The first of many E3 roundup posts. I’m just going to try to quickly summarise some of the cool stuff that was shown at E3 over the last week.
Microsoft
Project Natal – This is Microsoft’s entry in to the whole motion control thing thats going on right now, except this time YOU ARE THE CONTROLLER. Okay actually what it is is a camera that has motion tracking on it so it attempts to do motion capture in real time. It seems to work pretty well, far better than I expected, one of the tech demos they showed off was a 3D breakout game and it worked fairly well. I think it may have been more convicing if she wasn’t flailing about. In addition to this was the whole thing from Lionhead, great video but my god some of that was total BS the tech to do some of it just doesn’t exist.
Motion Controller – Microsoft still has another motion controller in production, but there isn’t anything on this other than the fact that it still exists.
Nintendo
Vitality Sensor – Apparently Nintendo decided that the next peripheral that the Wii needs is something to measure your heart rate. Umm…okay…
They did show off a little more motion plus stuff but nothing that wasn’t already known
Sony
PSP Go – The next iteration of the PSP, pretty much everything that was leaked. It has a slide out controls, 16GB of internal flash memory no UMD slot, I think the screen is slightly smaller but the same res. All in all a very nice looking piece of hardware and somewhat more portable than the original PSP. Downside $249. That’s kind of expensive compared to the current PSP 3000 so I guess its good that the 3000 isn’t going anywhere. I kind of want to get a PSP and I don’t really want to have to deal with UMDs so I guess that puts me in the market for a Go.
Unnamed motion controller – Somewhat similar to the Wii controller except that it has a glowy ball on the top of it for camera tracking. The main difference between this and the Wii remote is that precision seems to be the name of the game. And it basically does what the Wii promised to do that didn’t, couple of tech demos that showed that it is really sensitive to movement. Looks cool but totally don’t want it.
This time its a little bit boring but benefits hugely for being easy to do.It consists of egg noodle, choi sum, bean sprouts, prawn and fish cake. There is a tiny bit of calamari in it but when I say a tiny bit I really mean it. A couple of tweaks that could have been done to it is chilli, but more importantly garlic. It definitely needs a bit of garlic in it. Other than that thats all folks.
I know I’ve been a bit light on the gaming side for a while now but I’ll have something about demigod up tormorrow or the day after…probably.
It has a similar sort of texture to the mango and apricot I had last week this one which I still think is neat but from a flavour stand point its just a bit harder for me to get behind this one. The flavour is a bit more in your face than the last one which would normally be fine, but I’m just not feeling this one quite as much. I guess this opinion is somewhat slightly skewed by the fact that I’m a much bigger fan of mango and apricot than I have ever been of rasberry. It’s still a good ice cream but the amount you’ll like it is fairly dependant on your love of rasberry.
Okay by title conventions this should technically be 2 but the tofu and pork post should have been number two so whatever, deal with it.
So this week the lunch is beef curry! Well technically one part potato, one part carrot and two parts stewing beef with half and onion curry but thats so much less fun to have to type. To be served with the rice I also made, but a photo of that would be boring. That’s all for now folks. Now back to doing work.
This is a wonderful ice cream and worth every penny I paid for it. Right now they are selling the Haagen Dazs Smoothie tubs at Sainsbury’s for £3 each.
As you would expect from the name of the ice cream it has a great smooth texture to it, with the exception of very occasional apricot bits in it. It’s not overly sweet which makes it a great change from the chocolaty madness that I’ve been getting with all the Ben and Jerry’s stuff that I’ve had in my freezer for a while. Surprisingly the cool thing is that there is a very distinct mango taste to it but not to the point where you can’t get any apricot out of it and as someone who likes both fruits that’s awesome but if you just want one or the other you should probably look elsewhere.
That’s basically all I have to say about this for the time being and I should be getting round to other ice cream flavours in time, if you have any requests give me a shout.
Plants Vs Zombies is awesome, if that’s all you’re going to get out of reading this then those first five words are all you need. Plants Vs Zombies is the latest release by Pop Cap the wonderful creators of Peggle. In its simplest form this is a tower defence game, zombies come at you on a number of lanes and you build plants to kill said zombies before they get past your lovely green defenders and eat your brains.The currency is sunlight which during the day will fall from the sky and is also generated by sunflowers, but at night the only source of sunlight that you have are sun-shrooms and sunflowers the former of which is cheaper but also generates less sun. You have to click on the sun that falls in order to add it to your resource pool which turns it into a bit of a click fest when you get later into the game.
A Lawn Defence At Any Hour
There is also a back yard which has a pool in which gives you access to a couple of water plants and the roof of the house which requires you to plant watermelon and cabbage catapaults. Overall there is a pretty good range of plants and zombies to plant and kill, each of them has their own particular flavour to them and for the most part there isn’t a single plant in your arsenal which is completely useless. Which is annoying because you can only carry a limited number of seeds into a given level, but it means you have to be somewhat strategic about what you bring and to help you choose you do get to see what types of zombies that you will face in a level.
The adventure mode gives you a series of single lawn battles after each other, so you start off planting a new defence every level. In addition to the adventure mode there are a bunch of mini game types which each has thier own twist on the main gameplay as well as a pair of puzzle modes which change things up quite a lot. The survial mode is the one that is most like the classic tower defence of plant a defence while wave after wave of zombies come at your line, and eventually you will be overwhelmed. My record is at 21 flags so it should be easy enough for you to beat.
The game looks and sounds beautiful, and really the only complaint I really have is that there isn’t quite enough variety in the music but it doesn’t matter too much because the music is pretty good throughout. One thing to note is that you can buy Plants Vs Zombies from Popcap directly for $20 on PC or Mac or you can buy on Steam for £6.99 so take a guess at what my recommendation is. And to close this review I leave you with this:
Broken Steel is the third piece of downloadable content that Bethesda have released for Fallout 3 and this piece attempts to address people’s complaints with the ending of Fallout 3. So saying that be wary reading the rest of this review because there may be spoilers below, and for those people that don’t read this paragraph because they are too lazy.
POSSIBLE SPOILERS BELOW!!!
Broken Steel starts off at the original ending of Fallout 3 and it gives you a couple additional choices to make of who to send into the purifier. Most people that saw the ending of Fallout 3 pretty much thought that the ending was total bullshit, and unfortunately for Broken Steel the ending is still bullshit, in some ways more so. But it does have one good side to it and that’s that the game no longer completely ends and you can continue playing, which of course makes sense as the new quest line happens two weeks later.
The main quest line is basically you working with the Brotherhood of Steel to destroy the remnants of the Enclave that are still operating in the Wasteland. So you fight alongside Liberty Prime in the first part and mostly watch for a little bit while the Enclave get totally destroyed by Prime.
"DEMOCRACY IS TRUTH! COMMUNISM IS DEATH!"
After that you end up doing a couple of tasks around the Wastes and like the other bits of DLC this is very combat focused and really there isn’t much to do other than shoot guys in the face. And to help you in this task there are a couple of cool new weapons, the only one that seemed to be anything to write home about is the Tesla Cannon, but there is a sort of flamer/mortar thing and a tri laser (which is actually way lamer than it sounds). There are a couple of new additional quests here and there but if you’ve already done the all the quests in Fallout 3 it’ll take you ages to find them.
The Blue Beam of Death
The level cap has also been raised to 30 which is pretty good and will take you a decent amount of time to get from 20 to 30. With this level cap raise comes a couple of new perks the coolest of which is a level 30 perk that causes you to explode like a nuke when you get down to 20 hp. There are a couple of new enemies but nothing hugely interesting other than bloody hell they have a lot of health.
So thats basically a run down of what Broken Steel adds but there’s actually a decent amount and at 800MS points its a pretty good deal its just really annoying that it doesn’t actually fix the ending of the game because it still sucks. But mechanically it’s filled with a bunch of new stuff thats worth getting.
Oh how I hate you. Okay technically this isn’t really a post about GFWL but more to do with the buying of microsoft points. The DLC Broken Steel for fallout 3 came out yesterday or the day before I can’t remember, but I’ve never bought anything from marketplace before so obviously I didn’t have any MS points to buy stuff with. Now point 1 why the hell can’t you just price stuff, I’m using real money to pay for this stuff just tell me how much I’m bloody spending on this stuff. Part 2 make it actully easy to buy points if you’re in the UK, I don’t have a Visa or an American Express card, I do have a Mastercard but I would much prefer to pay by debit or hey even better let me use paypal that way you don’t even need to care what country I’m in because pay pal does all that nonsense for you.
Okay slight rant over. I’ll have some impressions of Broken Steel some time today or tomorrow depending on what I’m going to be posting about it, but stay tuned.
This is the photo of what I have for lunch at work today (and yesterday actually but I didn’t have time to post), main ingredients is bascially whats in the title of this post, Tofu and pork. Two main problems with the way that I made this is that there is way too little Tofu, there really should be about double what I put in. And secondly I used Silken tofu which tends to be really really soft to the point where it breaks apart if you so much as tap it. So I added that in a bit too early which is why it looks like there’s minced tofu in the dish instead of cubes which is what I put in.
Well tonight, well technically last night at the time I’m writing this, I was playing poker with a bunch of guys from the office plus a couple of other folk as well. It was for a wonderful pot of about £100, I came second. Oh well. I played pretty well throughout so I feel pretty good about that although I still think probability hates me.
It consists of egg noodle, choi sum, bean sprouts, prawn and fish cake. There is a tiny bit of calamari in it but when I say a tiny bit I really mean it. A couple of tweaks that could have been done to it is chilli, but more importantly garlic. It definitely needs a bit of garlic in it. Other than that thats all folks.
So this week the lunch is beef curry! Well technically one part potato, one part carrot and two parts stewing beef with half and onion curry but thats so much less fun to have to type. To be served with the rice I also made, but a photo of that would be boring. That’s all for now folks. Now back to doing work.
This is the photo of what I have for lunch at work today (and yesterday actually but I didn’t have time to post), main ingredients is bascially whats in the title of this post, Tofu and pork. Two main problems with the way that I made this is that there is way too little Tofu, there really should be about double what I put in. And secondly I used Silken tofu which tends to be really really soft to the point where it breaks apart if you so much as tap it. So I added that in a bit too early which is why it looks like there’s minced tofu in the dish instead of cubes which is what I put in.