200 OK

So that’s one resolution firmly shafted, a blog post a week haha its the 6th of Feb and I haven’t even bothered with one! shocking. Truth be told there have been a fair few things in my personal and working time that have sucked into my enthusiasm to write the blog.

So what are these things and what have I been upto this month you cry? I can hear your edge of the seat heavy breathing even now, well?! well?!!! what?!!….. Nothing exciting i’m afraid, i’v mainly been back to my old habits of being a digital whore with tv shows and computer games.

First of the bench is the game Assassin’s Creed 2

Ok so I randomly watched a review for this game and thought hey that looks freaking awesome and a great improvement over the first one.  The only problem with this was the fact that I never finished the first game and had uninstalled it from my ps3.  As a lot of people know i’m very much a sequence freak, I cannot deal with media out of sequence. I can’t miss an episode of a TV show and then just carry on next week watching the next one, skipping a season is stomach turning! heh its the same with computer games.

So of course before playing my shinny copy of Assassin’s Creed 2 I had to play through and complete the first game! It was not as repetitive as the first time I played it, perhaps my anticipation of installing the new one kept me going though the boring bits. It’s still a great game and once finished (literally) I installed the new game.

Now where the first game is a great game, Assassin’s Creed 2 is nothing short of a masterpiece of a game. I wont go into it in detail  as review sites (see below) can do that a lot better than I ever could or would want too. Needless to say this is a monumental improvement over the first and from the moment I installed it I was actually hooked. It is truly one of the best games I have played in a very long time. So how much time did this rack up? well the game tells you how long you have played and when I had completed it I had racked up a good 36hours not forgetting playing through the first game which would of been at least the same if a little less.

Reviews:

Gamespot Video Review
GameTrailers Video Review
IGN Video Review

The Shield

Now I watch a lot of American shows, Sopranos, Lost, Oz, Prison Break etc etc… But good golly miss molly have I been missing out on cop shows over the years. After discovering and devouring all five seasons on The Wire last year and loving it, my attentions have moved onto what other police based shows there are out there that i’v missed, very quickly I came across one called The Shield and once again I am hooked!

The show is basically around this fictional Los Angeles special police department and the corruption and drama and grittiness and oooo its awesome. I am only at the end of season 1 and there are 7! seasons, so i’v got my work cut out in getting through them.

I love discovering shows that have finished with such a big run of seasons because if you like the first you can generally assume you are gonna dig most of the others and the prospect of having so much good stuff to watch is great, often following a show from the outset can be disappointing if it is cancelled prematurely. I loved shows like Space above an Beyond and Invasion but they are just one season footnotes of what could of been classics.

So this has racked me up a good 11-13 hours getting though. S’ok only another 75ish episodes to go heh.

Court

So for the past two weeks I have been on Jury service. For those not in the know, if you are on the UK electoral role and between the ages of 18 and really old you may get called up for jury service, This happened to me and its pretty much a legal requirement to do it. I think I am going to save the details of my jury service to it’s own blog post as this one is getting pretty long already.  All i’ll say that it was a long and actually quite draining experience but kinda rewarding at the same time.

Of course this meant I was not at work for the best part of 2 weeks, now working where I work this isn’t really possible.  Since I manage a lot of projects and we are constantly working to deadlines I did have to work in the evenings a fair bit after my days in the court to make sure everything was still running smoothly. Vegging out with some shield or assassin’s creed 2 was about all I was up for come 7-8pm most days.

Lost

Oh lost, lovely mind fuck argh addictive omfg what’s going on Lost. I am a lost fan, if you are still into lost well done you must also be in the ranks of the obsessed if not you are one of the ‘its bollocks’ camps, lost is like Marmite. The FINAL (6th) season of Lost kicked off this week and i’m back into it like a paedophile in an orphanage.

Now you may think that this could not of taken up much time since it only just started I could only of watched a couple of hours of stuff, you’d be wrong.  I am a sado when it comes to lost, I not only watch each episode twice I look up theories on blogs for other things i didn’t spot, I have even go as far as to load up old episodes from other seasons to check-up on stuff.

Without going into a rant about how I think it’s going to end (again another blog post or several) all i’m gonna say is they better do it well. If they leave it even somewhat ‘wtf’ or up in the air i’m gonna find out where the writers live and send them some chocolate cake in a box.

I recently got a new PS3 game that I am hooooked on and it got me thinking about this interest I have.

What Type of Gamer am I?

I thought I’d firstly talk about what kind of gamer I am. I’m a bit strange in this regard, I can go for months and months and never play a single game and then play one like a maniac for a while. I’d say i’m a casual gamer with hardcore hundreds an thousands sprinkled on.

I love playing retro games from my childhood. Mainly because my folks were not exactly loaded so although I didn’t go without I did not get (like some i know) every single thing I wanted, so the games I did have I played and played and played! To this day I still load them up an go though one of my crazy gaming binges. Games like: The Settlers, Simcity 2000, UFO:Enemy Unknown, Elite, Frontier Elite Two (lost days to these two), Doom 2, Age of Empires are some of the older games that you can reallllly spend a lot of time on. It’s one of my ambitions to own a classic arcade machine which plays a really retro game called Rampage, you can play it online for free these days but its not the same! It was a game I found as a tiny tiny young lad at the sea side and I loved it!

Sweet link: There is this guy called the angry video game nerd, he reviews old ‘crap’ video games, check him out.

That is not to say I only play older games, I am very much into new games but seem to rarely buy them. I have had a ps3 for a year or so but only own like 5-6 games, something I intend to change. I love first person shootery games and also racey type games, anything with a lot of action in it is all good. Although I don’t mind a bit of role play I really don’t ‘get’ games like world of warcraft, why people dedicate them selves to it I have no idea, having skills and levels is cool an all but that game is just on its own level of weird.  I’d say the GTA games are the most ‘me’ I’v loved playing everyone of them and GTA IV (the reason I bought a ps3!) is simply amazing.

Best value for money

I really should buy more games as personally next to my geeky(er)  hobby of war gaming, video games are simply the best return for your investment. Seeing a film at the cinema is like 6-7 quid and lasts what a couple of hours? Going out drinking is the same, few hours and if ya like me its 50-100 quid spent on a night.  You spend 30-40 quid on a video game and as long as its a good one you get 20 to unlimited hours of fun from it! The best thing about the good ones is the re-playability, you can’t really read a book or watch a film over and over again but you can play a game like GTA IV forever and it (for me) never gets boring.

PC or Console?

I used to be a huge supporter of PC gaming, I’v never really owned a console other than a master system way back when. It wasn’t until GTA IV came out that I broke this trend and forked out some cash on a ps3. I’v not been disappointed! I always preferred a mouse an keyboard to play games, especially since I was a bit of an FPS fiend (and still am) but there is much to be said for the likes of the latest generation of consoles. For one the games are just ‘fun’, they may not be as complicated control wise and a little bit more simple with game-play but they’re just so much fun to play! I’m really looking forward to the motion sensor controller Sony are working on, they demoed a protype at e3 this year and it looks awesome.

What i’m playing at the minute

I recently have been playing a game called inFamous on ps3 and I’m hooked on it, its like a cross between spider man, gta iv and assassin’s creed. If you have a ps3 go and check it out, you will not be disappointed trust me. There is a similar game called prototype which i’m gonna check out after this one. Before inFamous i’v been spamming Sid Meier’s Pirates from 2005, I love pirates and this game is rather addictive. Also on PC i’m still very much into Left4Dead which is a multi-player zombie FPS game, I also love zombies so this game gets a lot of play. If there is ever a game of zombie pirates driving sports cars and firing ak47′s i’ll be buying that shit!

Anyhoo just thought i’d share a bit about on of my pass times with ya’ll, take care.

p.s i’m watching flight plan on the tele as I write this, Jodie Foster needs a punch in the face! gawd she’s an annoying actor.