Insomnia count - 1

Play-Asia took my money

Not once, but twice, before I even receive the products. This better be someone's mistake because I'm pretty careful with using my credit card online. I'm so deperately wanting to play Mass Effect and Assasin's Creed, should have just gone to JB and get them, sigh. The looooonnnggg wait is not over yet.

A few things...

Been a while since my last update, mostly because my internet is currently capped, so I just didn't bother, and that I've been playing a shit load of games, while enjoying the cricket. It's all thanks to Valve/Steam, that I blew pretty much all of my bandwidth allowance for a month in 12 days. The main culprit being buying Call of Duty 4 over on Steam. The game that Steam informed me that was fully pre-loaded, turn out wasn't complete, so I had to download the missing 2gb or so file. But it didn't stop there, the game refused to activate eventhought everything was in my hard drive and offically released on Steam. So I checked the forum for 'fixes' and it all went down hill from there. I think I have probably downloaded the game twice, in a 10 hour gap. The file size is around 6.25gb. So the result? I kissed my normal 230kbps download speed goodbye for the rest of the month.

However, Call of Duty 4 is a fantastic game, it was the Call of Duty style that I enjoyed when I played the series for the first time. Single player is as intense as it could possibly be, and had a good story. The story alternate from the point of view of a British SAS and American USMC sergeant. The non stop action drives the linear story combine with a nice relaxing level call 'Death from above'. It's being said that it is the most realistic video game moment in history so far. You basically take a point of view from a gunner in an aircraft, with one of those black and white infra-red vision one would often see when you watch the news coverage on modern warfare. The music is scored beautifully by Harry Gergson-Williams, his style of music is a perfect match for this game. Althought I have not play the multiplayer component much so far, mostly because of my onboard soundcard caused multiplayer to run at 10 fps. I had to remedied with calling someone with Skype before I load a multiplayer map (as insane as it sounds, it's actually true and works for me).

Now onto Crysis, which I just finished not long ago, it's by far, have the best single player campaign of any FPS I've ever played. From the open sandbox style at the early levels, to the action packed more linear story telling in the latter stage, they are all designed so perfectly. Boy, I would love to have one of those Nanosuits. It is a system killer, there is no doubt about it, quite literally. The graphic is by far the best there is right now. My high end computer was running it at quite acceptable frame rate with high settings, except right at the final boss fight where I most needed it to perform, it cluggs along quite baddly.

To my own surprise, I found myself enjoying Carcassonne on Xbox 360, a Live Arcade game, maybe because it was free. It's quite a nice and relaxing game to play in between of all those action packed FPS.

Guitar Hero 3, and my left wrist...

So after jumping out from bed resulted from a somewhat unexpected but hopeful delivery from Australian Post for my Guitar Hero 3 and Metroid Prime 3 that I have ordered online weeks ago, I was up at 8:30am and started playing Guitar Hero 3, for 4 hours.
My only comment so far for GH3 is, my left wrist really hurts, alot. I never ever remembered playing a real guitar for 4 hours straight so long that my left wrist hurts, but here I was slugging on the fake one like a wanna-be rocker (not for the first time either). Looks like I won't be playing Metroid Prime 3 for a while.

skate.

Apparently that's how you suppose to spell out this game... right EA... I'd been completely hook for a few days in this game, not that because it's really addicitive, it's just sometimes this game frustrate the hell out of you. In general the 'Flickt' control works really well, except when the game ask you to do a specific trick follow another, because the analog stick can be not that responsive sometimes, it is quite difficult to pull them off. The other problem I've had with is the camera angle, it's suppose to emulate from a point of view of a camera-man following you, from a low angle. At times I have problem seeing what is in front of me because my skater blocks the view and does not go transparent more often than he should, I wasted many hours retrying races and trying to grind on certain rail. The loading time is also quite hideous and feels like that part of the game is poorly coded. Load time is way too long for its own good, at times when you moved off from 30m of where you originally started and you retry to start from your original spot, the games goes into a loading screen, I spent alot of times retrying and the loading just doesn't help the cause.

Overall, it's a very solid game and offer something new to the skating genre that's been dominated by Tony Hawk. This game will likely have a sequel and I hope the problems above will be fix in the near future.

My Xbox 360

Got it today, yah! I'm loving it so far.




Skate is the only game I've been playing the most. The game's very unique control scheme does take sometime to get use to. It is very different from the Tony Hawks games I've been playing over the years. The realism of the game makes it completely different than Tony Hawk.