So it's finally happened, my Xbox 360 has died. It happened fortunately the day after I finished Dragon Age 2. Well I say fortunately, it would have done me a favor dieing before I even opened the game's box.

Anyway, after 4 years of service- my 360 finally died with an E71 error. I decided now would be a good excuse to justify purchasing a PS3, given there's an ungodly amount of exclusive titles and the sheer nostalgia ride of playing all my old Playstation One games on it. What surprises me, is how expensive the machine is; it must rank near on Macbook Pro/Intel Q6600 processor level of retaining value despite being years old.

I personally don't trust second hand consoles due to the amount of people I know who take in barely functioning machines in hope the clerk won't intensively test the machine enough to encounter any intermittent issues. The most annoying thing is every time that's happened, they've gotten away with it. I assume this is why they seed the losses onto game trade-ins, in which they profit higher than pharmacy companies, often with pre owned games costing around or the same as a brand new copy of the game does; at least the brand new games don't have snapped boxes with CD scratches so deep, a blind person would think it's braille.

So anyway, after shopping around I managed to order a moderately priced 320GB one in hope of storing all my games on there keeping the machine cool. What I didn't know was only a handful of games have this option and so far I haven't seen the option to install a game, it appears to just do it on it's own accord; well that was a great investment.

Now lets check the Playstation One store...Spyro? No. Tombi? No. Ridge Racer? No. Silent Hill? No. Kingsley's Adventure!? No. Pandemonium!!!? No. WTF is going on!? They've got shit games like Cool boarders, but nothing like Roadrash, Deathtrap dungeon or Croc? What is seriously wrong with this world.

Apparently so long as you have the original PS1 game disk it should work fine. However, when I looked into it there's quite a lot of people saying most PS1 games on the PS3 suffer from glitches. Again, what a great investment.

Still, the idea that all the controllers are wireless but charged via USB is cool...

And so after all that, I've bought a PS1, Battle Arena Tohshinden, here I come.

This week I played Crysis 2. Read about it here. *SPOILER* I didn't like it.

So last week there was riots in England. A few people died, many were arrested and many more cleared JD Sports. So what have we as a country learned from this entire experience?

Simple answer, nothing. People have been complaining saying it shows there are deeper social issues that need to be addressed and that the state has let them down. Don't blame the state for your own shitty parenting; if anything, you've let the state down by not wearing a condom. In most of these cases you would have thought after the fifth time they would have learned sex makes babies.

On the other side of the coin you have people thinking this is a race issue. The only 'race' problems involved in the riots were getting Nike Air Max 90's in their size. I hate to break it to you, but opportunist scum are everywhere. Just because The Daily Mail is trying to fabricate the idea that Britain was Utopia before we opened our boarders, doesn't make it true. Jesus Christ, open your fucking eyes.

I don't usually rant about something as serious as this but it really amazes me how people are treating this situation. I watched a question time on Channel 4 regarding the riots and the questions asked by the audience were either: second guessing the facts, or adding absolutely nothing to the conversation. Which further backs up my point of the news doing more harm then good in situations like this. It's this mis-information which is leading to people making hasty decisions which they don't fully understand. (AKA voting Conservative during the general election. Thank you The Sun.)

I'm going to keep this rant short as there's no point flogging a dead horse, I'm sure you're all sick of seeing articles about the riots.

The latest essay from BigDistraction is available here for your viewing. This one is drifting off from my usual essay subjects. This one is about serialized television programming. Fun Fact: According to Wordpress, it was also the most popular of my posts on the site. (4x the usual amount of post views) Which makes me think someone was testing their ReloadEvery extension for FIrefox and my post just so happened to be the lab-rat. 

Greetings to everyone still reading! Following what I said: Here is the following month's Big Distraction post.

So this week was my birthday. Quite a lot of people see their birthday as some magic occasion where it's suddenly all about them for the day. Personally, I don't see the appeal. This year I wanted to try something new and we decided to go to a Latin restaurant. I asked what they recommended and went for a Cuban sandwich. When it arrived I came to the realization that it was an over glorified ham and cheese toastie served on a wooden board as opposed to a plate.

Upon leaving- I felt as though I had been cheated out of £8.50. Especially since I could easily make at least 20 ham and cheese toasties for that price. Not that me or my friends would want 20 toasties, but that price is taking the piss. I should open up a sandwich shop, slap "Cuban" on the front of it and increase the price by £6.00. In-fact, I'm off to test this theory on Theme Park.

Update: It didn't work. Fucking Cuba.

This week as promised, the Alan Wake review is up. You can find it in the merged Essays/Reviews section.

Nothing much has really happened this week. I was sent Homefront which I don't think even deserves the brief 122 words I'm going to describe it in here:

Firstly, you can die for almost no apparent reason. It seems the biggest threat in this game is your shoe laces. Not to mention that half the time when trying to hide for cover after a gunfight, one of the NPC's will block your way to insure they're fully protected leaving you have to reload your checkpoint. Another problem I have with the game is the weapons system, it seems you can only keep 3 magazines of any gun and if you use a weapon with an accessory (e.g. red dot scope) it makes any other type of that gun's ammo totally incompatible. This leaves you hot swapping guns for the most basic ones just so you can progress through the game.

On the upside the single-player is incredibly short.


- Jack

Has it really been this long? Damn, I still remember when this site was nothing more than a host for Deity.

Anyway, I'm now back and hopefully shall be updating this blog far more regular than this long hiatus. I feel kinda bad considering my site is still getting >300 hits a week and I haven't updated it with any content for 7 months; so I'll be filling it with my BigDistraction reviews every week until we're up to date; starting with my Alan Wake review.

Secondly, after reading through some of these previous postings, I'm cringing at how awful my writing was compared to now. I mean, it's still not perfect- but it's far more fluent compared to how it was back then. I've deleted a few of the worst offending posts in a sort of Atari 2600 E.T. desert burial esque operation. Hopefully they'll never be seen again.

Thirdly, to answer everyone who has emailed me about cynicaldiscourse.info not working: I've let the domain expire. This is because I originally got it for free and I don't think .info rolls off the tongue very well. However, I have purchased cynicaldiscourse.co.uk and it is now a usable domain link to this site, so make sure you update your bookmarks!

Is there really any more news? Oh! What I've been up to all this time. I've been experimenting with different projects. Unfortunately, none of these will ever see the day of light- although, I am hoping to salvage some of the assets & code to use in future games. I've got a few ideas in the pipeline- probably taking advantage of iOS and HTML5. If anything worthwhile comes of it, you'll be sure to know.

P.S. I also liked Duke Nukem Forever. Fuck the haters.

Thank you to everyone whose voted for me!

Now it's phase 2, If you vote for me again First Fantasy could become Indie Game of the Year 2010! [Also 1000$ and a distrabution deal]

Give a cynical guy a gift at christmas, the gift of Indie Game of the Year 2010. [Also 1000$ and a distrabution deal]

- Jack

P.S Here's one of my reviews from BigDistraction.

This week I decided to give Linux a go. I decided to choose Ubuntu despite my friend who insisted Debian was the best. God my life is so dull at the moment, let's write about something more exciting.

Okay I really can't think of much this week, fucking writers block. Let's just do some commentary on an interesting news article, take this one for example: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-11796903

Make cigarette packaging plain, government urges

Now, I'm not a smoker but seriously, this is the biggest load of bullshit I've heard the government say in a long time, this is almost on par with when the liberal democrats said joining the Tories would be the best solution to the hung parliament.

Health Secretary Andrew Lansley said "glitzy designs on packets" attracted children to smoking and it made sense to look at "less attractive packaging".

Glitzy designs on cigarette packets? Is this bloke out of his mind? When I go to a shop counter with my items, the only thing I can see from the cigarette packets are pictures of disfigured mouths, cancerous necks and a needle (which the government believes that if you smoke cigarettes you'll turn into a dope fiend almost straight away) I fail to see how that's glitzy and attractive to kids I mean if it was: Michael Jackson would have had a lot more action.
Still remaining on the subject of glitzy designs, a plain black box wouldn't stop kids from taking up smoking. Drug dealers are doing absolutely fine and have been for years with just selling drugs in a clear plastic zip-lock bag, I fail to remember a time where dealers designed their own logos and sprinkled glitter over a small velvet gift box with a childhood memorable character like TJ from recess giving a comforting smile on top. Maybe that was the time I was hit over the head with a chair and woke up 3 days later in a semen stained bathroom in Norfolk, but that's a story for another time.

 

On the topic of stupid things, why is everyone going apeshit over Call of Duty: Black Cocks? I really don't see the appeal in the game at all. I just keep hearing how people are annoyed they've took out quick-scoping or some shit and how it's going to make the game fairer but, it still looks exactly the same as all the other Call of Duty's they've pushed out recently. I seriously just fail to see the point of it all; especially prestiging or whatever it's called. You get to top level, so what do you do? reset it back to zero. Okay, that seems really counter-productive. Imagine if all WoW players just deleted their character after getting to level 80 and starting again with nothing. Yeah guys, REALLY fun. And then you've got the screaming kids over XBL which is one of the sole reasons I rarely go online with my 360 anymore. That, and I'm an anti-social prick who despises all of humanity.

In conclusion, Kids - get the fuck off Xbox Live and Call of Duty and pick up a carton of Marlboros.

Well, it seems my ISP is ran by Valve because that was the longest "2-3 weeks" of my life. But don't panic all you readers that are still here! I have some interesting articles of information I shall highlight below.

First things first: I am now an editor writing for an awesome website known as Big Distraction. A few reviews/news articles I've done during this downtime on CD will be put up there which should hopefully semi-make up for this long break. As for content I'll be aiming for 1/2 reviews a month on there so I recommend you check them out. Don't fret, all my [shittier] writing will still appear on here as regular content.

Secondly, Bulletxt is a cunt. He is the developer of the card game in First Fantasy, which had corruption issues when saving. Before I moved I sent him a pm informing him of the issues, he replied back later that day stating he'll let me know when he's fixed it. That was 3 months ago, I sent him a message a few weeks after asking how he was getting on but he's yet to reply; So what does this mean? Well it means if you're a Ruby developer wanting to get in on the sexy action that is First Fantasy shoot me an email and if you fix the issues, I'll give you a special mention in the credits!

While we're on the subject of First Fantasy, I have now *hopefully* got rid of the buffer overflow/stacking bug. Also until the Grifter problem is fixed, I have removed him from the game. You can download the full game/patch below or on the game's main page.

A few of you have messaged me asking where I've moved to. Well, it's this place called Leicester in the Midlands. What do I think of it? Think of Gordon Brown giving Phil Jupitus fellatio while Steve Ballmer shakily masturbates with one hand and tries to clutch onto a video camera in the other hand. Savour the thought and remember the disgusted feeling you now have in your stomach: This ladies and gentlemen is my feelings towards Leicester in a nutshell.

Now piss off, stalkers.

- Jack