly solid game, with the dynamic battles and strategy making up for the spartan towns and repetitive dungeons. It is very long though, I ended up just playing to finish it, I had little interest in the story which had descended into 'oh no a giant demon who we didn't see before and is going to devour the earth, you are the only ones who can save us' blah blah blah.

So yeah... I suppose if you stayed into the story throughout it would be better for you, (do you like long, boring stories?) but it got very tedious towards the end for me. Get it if you're an RPG nutjob and you have a long attention span.

Friends and Crocodiles

I just ordered this on DVD from Amazon. "By Stephen Poliakoff".
I watched it last night, BBC1-it was fantastic. It's about this guy Paul Reynolds in 1981 who is ridiculously rich and this uptight woman Lizzie Thomas who starts work as his secretary. He is pissing around the whole time, having parties, and driving a red bus around his grounds, although he has a study full of designs for wind turbines and airships, which makes her fascinated by him. He has a crowd of poets and "artists" and stuff who he lets hang around and gives enormous banquets for ("just a small picnic, nothing special I promise") About a year later she organises this amazing, posh party for him and after a while he invites some hooligans in ("my parties always need an element of suprise") and they fuck it up. She leaves, and doesn't speak to him for like 5 years...

5 years later she's working in this stupid "future-prediction" type company, and he's invested badly and has lost a large part of his money. They meet by chance, and after a while she gets him to come and work at the company. Everyone else in the company is obsessed with stupid 80's "future" shit. So he spends five months in his office coming up with... bookshops. Just simple bookshops that sell quality books, no extra shit (Waterstones, anybody?) They of course think he's crazy and fire him, and she freaks out at him.

Another long period of time passes. He's now lost pretty much all his money, and is long-haired and unkempt; but still very smooth and suave. He hangs around in an old 24hr cafe, where a mentally handicapped guy also does (he was round the mansion as a kid). She's getting married to a guy whose dad owns an enormous pan-european manufacturing empire, and is going to work for them. Paul crashes the wedding, and a lot of the people from before are there who look at him in disgust. He has a bit of a scene with Liz; him saying that the company is "like a giant hippo, slow moving but very hard to destroy" but he goes when Liz agrees to call him after her honeymoon. She doesn't.

Another few years pass. It's the late 90's. (Guess what happens) The company is selling off all it's factories, laying off 20,000 workers; to invest hugely in internet and telecoms companies. Liz has misgivings about this, and finds Paul, who is now living on a farm with two wives (they were in his "artist" bunch) and about 5 kids all running round. He obviously talks sense to her, and she agrees, but can't seem to do anything about it.

After a bit, the dotcom bubble bursts and the share prices bottom out at like nothing pence from £20 each. She and the executives get lynched by the press at the shareholders' meeting, and she breaks down. She phones him, and he's like "yeah, I heard, so what? Come to my party."

Liz goes, and it's a big bonfire, everyone from the old days who rejected him is there. (Paul's bookshop idea paid off and he bought an old school, randomly.) He takes her aside and says that they should work together, that you need people that challenge you at work, and that they don't even need to see each other, with email and all. That they would be unstoppable together! She groans/smiles and it pans out with everyone dancing around the bonfire.

Friends and Crocodiles is a fabulously complex and indulgent tale, telling the story of Paul and Liz and their complete incompatibility, but dread fascination with each other. The way the characters are weaved in and out of each other's lives throughout 20 years is brilliantly executed. The characters themselves are also great. Paul is a masterclass in unflappability, cool and collected and sharp even when he's lost all status. People are clearly intimidated by this ability, none more so than Liz who is completely scared of what he'll do when he shows up at the wedding. It takes a long time for her to realise that what looks like his uncaring, surface-deep view and presentation of himself to the world is actually a far more mature and reasonable approach than her obsession with 'bettering herself', and in the end when it all falls apart, he is there to catch her. Liz is not so interesting, as a slightly uptight and prim character, but obviously plays a necessary foil to Paul.

The best character drama I have seen since I can remember.

9/10 for me.

2 Megabit!!

So I just ordered 2MB ADSL from tiscali. It should be arriving in about two weeks. I'm kinda embarrassed to admit this, but I had to get my mum to pay for it (well she'll use it too, but obviously I was the one that pushed for it). I was intially resistant to getting tiscali, as my dad was espousing it's virtues, and he knows shit all about PCs, and I wanted to get Blueyonder. It wasn't available here though, so I checked out tiscali, and it's actually very good; £17.99 PM for unlimited usage. Although it does have a 'fair usage policy' which basically amounts to no P2P filesharing in the peak evening hours as it uses too much bandwidth, which is fair enough really. (I'll just use P2P in non-peak hours, duh.)

So yeah, in a couple weeks I will actually be a 21st century human! Online games! Music! Video! Wooo!!! ;) Haha. I'm going to get Eve Online, been waiting a fair while to play that, and also get BF2 on this, instead of forking through the nose for it at a stupid pc cafe.

Feeling a lot better today, and not just because of this. Mevve the medzorz are working a bit. I went out and bought some comics- the new Witchblade, a few back issues of it, a Spawn issue, and a Soulfire book. Gonna read them in a bit. Now I just have to stop spending my will money....... crap, Eve has subs, doesn't it? Oh well.

See you!

Battlefield 2

So here is my review, it's 6 months late, but hey.

I blink in the bright sunlight as I step out onto the flight deck of the US Naval carrier i'm serving on. All around me is chaos as troops run to board helicopters, their blades spinning up and creating a terrible drone. I follow their example and jump aboard a Blackhawk transport just as it leaves the deck. The pilot dips the nose to build up speed as we fly low across the water towards our destination- a small, Chinese-controlled island.

As we approach, the missile lock-on warning sounds and the pilot jinks left, right, left again to break the missile lock, but it won't go, so he releases flares, leaving us vunerable for a few seconds until they reload. Beside me, the twin chain guns erupt into life as we fly over the enemy territory, scattering troops on the ground, and ripping apart those caught in the open. We hover over an enemy base, guns blazing, until the lock-on warning sounds again, and the pilot pulls the helicopter into forward motion.

I glance to the side, and see an enemy attack copter; harder to shake than ground AA, and indeed, the sound of bullets pinging off the thin shell of the aircraft cements this fact. Despite the pilot's best efforts, we're being destroyed. Warning alarms sound as flames burst into the cabin. I take my cue, and jump out, waiting a second before pulling my parachute ripcord and floating down to the ground. I land smack in the middle of a road, with enemy troops bearing down on me from a hill to the side, bullets thudding into the soil around my feet. I run and dive behind a burned-out plane. In my ear piece I hear the commander's warning- "artillery, your area". I run for a group of buildings I can see in the distance, as behind me the screams of enemy soldiers are drowned out by the deafening roar of artillery shells bombarding the narrow spit of land.

^A couple of minutes in the life of a BF2 soldier.

Battlefield 2, the sequel to FPSes Battlefield 1942 and Vietnam is set in the near future and sees the aggression between the Middle East, China and the US reach breaking point as they descend into open war.

The US is the invading force, so most of the maps are either the People's Liberation Army of China or the Middle Eastern Coalition trying to hold off the United States Marine Corps from getting a foothold in their territories.
In BF2 you play online in games of 16, 32 or 64 players. The game uses a clever but simple system of flags and tickets to decide which team wins a round. Each of the two teams has a number of flags, and you can only spawn at a friendly flag unless you're in a squad (more on that later.) Each team has a limited number of tickets; one is used each time a player dies and has to re-spawn. However, if one team holds more flags than the other, the weaker team will steadily lose tickets regardless. Flags are captured by standing next to them until they return to your control, and this process is speeded up with additional teammates helping with the flag capture. Whichever team runs out of tickets first loses.

When you spawn you can choose from a range of troop classes to attack or defend in many different ways, from standard Assault grunts with a standard rifle and body-armour, Snipers, Special Operations who specialize in stealth and covert operations, Anti-tank with a rocket launcher, Engineer, and the supporting classes of Medic and Support.

My personal favorites are Spec Ops, they have a good rifle, and can lay remote C4 charges to destroy enemy structures like their radar or artillery, tanks, or lay traps. Versatile! Although the the chances of getting 2 charges on the back of a tank and retreating to a safe distance before being reversed into or shot to bits are fairly low. Maybe 3 or 4 times out of 10 you'll be successful. It's very satisfying when it works though.

I like snipers too, it's fun to snipe people, although it's pretty hard to be accurate, and you're very vulnerable if they figure out where the fire is coming from, although you can sometimes get them post-death with your craftily-placed anti-personnel mines .

Engineer is a fun class as well, you can repair vehicles and structures, and lay anti-tank mines, although not too much as team-retards, sorry team-mates have a habit of running over them and then punishing you for the TK.
Adding into the mix are a plethora of vehicles, from buggies and jeeps, to APCs and tanks, and helicopters and fighter jets. Tanks can be good, but they tend to die quickly, as they're a big target. The Anti-Tank bitches pop out from behind some building and hit you, then duck back round while they reload, before you know it, you're blown up...
I've been having the most fun with the small attack choppers. The pilot has 3 sets of 14 unguided rockets, and then a gunner can hop in and use a machine gun and tv-guided missiles. It's quite hard to fly and aim them, but you can get a lot of kills.
I find jets too fast to fly properly and hit anything, but you do get guys on them who are insanely good and get the top score every time.
The Blackhawk transport helis can also be good- but you need a decent squad who will spawn on the squad leader, and that consists of a couple of medics to auto-heal flesh wounds, and preferably 2, but at least 1 engineer to repair the heli in flight. It's pretty hard to acheive this level of cohesion, but is supremely satisfying when you manage to pull it off. My best scores have been in this situation.

You can make or join a squad to play with, with a squad leader who is in contact with the commander, and issues orders to his squad. The squad-leader acts as a mobile spawn point for his squad, allowing him to be reinforced in enemy territory. You can speak to your squad through VoIP, although I haven't been able to test this function yet. When you're in a good squad, it can really add another dimension to the gameplay, with a genuine sense of cameraderie, and of course you are more likely to survive as you have more firepower and hopefully a medic to heal/revive you.

Medics are an essential part of a properly functioning army, they can drop healing packs, or revive a dead teammate with shock paddles (magical shock paddles that heal bullet wounds of course). When this happens, your team doesn't lose a ticket for respawing them. The Support class isn't so essential, as to be honest, you will often die before running out of ammo. They have a spray-happy machine gun for covering fire though, and on the occasions when you need ammo, you will be glad of it.
Also available is the commander position, where you have access to a map of the battlefield; which you can scan to see enemy positions for a few seconds, use a UAV to see realtime enemy positions, but only in a small area, drop supply crates, and bombard the enemy with artillery. You also issue orders to squads, to attack, hold a position, repair etc. You can get quite a lot of points as the commander, and it's a nice diversion when you're tired of being blown up for a bit.

That's probably the most annoying thing about BF2, you die. A lot. Whether from an artillery strike, or sniper, or heli or jet, or just foot soldiers- you die quite often and without warning, it can get quite infuriating. I don't know if it's because i'm rubbish or what, but my health seems to be tiny whereas enemy troops will survive heavy fire from me. Some people online are very good at this game. Another annoying factor is the fact that the other type of people online are just idiots, plain and simple. Teammates running into mines they saw you lay, C4ing the vehicle you were about to get in, rendering it comically vunerable to bullets detonating the packs, getting into a heli with some retard who crashes it in a few seconds, killing like 3, 4, 5 people, etc...

A bit less drastic, but still irritating is people who you get to join your squad and don't follow orders and piss around by themselves. This can usually be alleviated by joining a clan server, as a higher class of player frequent them. The flipside to this however is that these same servers are often full of super-nerds who are insanely good at the game and kill you before you even get a shot off at them; after a while of this I often find myself forced back to the EA servers for some easier kills (but stupider teammates). *Sigh* I guess I just need to get better at the game. But these are really the exceptions to the norm, most people are pretty good and reasonable, I guess I just had to get the worst cases off my chest.

Adding to the replay value is a system of points and awards. Every time you get a kill, kill damage assist, flag capture, flag defend, repair, heal, revive etc; you get a point or two. These add over the hours, and your rank increases, allowing you better weapons to unlock, and also to give you the commander position when more than 1 person applies (the highest rank gets it). The points system is a brilliant addition; you get rewarded well for skill, and even if you're losing badly, you'll still accrue a few points to edge you closer to that next rank and unlock.
There are a huge amount of awards that can be earned- from your basic awards for each class and vehicle, through special awards for teamwork, combat, weapon profiency and skill.

Unfortunately, i've been playing on a rather low-end machine in minimum settings, so I can't really comment on the graphics firsthand, but if you have a decent pc they are pretty spectacular. You can see some good examples here:

Pics!

The audio is very good; in battle there is no music, only a soundtrack of war! Rifle fire, explosions, shouts, screams etc all sound very realistic and are also directional- if you are looking towards a sound it will be louder, thus allowing you to judge where it came from. There are nice background effects; seagulls on the beach and at sea, rustling palms, gently creaking cranes, and wind effects when you're very high up.

Battlefield 2 is exhilarating, fun, addictive, amazing. It can also be fairly frustrating, but give it a break for a couple of hours, and you'll be raring to go, to punish that little sniper/pilot/tank whore etc who pissed you off last time, and you may find yourself still there 8 hours later! Highly recommended.

Edit 723: Here are my scores courtesy of BF2S.com

http://bf2s.com/player/48949941/

9/10