What's black and white and blue all over?

Okay, I know I've not been updating this thing too often. My loyal readers must be quite annoyed by my inactivity, and I apologise to both of them. So, without further ado...


This is my result from the Political Compass test, not as left/lib as I thought, but it still pretty much explains why I wasn't crazy about either of the main candidates in the US election. Still, it seems that the US is gradually shifting to the left... or maybe "away from the right" would be more accurate. Maybe Obama seemed like the USA's only hope in these dark times (no pun intended), but I think they're just fed up with the Republicans. It could've been the last eight years which brought that about, but it could equally have been the last few months.

In other news, I went to see Tropic Thunder at the cinema recently, and it was refreshingly good. I went in expecting another mediocre Ben Stiller film, but I was pleasantly surprised. It could've been a little shorter, in my opinion, but it's generally agreed by many that I have a below average attention span.

[Insert clichéd "ooh, a butterfly" joke here.]

The Matrix in three panels

MS Paint, 10 minutes.

Cold Hearted BAWW

So, how many songs do you think you could dub over this scene?

Are there any songs that you absolutely can't stand, be it for the singing, the lyrics, the meaning or just the tune itself?

What Does it all Mean?

I had a strange dream last night. All I remember is that I was in a futuristic airport, with many towering levels and glass walls. I felt a slight craving for milkshake (as I do often) so I went to a small shop off to the side. After examining the shelves, I saw that the only thing close to milkshake that they stocked was a milky energy drink, and what was stranger was that it was xkcd themed. Perplexed, I chose a drink from three colours available - yellow, pink and baby blue. I chose the blue and headed for the counter. Behind the counter were two members of staff; a slim, young, handsome Asian man with spiky hair and a chubby but cute woman with glasses. I handed the drink to the woman and gave her my money, explaining that I only bought it because I wanted a milkshake. The Asian man overheard this and turned to me, saying "so you're not an xkcd fan?" I told him I was, but I was still surprised that it had an energy drink named after it. I left the store and took a sip of the drink. It tasted disgusting.

So, what are your dreams like. Remember them much? Ever tasted something in a dream and still had the taste in your mouth when you woke up?

o.o

A Long, Dark, Dreary Knight

So it all started a few years ago when I went to see Batman Begins at the cinema. I went in expecting a fairly decent movie, and I came out having witnessed a masterpiece. To this day it stands as one of my personal favourite films, and naturally I was excited but nervous when I heard that a sequel was on the way. Sequels, as I'm sure you've noticed, have this weird habit of being terribly disappointing, with a few exceptions. My nervous thoughts were cast aside, however, when I heard from a few, very reliable friends across the pond that it surpasses even the brilliance of its predecessor. Even Yahtzee praised it as being, and I quote, "absolutely fucking legendary".

If I have ever felt like the subject of some massive, Truman Show-esque social experiment, it was in the few seconds after having finished watching that film. I literally had not read a single review of it, official or not, that didn't shower it with praise, and yet not for one moment while I sat in front of that screen did I once think "this is a good film". I went to see it with two other people, and the average opinion upon leaving the cinema was "below average".

This is where you'd probably expect me to do some explaining for myself, since I seem to be the only blogger who isn't currently kissing that film's arse until it's red raw, but to be honest, I have nothing to say. That's exactly why I didn't enjoy it. There was nothing to particularly like about it at all, with the possible exception of the late Heath Ledger's impressive performance as The Joker. It seems somewhat of a mistake that they took the only remarkable thing about the film and did a completely half-arsed job of it, then. I'm pretty sure that at the time of his death, Heath had already finished doing all of his scenes for the film, so there's no excuse for the fact that Joker fades into the background around half-way through, and becomes a secondary character to none other than Burnt Face Man.

Upon retrospect, The Dark Knight is not a single film, but rather the beginning of one film, and the ending of another, connected tenuously by a run-of-the-mill-American-action-movie middle section in which each minor character is kidnapped or killed at least six times.

If I could somehow construct a time-machine and deliver a message to the film's director before the filming began, I would tell him to leave Two-Face out of it whatsoever, because, much like said villain, the film tries to be two things at the same time and ultimately ends up as a wet, half-baked mess on the floor. So, my time-travelling message to the past would be this: keep it simple, because sometimes you can have too much of a good thing. I suppose while I'm there I ought to give Mr. Ledger the same advice.

Graphical Styles

A post to accompany the poll. I was just wondering what people think about the art styles used by different video games. Which are your favourite? Which don't you like? Do you think a game should be as realistic as possible, or should each game have its own unique style? I've got some examples in case people haven't heard of any of the ones in the poll, or just want to compare:

Crysis is quite probably the most realistic looking game to date. After all, there's no better artist to imitate than the Universe itself, right?

Gears of War takes realism and makes it look a little too real. Desaturated colours and rough textures make this what I call a 'gritty' style.

Beyond Good & Evil is a great game, and if you haven't played it, you should. Its visuals are jaunty and every place, person or thing seems to have its own character.

The Legend of Zelda - The Wind Waker recieved some negative critisism for its cell-shaded art style. I personally thought it was beautiful.

Team Fortress 2 is a brilliant arcadey multiplayer shooter from Valve. Their art style is inspired by 1920s cartoons, and is at a comfortable point between pure cartoon and realism.

Viewtiful Joe is a fast-paced, movie-themed beat-em-up by Capcom. The graphics look cell-shaded, but with ink outlines imitating comic book illustrations.

I haven't played Okami, but from what I've seen, and what people tell me, I think I should. The visuals, and some of the gameplay, are based on Japanese brush paintings, as is fairly obvious.

Metal Slug is fairly well known as a series of wacky side-scrolling shooters. The visuals, while old-fashioned, carry a style that's near-impossible to acheive with 3D games.

Super Mario World features simple, smooth sprites and bright, vivid colours and, despite lacking detail, still manages to be full of character.

One of my favourite games of all time, Yoshi's Island was gorgeously cute all the way through. Miyamoto's idea for crayon-drawn graphics are possibly the best on the SNES.

Last, and possibly least, are the simple but colourful shapes of trancey minigames like Geometry Wars for the Xbox Live Arcade. It's a bit like being on acid, so I'm told.

So, what do you think? Did I forget any? Leave a comment, if you want.

Angst and Internet Dating

Read this.

Done? Okay.

Funny how when you look at the Maths of something, anything, it always seems a lot more bleak and frightening than it did before. Way to go, Maths.

I think a lot of blokes out there would benefit from seeing that, though. It makes me wonder how people even used to survive without the Internet. Has it raised our romantic standards, now that we have millions more potential dates? Do we rely more on personalities for first impressions, and exchange pictures afterwards? Is the time spent composing an e-mail a way of arranging and perfecting a message of our true feelings, or is instinctive, spontaneous speech the only way to convey our emotions without concealing anything? I find myself to be much more open to people on the Internet - even when talking to people I know in the real world. But I can also lie a whole lot more easily.

Is it good to fabricate a façade of sorts - to engineer our ideal personality, and fall in love with people's fantasies instead of their real, boring selves? Perhaps knowing someone's ambitions from the start would mean a relationship with no nasty surprises. But if we can build an alter-ego on the Internet, could we simply trap gullible fools in our web of lies?

In truth, things are rarely extreme positives or negatives. There is no black or white, only so many shades of grey - or maybe some other colour, who knows? My point is, my questions have no real answers and are thus a little pointless. The Internet has done a little evil and a little good. I like to think it's a tad more of the latter. Like any revolution, it causes harmony and controversy, pleasure and pain, joy and sadness. Which leads me nicely back to the topic of Mathematics.

If you read that link, you'll have seen how hopeless our chances of falling in love are. One blind date every week, and it would still take 67 years to find an ideal girl.

But do you know what would be worse than going 67 years without a girlfriend? Finding the most perfect girl in the whole world only to have her march off with someone better and more attractive than I am. That would be pretty lame.

... I'm sorry, I'm just being a bitch.

Acta non Verba

So, I finished Battlefield: Bad Company a few days ago. I suppose I'll tell you what I thought of it, as if my opinion matters to whomever you might be.

I was initially intending to buy Call of Duty 4 for myself, but decided to spend the money instead on a birthday present for my brother. He seemed to be more interested in Bad Company, and it was a game I was quite eager to play myself, after watching some of the trailers. So, Battlefield it was. Naturally, he lost interest in the single-player campaign after a few minutes, so I completed it for him.

My Internet connection is fairly unreliable, and wasn't working when I first tried to take the game online, so I decided to play through the story mode first.

My first impression was that DICE are awesome. The graphics are gorgeous. The trees look like real trees, the tanks look like real tanks, and the people look like real people. The Frostbite Engine's lighting is entirely dynamic - as it would have to be in such a dynamic game. My only beef with the graphics is the smoke effects - although it looks pretty in screenshots, they animate rather poorly, flickering and disappearing in a rather distracting way. It's a minor issue overall, though.

If anything is more impressive than the graphics, though, it's the sound. The Frostbite Engine uses HDR sound, as explained briefly by excited Swedish men here. This generally means that the whole experience is very loud, and I reccomend you buy a pair of fancy headphones if you want to fully appreciate this game. Combine that with plenty of explosions, funny characters and a beautiful soundtrack, Bad Company could well be the best sounding game I've ever played.

The big deal with this game, though, as I'm sure already know, is the destructible environment. The Frostbite Engine can render 90% destructible environments - that's only 10% away from real life. One can literally blast a path through a row of buildings, a la Juggernaut, and even the ground itself can be blown to pieces. If you like destroying things, buy this game.

But, regardless of how much fun it is overall, there are a few issues I still have with the thing.

The game has three difficulty levels. I played through on Hard, and that was still quite easy. What made it so simple was the way that the player's character is completely invincible. Upon losing one's hit points, one is simply teleported to the last checkpoint, and sometimes given a new vehicle. The enemies, though, stay dead. So all one has to do is march into the game, kill at least one enemy, die, repeat, and the level is as good as done, and since the enemies die from so much as breaking a fingernail, anyone can pretty much breeze through the game without encountering much of a challenge. The only time the player does have to restart a level is when they've failed an objective, which can only happen about three times in the whole game. DICE apparently wanted to make these three times really count, because there is one part of the game that is so frustratingly difficult, it will make you cry, not least because the player's AI squad is pathetically stupid. Trust me, they live up to their name.

The great thing is, there are Achievements for completing each level on all three difficulty modes, and, unlike other games, I can't get them all from doing it on the hardest setting. This means I have to endure a large portion of deja vu with a side order of boredom as I waltz through the entire game again, against even less challenging enemies. Twice.

Battlefield has always been about the multiplayer, though, and, although the matches are a little smaller this time round, there's no less fun to be had. It's difficult to get bored of a multiplayer where, upon spawning at my base, I am presented with several armoured cars, a helicopter, two tanks and an artillery gun. Very difficult indeed. All of the problems with the single-player, such as stupid AI and overly forgiving difficulty levels are, of course, not present, although that's not to say my fellow players are guaranteed to be any more intelligent.

So, to draw this dull, rambling excuse for a critical review to a close, Bad Company is an excellent multiplayer game with a surprisingly deep and enjoyable single player experience. I'm quite glad I chose it over Call of Duty 4, now.

Well, I'm sorry this ended up so drawn out. I guess I have a tendancy to ramble on a bit.

f1RsT P0sT!!!1

Funny, that. I've always been meaning to start a blog, but now I have one, I can't think of what to put in it. I suppose I ought to start with some kind of introduction, but I'm not brilliant at introducing myself. So I'll just start posting, and I'm sure you'll quickly learn what sort of person I am.

Wikipedia and other informative links are provided for convenience.

You ought to know the basics, if you don't already. My name is David, but I'm often called Pocket, for some reason. I'm a 17-year-old student from England. My e-mail address is dark_pieman@yahoo.co.uk but I use my MSN messenger account to chat - that's dark_pieman@hotmail.com.

I have an Xbox 360 and a Gold Membership to Xbox Live, with the Gamertag Dark Pieman. I play Team Fortress 2, Battlefield: Bad Company and Gears of War. I've got an Xbox headset, so drop me a line if you've got a 360 and you want to know what my voice sounds like at a low bitrate - or, of course, if you wish to play with or against me. I'm not the best gamer in the world, but I'm alright.

Well, I'm happy the holidays have begun. I don't really have much else to say. Sorry to disappoint.