Packaging and other rambles

I’ve always had a thing for nice packaging. The Apple packaging is hard to beat and gives you a great impression of the product you’ve bought before you’ve even switched it on. Likewise a great CD case (Thom Yorke, Lemon Jelly) has always given the CD a greater worth. All in the head as it doesn’t change the music, but there you go. My first Blu-Ray movies have now arrived and again the packaging is interesting. The cases are smaller than DVD, nicely rounded, slightly transparent and just feel better quality than a DVD. Which ties in with the fact it should be of better quality. All in the head but I like it.

Thats why I’ve always liked Japanese game packaging. Far smaller than western equivalents and to be honest far better. I look at my DVD collection – it could take up a quarter of the room that it currently does. Nevermind.

Speaking of room, I’m still tempted to ditch all my cd’s as I have them all digitally available. I would probably re-encode some of the disks at a higher rate but apart from that I have no need for the physical disks. Apart from the nice packaging that in my head adds value. Doh. So do I dump the disks and save room or not?

Finally, a quick bit on the Blu-Ray disks. I imported them from the states using DVDWorldUSA. They delivered within 7 days and there was no import duties to pay. They also guarantee to pay import duties if you do have the misfortune to get caught. It’s a long time since I imported and I was a bit worried about region playback issues. However this site lists the region free or restricted titles released so far. Very handy. Just need the player now.

Blu-Ray

Shaggy Blog Stories

Shaggy Dog Stories

Press release….

Bloggers publish book for Comic Relief.

100 bloggers have published a book to raise funds of the BBC’s Comic Relief appeal on Friday 16th March.

‘Shaggy Blog Stories’ features hilarious contributions from Richard Herring of ‘Fist of Fun’ fame, BBC 6Music presenter Andrew Collins, comedian Emma Kennedy, and James Henry, scriptwriter from Channel Four’s ‘The Green Wing’.

Authors Abby Lee, David Belbin, Catherine Sanderson and The Guardian’s Anna Pickard have also contributed pieces to the book.

The vast majority of contributions, however, are the work of many of the lesser known and unfamiliar heroes of British blogging; going under pen names such as Diamond Geezer, Scaryduck, Pandemian and Unreliable Witness.

Also contributing to ‘Shaggy Blog Stories’, and hoping to raise funds for the Comic Relief Appeal is local writer INSERT YOUR NAME, LOCALITY AND BLOG DETAILS HERE.

The book is the idea of blogger Mike Atkinson who writes the ‘Troubled Diva’ weblog. ‘Shaggy Blog Stories’ features comic writing from not only the cream of British blogging, but also the best up-and-coming and undiscovered writers publishing their work on their own websites.

Giving himself a “ridiculously short” seven days from idea to finished product, Atkinson admitted that he was overwhelmed with the response, which gleaned over 300 submissions for publication.

With a pool of talented writers, and the latest publishing-on-demand technology, Shaggy Blog Stories bypasses the usual snail-paced publishing industry, and offers a mail order service to customers who will receive their finished copy within days of placing their order, and only a couple of weeks after the original idea.

“Blogging creates complex, worldwide networks of friendship and contacts on the internet”, says journalist Alistair Coleman, one of Shaggy Blog Stories’ contributors. “By creating a buzz about this book, we can reach out to hundreds, thousands of readers who’d be willing to part with a few quid for this very good cause. Mike’s got some excellent writers on board here whose work deserves a wider audience. Everybody wins.”

For details of how to order the book, visit www.shaggyblogstories.co.uk.

For the background story on the creation of Shaggy Blog Stories, take a look at www.troubled-diva.com.

Buy it here.

Shopping

Just back from Braehead – what a miserable day it is out there. Amongst the Mothers Day shopping I couldn’t help notice that the PS3 isn’t sold out. Anywhere. HMV and Game are still taking pre-orders. In fact HMV were sure that you could stroll in next Friday and pick up a PS3 without pre-ordering as demand is pretty slow. Coupled with the Game announcement that only 2/3’s of their pre-order allocation has been bought should hopefully put a stop to any hopes of the eBay sellers hoping to ‘double their money’. Makes you wonder how many will actually sell as no doubt there are many that have bought two or more just to sell one on eBay.

In preparation for the PS3 I’ve ordered a couple of Blu-Ray titles – MI3 and The Departed. Both films have reportedly excellent video quality and I’m looking forward to watching them on the PS3. Thats as long as they work as they are American imports. I’ve also picked up a Bluetooth headset for the PS3 as it doesn’t come with one as standard and I don’t want a wired one plugged into the PS3.

Final bit of shopping news is regarding my Edge subscription. With all the money hassle recently there was a direct debit problem. One phone call later and it was all sorted…or so I thought. This months hasn’t appeared and on calling the subscription team the next direct debit isn’t until May. SO no issues this month or next month. Doh! They could have at least explained that at the time. I’ve now had to make do with a shop soiled copy. Nevermind…only one week until PS3 arrives.

Orb Hunter

Crackdown turns out to have more depth than I gave credit for. It’s great for short bursts of play which is what I do more of now. One challenge I’ll never complete is the Orb Hunter – finding all the hidden orbs dotted around the islands. Thanks to Herman Gatevold though this has become slightly easier. He’s posted a map(hi-res version) of where they are hidden and a screenshot for each orb. All 300 of them.I’d hate to think how long it took to do this.

WordPress…stuff

If you use WordPress and your on version 2.11 you MUST upgrade as soon as possible. A hacker managed to insert a security exploit into the 2.11 files. Although this only happened in the last 3-4 days it makes sense to move to 2.12…NOW. The dev blog has all the details.

The 2.1 upgrade contained a lot of fixes and changes. One that I hated was the feeds no longer displayed full text if you used the ‘more’ tag. Bah. I hate feeds that are truncated or contain excerpts. Defeats the purpose of feeds in my opinion and…well…it just sucks. Thankfully there’s a plugin – where would we be without plugin authors filling the gaps?

Another plugin I’ve recently added is the Dunstan Style Error Page. This generates a far more helpful error page for those links that might no longer exist or typo’s on blogs elsewhere.

Searching in WordPress is fairly weak but the Search Everything plugin allows you to turn on searching for comments, pages, metadata and even attachments. Hopefully this will be added to WordPress core as it’s been an asked for feature for a long time.

Final new addition here is the DoFollow plugin. It’s not new but I installed it after reading Dougal Campbells post on why he had only just installed it. Made total sense so it’s here now too. Again this really should be an option in the core.

There’s been a lot of bashing of WordPress recently but I still think it’s a great platform with an active community around it. Contributers will come and go but hopefully a more active and aggressive release schedule will see some features being more frequently released.

PS3 Groan

The Euro PS3 is the most expensive PS3 when compared to Japan and the USA. Fair enough I guess as we’re used to rip off Britain prices. Now Sony have announced that they have altered the backwards compatibility features of the Euro PS3. Altering means they have removed hardware from the PS3 to reduce costs. That blows.

I’ve no real desire to play any PS2 games so it’s not the functionality loss that annoys me. It’s the fact that an inferior machine is being launched in Europe for a higher price. There is no justification for this apart that they can get away with it. Also annoying is that the reveal this just 4 weeks before launch when most of the pre-orders have already been placed. If Sony had any decency they would reduce the price, even slightly, for the PS3. I doubt they will though…the bastards. I should really vote with my money and cancel my pre-order. I may still do (OK…I won’t. Saying it though makes me feel slightly better).

Crackdown

GTA4 is out October this year, however you don’t need to wait – just buy Crackdown. Thats probably a little unfair but it’s from the guy who devised the original GTA and it’s hard not to see the roots when playing Crackdown. You play an agent who’s task is to take back three islands who have been overrun with gangs. You start off with fairly basic skills and through more driving, shooting, fighting you build up your skills. Sounds pretty formulaic but there are some twists.

Crackdown Vista
Firstly there are agility orbs – the more you pick up the further you can jump and faster you can run. This really opens up the game. No longer is driving the best way to travel. The islands have height, lots of height and once you start to level up you can make incredible leaps. Secondly the cars evolve with your skills. Some can even drive up walls again making great use of the terrain. The game can also be played any way you like. Enemies taken out in any order, evolve only the skills you want to, take part in agility and car races…if you like. While the sandbox environment mimics much of GTA, Crackdown’s game engine delivers far more than GTA ever could.

Crackdown
Finally a sandbox game with no pop-up and no other graphical issues that get in the way of the game. There’s nothing better than scaling one of the taller buildings, looking over the whole island and then jumping off, landing like Nero/Blade with the ground crumbling under the force. Golden moments that you don’t tire off. Explosions can be massive, there can be 100’s of enemies all firing at you, bullets ricocheting off walls, cars and other objects thrown at you…it’s all rather impressive especially as it’s got a cel shaded quality that makes it all look spiffy.

There are a couple of flaws though. Driving is tricky as the driving model is pretty poor and the streets crowded. Killing locals attracts the police and it’s pretty unavoidable at times. The islands are also pretty small with not much variety. Speaking of variety, the biggest flaw is the lack of variation in killing the gang members. They increase in volume and difficulty and thats about it. Once you clear an island there are no gang members left. Once the game is completed you can turn gang members back on but not the gang bosses which takes some of the sandbox nature away. However there are time trial options in which you compete to kill bosses in the quickest way possible which adds some depth.

Online play is limited to 2 player co-op and uploading race times. The co-op is excellent and you are only limited to your own imagination in what you do…play the game, race, fight, horse around etc. You feel though that an eight or sixteen player multiplayer game would have been amazing. With the different weapons and skills, battles could have taken place over the whole map or just limited to one island. I would love to play capture the flag in this game against friends.

I think thats my real gripe…it all feels rushed. Don’t get me wrong, I love the game but it’s as if they’ve finished the single player game and instead of developing multiplayer Microsoft have slapped in the carrot of Halo 3 beta which is admittedly a very big carrot…but this game could and should have been so much more. Already dev’s are talking about Crackdown 2 which like the Halo series will probably see the introduction of online multiplayer. Probably more expansive environments too…and taller. However it will be another game, another £50 and more evolution rather than revolution. Crackdown is highly recommended but bare in mind it will probably take two versions to truly deliver unless, like Gears of War, downloadable content will be used to deliver extra multiplayer goodness.

Goodbye Temptation

CA GamesA guy at work is still trying to source a Wii so I gave CA Games a ring. Phone will not accept incoming calls. Oh – thats strange – they must have changed their number. A quick visit to the website brought the sad news that they have gone out of business.

Most gamers outside Glasgow probably don’t recognise CA Games but for me and a few friends it was THE import games shop in Glasgow. In a time before the internet had taken off it was the place to get import consoles and games at vastly inflated prices. Maybe it was the internet competition that finally did for the shop but there was many an hour spent in CA Games and many (too many) pounds spent in the pursuit of gaming happiness. Thats another local temptation that has been removed. Still, there’s always Loud and Clear if I feel the need for instant gadget gratification. Plus an Apple store coming soon. Saved.