Occupational Thoughts -

At the weekend I went and bought Tomb Raider: Underworld and Kameo: Elements of Power on the understanding that they were both British games and only £5 each. So far Kameo has truly entranced me as a Fable-eqsue fairytale fantasy directly influenced by Lord of the Rings. Despite this I’ve been playing Tomb Raider the [...]

Yesterday I finished playing Perfect Dark Zero. And I liked it, especially when I go to meet Carrington the fat Scottish man who’d been organising/narrating all the operations so far. I was really surprised when Chandra betrays Joanna, or at least I think she betrays her… It had just the right amount of Cyberpunk style, [...]

Over the holidays someone borrowed Forza Motorsport 3, and I’ve been playing it in spurts, doing the occasional race. I’m not a big fan of many racing games so they all seem the same: GRID, Blur, Split/Second, PGR 4, Need for Speed: Shift, Gran Turismo. All apart from Burnout Paradise, which I actually own and [...]

Yesterday the projector we have stopped working, this is because it’s summer and it had gotten hot, and the thermal switch popped out. The thermal switch stops the bulb from lighting and blinks with a yellow orange error message that something’s gone wrong. The projector is a Sanyo PLV-Z5, and in order to open it [...]

I read recently on the Bungie.net weekly update that they were slowly getting rid of the Halo: Reach multiplayer beta screenshots. I don’t have many but I don’t want them to disappear, so here they are in a gallery: I realise they were all taken from Powerhouse, I don’t know why I didn’t take screenshots [...]

Yesterday, at about 17:00 GMT, the Modern Warfare 2 Stimulus Package came out. Matthieu bought and downloaded it, and then went running, leaving me to explore it. There’s not really that much interesting to see, it’s just barren landscapes designed as the ultimate battle arenas. I went through and took a few screenshots in 1080p. [...]

Yesterday I got up at 4:30 to blockade the AWE ‘nuclear bomb factory’ in Aldermaston. It was cold, some people were arrested, and there was a tent operated by the Oxford branch of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament which gave out food to the protesters. Protesting makes people hungry, they passed out some excellent organic [...]

In true fashion my blogging has a little lag that means I blog about things sometimes a week after they occur. Better late than never though, #Oxtuttle is a real-life meetup for social media enthusiasts in Oxford. While I was there I met my next door neighbour, which was weird because I had forgotten they [...]

Yesterday some people came round to play Castle Crashers, we moved on from that to Guitar Hero: World Tour, then to Halo 3′s Multiplayer, then to Worms 2. In short it was good fun. I was also lent Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones and a Gamecube. Today I tried it out: You can see [...]

Back from my last post I was thinking about design and I remember having played Bioshock this week. I returned and took some pictures: Apparently the game is a critique Ayn Rand’s philosophy. I don’t know Ayn Rand, or her theory of Objectivism. But I gather it has something to do with leaving humans to do [...]

I’m back from holiday, while the parents went out running I stayed in the Youth Hostel and played Secret of Monkey Island. I clocked up over 6 hours of play time and finished it. I think it’s the first point-and-click adventure game I’ve ever completed, the story is engaging and brilliantly simple. The characters are believable and easy to [...]

Today it is the 25th of December, and we’re going off to Derbyshire Staffordshire later on this morning. But before we do, here’s my vlog on the arguments for piracy: It took me ten takes, I was using a sheet of notes and after the 6th one I dropped that and wrote out a script. It’s [...]

This morning I drew up a little piece of political satire about Peter Mandelson’s Digital Economy Bill: If you don’t get the joke it’s a play on the All Your Base Are Belong To Us meme from the game Zero Wing.

On Friday I followed another tutorial on the Pain.NET forums. This one was to simulate the depth of field effect, to make things easy I used a Halo screenshot. Starting with this: I cut it into it’s seperate objects: Then applied a greyscale gradient to each object (note that the Spartan is our focal point [...]

The overall result of this observation is that if you like Halo you should definitely play ODST. I advise against buying it now as it seems like little more than an expensive expansion to Halo 3 but root around for a second-hand copy in the bargain bin in a few months time. The new gameplay [...]