deKay’s Blog

If it’s even one tenth the game Fallout 3 is, New Vegas is worth getting very excited for indeed. And look! He’s got a glowing red face!

Yesterday, Apple announced the iPad. Not that anyone was really surprised, as all bar the nitty gritty specifics had been leaked already over the last few weeks.

And, although I was looking forward to the reveal, I didn’t think I was going to be especially interested in the product. After all, I’ve had tablet PCs and PDAs and an iPhone and laptops and netbooks and stuff in the past. So it wasn’t going to be anything new.

I was wrong. I really want one. I’m right in that it does nothing new, but that’s not the point with Apple kit – little of it is actually new. The iPhone did nothing new. The iPod did nothing new. But Apple are masters of mastery; Of doing things right. The proof is there: mp3 players didn’t take off until Apple’s iPod, and now half of the competition are trying to duplicate the iPod. Touch screen phones had been around for years before the iPhone, but now every phone is an iPhone wannabe. So it is with the iPad.

Everything it does, has been done before. But it’s how it does it. How easy it is to do it. How powerful it is in doing it. How slick, smooth, seemless and shiny Apple have done it.

I can see the naysayers and iPad haters already making complaints and rubbishing it. It might well flop yet – after all, every other similar PDA/tablet/touchscreen device before it have already flopped – but this feels different. It gets so many things right that even if some of it’s functionality doesn’t take off, there’s loads left.

Take iBooks. It’s just Kindle mixed with Delicious Library. But then this is Kindle which can also play films. And games. And surf the internet.

Or it’s a portable movie player. That lets you read books, check your email, and do your online shopping.

Or it’s a games console. That doubles as an electronic photo frame, lets you view YouTube and plan a holiday.

Or it’s all of those things, and everything else the App Store can provide for you. As with the iPhone, it’s all the “value added” stuff that will make the machine. The iPhone without the App Store is a basic, but pretty and functional, smartphone. With it, it does everything you can imagine. If you can think of a need, there’s a pretty good chance (as they say) there’s an app for that.

If you’re the sort of person who wants a mobile office desk, with your desk diary, email, internet, notepad and so on, with features for when you have “down time” or are travelling (that’s your music, books, films and games then) it’s great. If, like me, you love the iPhone but when playing games or reading web pages you just want something… bigger, then it too is great.

Imagine playing the sort of games Microsoft were showing off with Surface – only without having to spend ten billion pounds to own one!

My only concern with it is the lack of a camera on the front. This would be ideal for Skype, but I’m betting there’ll be a camera add-on for the expansion socket available at some point.

Will I be getting one? I’d like one, certainly. But I might just wait until the second revision. If I can.

Blogger is dead, long live Wordpress!

You see, Blogger announced recently that they were going to ditch FTP support for Blogger users. Since my Gaming Diary uses Blogger’s FTP features, and always has, this caused me a problem.

My options were:

• Migrate to a Blogger subdomain (urgh)
• Create a lofi-gaming.org.uk subdomain and direct that to my Blogger-hosted diary (not that bad an issue, but my URL would change)
• Move away from Blogger entirely (to Wordpress, by preference)
• Close the diary entirely
• Merge the diary with this blog
• Wee on some cakes and send them to Blogger with a note saying “Hey you guys!!! You suck! Have some cakes!!”
• Blast off and nuke the site from orbit

Since I’d been considering the third of these options, I decided upon that. And did. And now it’s done.

The new, migrated, diary is still at the old address of http://lofi-gaming.org.uk/diary but the RSS feed URL has changed to http://lofi-gaming.org.uk/diary/feed/so you’ll need to update that if you subscribe (and if you don’t why don’t you?!).

Maybe one day I’ll tell you all the story of how the migration involved headaches with MySQL servers and folder structures and Blogger’s interference trying to overwrite the new Wordpress install and css files going missing and Germany invading Poland and everything. Or perhaps I won’t. That would be very dull.

Just over two years ago, I came up with the £25 Game Challenge. In summary, it was a rule preventing me from paying over £25 for any game.

And, in that time I only broke the rule once, except that somehow, I hadn’t.

So the time has come to update the challenge. Looking at every game I’ve bought in the last year or so, not a single one has cost me more than £20. Why not, then, drop the limit to £20? It should be perfectly do-able, right?

Lets hope so!

Here’s the rules, recycled from last time:

I will no longer pay more than £20 for a game.

Hopefully the pay-offs will be three-fold:

1. I will save money (obviously)
2. I will, in a very small way, be protesting about the high cost of games
3. I won’t buy so many launch-day games that I don’t play for months

The latter in particular is a big thing. If I pay £40 at launch, and then don’t play it for six months, the chances are the price will have come down. OK, so I run the risk of never actually buying the game, but that’s better than the risk of buying it and never actually playing it, yes?

However, there will be some exceptions to this £20 Rule:

• If I have loyalty points, gift vouchers, store credit, etc. then these don’t count in the £20.
• If the game is, say, £25, but is in a “2 for £40″ offer, then the price counts as £20 if I buy both.
• For games that include extra hardware (Guitar Hero, for example) I am allowed to pay over £20, but never full price.
• Any postage costs are not part of the £20.

So, anyone fancy joining me in The £20 Game Challenge?

For reasons I don’t understand, Spotify just went a bit mental and started playing everything at double speed. Even closing the app and opening it again doesn’t seem to have helped.

Shame I can’t do the same with live TV. By tomorrow morning I’d know the lottery results!

Oops!

After scraping together all my Club Nintendo stars loyalty points at the end of last year (some were due to expire on the 31st of December), I had a look through the Club Nintendo Stars Catalogue for things to spend them all on.

Of course, it had to be this:

It’s three old Game & Watch games – Oil Panic, Donkey Kong, and Green House – all for the DS. Which is oooh shiny enough in itself, but becomes even more oooh shiny when you realise it isn’t available for sale anywhere. Excellent.

I was surprised that, despite having a baby at Christmas last year, I was still able to play games in 2009. It seems babies sleep! Not that I’d have imagined that in our first few days with her at home.

More surprising, is that I’ve somehow managed to complete a total of 43 games in the last 12 months. In 2008, I “only” completed 33.

But the best games of 2009? That’s an ask, isn’t it? Mainly because I’m pretty sure a lot of the games I played in 2009 were actually out in 2008. Or earlier. Much earlier in the case of some of the Megadrive titles I blitzed in the middle of the year! Apologies, then, if some of these are of an older vintage, but I’ll try to stay on-target with the year.

5. Words With Friends (iPhone)

Because it’s one of the games I’ve played the most. It’s just Scrabble, only legally not (so different letter scores and board layout), but the fact you can play others online and have a billion games on the go at once, makes it somewhat addictive.

4. Lit (Wii)

I seem to be the only person in the world who actually bought this, which is a shame. It’s a puzzle game, played out like a sort of reverse stealth game -you have to stay out of the dark or evil beasties eat you. Unusual and challenging.

3. New Super Mario Bros Wii (Wii)

This would be one notch higher if it wasn’t for just one thing – I’ve not played it enough yet, having only got it for Christmas. Perfectly built, inventive and clever. Nobody makes games like this any more – only Nintendo.

2. Little King’s Story (Wii)

Pikmin was an amazing game, and Little King’s Story owes much to it. You control a (growing) army of followers, of different types with different skills, and roam the world defeating bizarre bosses and collecting strange objects in order to “unite” the world essentially through ethnic cleansing. It’s cute, it has a few huge difficulty spikes, and it’s story can only be attributed to a loon. And it’s great.

1. Shadow Complex (360)

I love Metroid games. And I love Castlevania games. And Shadow Complex is the same sort of game – lots of exploring, and picking up new powers and items that open up more of the map. There’s nothing really new in it, and it’s got terrible, grating, voice acting. But! It’s the gameplay, the spot-on controls, and the amazingness of going from feeble weakling with a water pistol to an indestructible killing half-man, half-machine. So great is it, that the doable-in-5-hours story was done so many times, on every difficulty (bar Easy), that I’ve racked up over 60 hours on the game. And the OCD sufferer in me loves the item collection. 100% complete or nothing! It’s also a staggeringly good bargain at 1200 MS Points (it’s an Xbox Live Arcade title). My Game of the Year, for certain.

And the rest:

Other games of note from last year include the GTA IV add-on The Ballad of Gay Tony, which is another excellently written, funny, and fun to play GTA romp, Fallout 3 and it’s extra DLC (yeah, Fallout 3 was 2008 – but not all the DLC was) because it eats time itself, and GTA Chinatown Wars for the DS, which somehow managed to be a proper GTA without much compromise.

And hurrah for point-and-clicks! They made a return for me last year, with the last few Strong Bad episodes, Sam & Max, and Monkey Island. Thank $deity for Telltale Games!

As is sometimes the way with things I see others do on their blogs, I’ve nicked this idea for a post from here. Mind you, I’m pretty sure I’ve done something similar myself before. That I also nicked the idea of. Ahem.

So here is the Top Ten Things People Searched For And Found My Blog As A Result:

Interestingly, most of these refer to the twin scams of The Loyalty Awards Club and Survey UK. The error code (the second highest search) relates to an issue I solved with Microsoft Exchange 2003 – obviously it’s affecting quite a few people! The phone numbers are for another scam, and the final entry is because I seem to have become the Philips Freevents One Stop Shop Help And Advice Line.

In fact, looking back, most of the results are the same as those from last year!

I need to move my blog from a MySQL 4 database to a MySQL 5 database, so I’ve started doing some stuff to achieve that. If things all go wonky, this is why!

At the moment it’s on a staging database server and seems to be OK. I’ll test it for a few days then move it to it’s new home.