Entries from June 2005 ↓

So I did something odd this past weekend. I went over to Best Buy and actually bought a computer game. Yeah I know… WTF? What caused me to do this? Well, my girlfriend was telling me a day or so before that she wished she had another game to play besides ‘The Sims’. So, since it was Saturday and she was at work I went to get the game that I think (I still don’t know if she does) she might like. What’s this game? It was ‘Still Life’ ( http://www.stilllife-game.com ). I figured since it is an adventure game that she would be into it.

I installed the game onto her computer and preceded to play for the next several hours. The game is fairly straight forward. Every character you encounter direct you toward the next step in the game. The puzzles that I’ve seen so far are pretty tough. The baking puzzle has got to be the hardest. I’m not ashamed to say that I headed over to GameFaqs ( http://www.gamefaqs.com ) for a helping hand on that one. Game play is pretty standard move your mouse cursor around the screen and wait for it to change to a different style cursor at which point click and do some task. Moving around is point and click and with a double click your character will break into some sort of shambling run.

The voice acting has to be the worst part of the entire game. And that brings me to a small aside… Did the voice acting get redone for the Xbox version? There is a review of it done by Ashley – mumble mumble something or other – in the June issue of Play Magazine ( http://www.playmagazine.com ) in which she says something like ‘the voice acting is great and totally believable’. I don’t know but maybe the PC version is different. The voice acting is ok I guess but not in the least location accurate.

The pre-rendered back grounds look great and the movies are just fantastic looking. The opening movie is fantastic. The character models are very well done but the animation seems a little jerky to me. And I won’t even mention anything about the mouth movements matching up with the dialog. The running animation just seems all wrong to me. It just look awkward.

The music for the game fits in very well it’s all most ashamed that there is so little. If you want to check it out go over to Grawl ( http://www.grawl.nl ) and check the downloads section for an FTP which has the ‘soundtrack’.

All in all the game is pretty good. I won’t really get another chance to play till this weekend but if I have enough time maybe I can finish it up.

Well it looks like now might be the time to pick up a PSP. Since version 1.5 now has a working exploit I can play SNES and Mame on it. Also since the UMD dumper was released the number of ‘released’ UMD’s is up to 37 according to Console News ( http://www.console-news.org ). Anyway, back to other stuff.

I’ve been putting off posting this… Alright, I admit – I keep forgetting.

Anyway, I hope you all know about www.newgrounds.com (if not wtf mate?). Anyway, back in 2002 a game called ‘Alien Hominid’ ( http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/59593 ) was released. Then a strange thing happened the people behind it ( http://www.thebehemoth.com/ ) rewrote it as a console game. Not being a PS2 or GC owner, personally I ignored the release of the game and sat in my corner waiting for the Xbox version to hit the scene. Well, here in the US we (well not quite everyone) are still waiting (And US stores don’t seem to have a solid release date). On May, 27th the Xbox version came out in Europe. Lucky for me a few days later I had my copy. And I am glad I got it!

The game like the early Flash version looks just fantastic! Of course it looks great – it’s the same people from the original.

The game is hard! Let’s just make that clear right now. There are no unlimited continues or any of that crap. That means you better have the hand eye coordination to keep track of all the bullets flying around the screen.

I don’t have any screens of the included mini-games but I have tried a couple and they are great. The EU version has exclusive content that can be downloaded also. We’ll have to wait and see if this great game actually comes out in the US… Take it with a grain of salt but Gamestop has it listed as an August release ( http://www.gamestop.com/product.asp?product%5Fid=210694 ).

Anyway, visit the web site for more info ( http://www.alienhominid.com ) and a great batch of product based on the game.

Star Wars Horoscope for Pisces

A typical Pisces, you have your head in the clouds.
You’re self-sacrificing and a bit too passive to stand up to the dark side.
You become fairly pessimistic when put under pressure.
You are a chameleon – wanting to change your scenery on occassion.

Star wars character you are most like: Lando

What is Your Star Wars Horoscope?