quick news

They're doing a Tekken movie by the way, and Andy Serkis is going to be in it. It's due out some point next year.

You'll also be pleased to hear it's been done in Japan in Japanese. So there might be a god after all...

More info here

Scratch that, it's been written by 2 guys, one of them has written episodes of Bones, Prison Break and 24 and the other wrote Ecks vs Sever, Spawn and The Marine.

So it'll be high-contane, low quality shite as usual

It's a slow news month

Hey Jimbeeer, i hear you cry, why are there fewer witty insightful thoughts and musings this month than normal? Are you getting bored or something?

Well the main reason is there's absolutely buggery flip out this month, what being the backlash of exmas. So far we've had Burnout Paradise which holds your attention for about the same amount of time it takes to smoke a cigarette.

I sincerely believe i've had the game on pause longer than i've actually been playing it, so i just sit there blankly, listening to the serene classical music and let the auto camera pan up and down the empty highway while i skin up and smoke a spliff. As i sit there i think precisely nothing, i do wonder why i'm not playing it. Then i play it in between spliffs and I realise why. It's just that teeny bit boring. Not to mention frustrating when I've taken that tiny wrong turn in the race, then i watch my position drop from first to last in the time it takes to cough.

So i turn it off and play Splinter Cell: Double Agent, but i'm stuck on the second mission in the JBA headquarters, you know the one where you have to get the blueprints and get the voice commands. Spent 20 minutes running around, scratching my arse and watching the seconds tick down, then i turn it off and see if i can get some entertainment from the XBox console, like messing with the resolution, brightness, that kind of crap.

What's coming up in the next couple of weeks then eh?

We've got Devil May Cry 4, Mercenaries 2, The Club and Conflict: Denied Ops.

Or in other words: absolutely fuck all.

At least nothing interesting. I'll probably get the above games but i can't see me actually playing any of them to completion. They might just hold a bit of interest until something decent comes out.

I'm so fucking sick of fps where you're military/ex-military/lone gunner/world war 2 serviceman/modern war/biochem meltdown apocalypse survivor and you gun down wave after wave after wave then boss, then repeat until completion.

Of course we've got Smash Bros for the Wii coming out soon but anyone who's played the other 2 on the N64 and Gamecube knows that Smash Bros is only good when played in very small doses, if you've got a whole bunch of mates to come round and play 4 player it gets pretty good fun and quite manic. If you're like me, you have very few friends, even less that'll come round to your house, then you play the single player game on easy, complete it in half an hour and then only play it every now and then over the next 6 months.

Ah well, at least S04E01 of Lost is on tonight, but due to the sodding WGA strike there's only 8 episodes instead of 16 like there's supposed to be.

Let me be the first to say:

FFS!!!!!!!

For all you poor people out there

Fuck them in their stupid asses

You know i got banned from XBL in November right? Well, what you didn't know was they've kept my account going all this time. Me neither!

And what you also may not know is you can't delete your account through the website. You can have to call them up and speak to a person to delete your account.

Lame eh? Well, i haven't told you the rest of it.

Basically the conversation went like this:

Riiiiiiiinng, Riiiiiiiiiing (oh christ it's got put through to a foreign call center, you can tell by the single tone rather than the double you get in Britain)

Indian guy answers.
Hello, welcome to XBox Support, my name is (insert unpronouncable Indian name here), can i take your name please.

So i give him my name and then spend another minute spelling out my surname phonetically.

Me: Yes, i'd like to cancel my Xbox Live account please.
Him: Certainly sir, can i ask the reason behind this please?
Me: I just don't play it any more (what the fuck am i going to say? Microsoft banned me for having a modified console)
Him: Is there a reason you don't play it any more?
Me: No, I just don't play online any more, i just want to cancel my account.
Him: Is it the games you're not liking?
Me: No, i just don't play it very often.
Him: Are you connected to Live at the moment
Me: No, it's not plugged in, i haven't played it for a while (pick one story, stick to it, that's what i learned)
Him: Are you not liking the Xbox 360 any more, is there a reason for this?
Me: No, no reason, i don't play it, i want to cancel it now please
Him: Have you had a bad experience playing online?
Me: No
Him: Do you know how to connect to online games and get the most out of your Xbox Live account, i could show you how if you like
Me: Yes i do and no i don't like
Him: Are you sure you wouldn't like to think about it for a little while?
Me: What? No, i rang up to cancel it. That's what i'd like to do now please.

So it starts to dawn on him that i won't be budged so he spends the next 7 or 8 minutes getting my gamertag and confirming every detail about my account even down to my favourite pets name (wish i'd have written 'Fuckhugh' in the pets name box now). It didn't help that when i found out i couldn't cancel my acc. online that i went into my billing information and changed my entire billing details to a's and 1's.

All this time he's giving me the usual crap:
Him: Have you considered transferring your account to another member of your family, i could do that for you right now

At this point i just get annoyed

Me: Nooo, please, please, please, just cancel my account.
Him: Ok sir, don't worry, I was just...
Me: I know EXACTLY what you're doing, i get it, i really do. But i want to cancel my account, i 'won't worry' when you do what i'm asking you to do and cancel my account.

So he puts me on hold for about 2 minutes while my account 'cancels' (Fuck knows).

And then he comes back and tells me it's cancelled. By this time i'm sick of him and can't be bothered with his false platitudes so while he's giving me the 'That has been done, is there anything else i can help you with today' I'm just talking over him with 'No, it's fine'. Then the obligatory 'Ok sir, you have a nice day now' (It was 9.30pm, there wasn't much day left to have a nice one) I just butted in with 'Yeah, thanks, bye' and put the phone down

Total call time 15min 38sec.

I don't know what it is about Indian call centers but they drive me up the fucking wall.

Maybe it's just because the whole deal stinks of a company trying to cut costs and save money. That's the only thing it says to me.

So that's it, my trials and tribulations of quitting my XBL account. And one day, ONE DAY, you'll all go through exactly the same thing as i just did...

Lost: Via Domus

It means 'The Way Home' in Latin, but you knew that already.

"Only six characters (Desmond, Ben, Mikhail, Mr. Friendly, Claire and Sun) are authentic. The rest are voice-a-likes."

Who the fuck is Mr. Friendly? I've watched every singly episode of Lost and I haven't a sodding clue who this Friendly character is.

Anyway it doesn't actually look to suck as much as a tv/movie tie-in normally does. Though it'll probably suck a little bit coz it's a tv tie-in innit?

Pure unadulterated wank material

This looks so good i'm getting a semi here. I'm mean, fuck me, he brings down a frigging Star Destroyerjust using the force. How mental is that!

http://uk.media.ps3.ign.com/media/823/823668/vids_1.html

(I tried embedding it into here but it didn't want to know)

What the buggery fuck?!

Ubisoft have released the recommended specs needed for Assassin's Creed on the PC.

In a nutshell:

Dual-core 2.6 GHz chip
3gb of ram
Direct X 10 gfx card

3 GB OF RAM?!! WTF!
That's a bit bloody steep innit?

So basically, if I wanted to play Assassin's Creed on my pc i'd have to update the motherboard, chip, gfx card and memory.

Doing a quick run on Misco for parts, i can see that it would come to roughly £600 for those 4 components.

Or i can just play it on the 360 for a week until i get bored of it and save my money for porn sites when the guided tour just isn't enough.

For £600 you can get a whole load o' wank.

And they wonder why pc gaming is dying out (nothing to do with the rampant piracy, no no)

Where the grass is green and the girls are pretty

FINALLY!!!

After a long, bleak Christmas where bugger all has come out, Burnout Paradise is finally out. And you know what? It's actually good.

It's radically different to the other Burnout games. It feels like Need For Speed multiplied by Burnout. You drive around the city, wherever the hell you like. Every single junction has a mission. A majority of them are races where you get from point A to point B, but there's no restriction on the route you take.

The crash point junction slo-mo things have gone and have been replaced by something a little similar where you can press LB & RB at the same time, then you flip over and start bouncing along the road, press A at the bottom and you'll hop upwards, then you basically have to smash into as many cars as you can while you've still got turbo. Lots of fun but it may get a bit tiring after a while coz after you've smashed into 120+ cars you get a little bored and just want to finish.

Still, it'll hold my attention for the next couple of weeks and at least i don't have to go back to the old games just for something to do.

7th March 2008

That's the (un)official release date of Rock Band on the 360.

Just thought you'd like to know.

Apparently they've delayed it a little as the pedal on the drumkit keeps breaking as it's a bit flimsy so it's probably a good thing for this Keith Moon wannabe right here.

Faustian Bastards

I've just had another email from my former bandmate saying that the main reason he's doing the tribute band is to get some dosh in. Apparently a good covers band can get up to a grand a gig. That'd be £200 a piece for a couple of hours work.

Bastards!

So that's it. He's now going in my list of Faustian scum:

. Katie 'Useless' Price
. Peter 'Greasy Retard' Andre
. Google
. Covers Bands

nb. Faust was a guy who sold his soul to the devil for a lifetime of all the material possessions he desired.

This Christmas I have mostly been playing...

Tony Hawk's Proving Ground.

And you know what? It's without a doubt the best Tony Hawk game since THPS 3. Underground and Wasteland kinda lost their way quite a bit but this one is just superb. The best part is you can do a nail the trick at any point, even during a normal ollie. The maps are good fun and have some shit long grinds. You lvl up a little like an rpg where you just get better at something the more you do it, which is the way it should be.

I hate to use the tired old cliché of 'If you like x, you'll love y' but if you used to enjoy the old Tony Hawk games before they got into all that cycling and parkour bollocks. Everything they've introduced into Proving Ground actually makes the game better rather than worse, it feels like they're refining it rather than adding new stuff for the sake of it.

And if you've never done them before, Nail the Trick/Grab/Manual are really, really well done and totally fantastic when you pull off a particularly difficult one.

If you're looking for something good to play after the usual Christmas release-date hiatus then i would highly recommend Tony Hawk's Proving Ground. Doubly so if you used to like it but went off it in the later years then this is definitely the game to pull you back.

It's Marvel-ous

Can't get enough of that delicious Marvel.

Completely read all of Civil War from beginning to end. Now i'm backtracking a bit and reading House of M. How effin' cool is House of M. It's really really gurd. Then I've got Age of Apocalypse, World War Hulk and Planet Hulk to read so there's definitely some Marveling times ahead.

It's a catch-22 as always

I've just found out the guy in my old band is now in a Who tribute band. The most annoying thing is, they're getting regular paid gigs. Even though i can understand all the reasons why, this kind of stuff really annoys me. It all just seems a little Faustian. You sell your soul and spend a couple of weeks learning other peoples music, presto, gets loads of paid gigs. Bust your gut and make your own songs. Refine them over 6 months or so. Really push to get your song numbers up without resorting to throwing trash in or even covers just so you can pad out a gig. Then struggle to get the odd gig that's definitely non-paying and you need to be grateful just because someone has provided a stage for you.

Are people really that shallow that they'd rather watch some band play music they've already heard a thousand times before rather than go watch some new music where the members are throwing blood, sweat and tears into every song.

Obviously, the answer is yes!

It's sucks and yes, i'm bitter about it.


Oh, by the way, we rocked so fucking hard at The Face Bar last month they begged us to come back and rock this house inside out again.

Naturally we had to discuss this at length to see if we could fit it into our busy schedules but they kept begging so eventually we said yes so we'll be kicking bottoms and taking names next Saturday the 19th January at The Face Bar.

Why have I only learnt this now?

There's a game for the PC called Frets on Fire. It's a guitar hero clone BUT it's open source and free. To all you laymen out there, this means it's free to download and the source code is freely available to modify as you see fit. Conclusion: You can download a shit load of stuff for it and it doesn't cost a thing.

But here's the REALLY cool thing about it, you can connect a ps2 Guitar Hero controller to it as long as you have a ps2-pc dongle.

Now that is effin' cool. Gotta get me some frets action this evening...

What Rock Band really sounds like

Everyone and their dog is looking forward to Rock Band when it finally comes out but i've just stumbled across this. It's what rock Band really sounds like with all the clicking and hitting of the pads. You've got to admit, it puts you off just a tiny little bit...