A tale of two New York cities

A tale of two New York cities

I imagine that the people of New York live their lives in absolute fear. They spend their lives running from cover to cover because at any given moment there is some monster mercilessly hunting them down. 

Alone in the Dark and Prototype are both set in the city of New York. In both games you wake up after being experimented on. In both games the experiment goes wrong and the citizens of New York get butchered. 

In part one of this article, I will review Alone in the Dark. Next week in part two, I will take a look at Prototype.

Alone in the Dark

I obtained a copy of Alone in the Dark and immediately regretted it. To be fair… I think the game was really designed for the X-Box / PS3 controller and not the PC keyboard.
To control your character is just impossible. Literally every key on the keyboard is assigned some action. Think I am kidding? Even the print screen button does something. Some of the actions are useless, for example x blinks your eyes (what!?).  Trying to hit all the keys you look like Jerry Lee Lewis playing piano. (Previous sentence might contain hyperbole)

The first level you play has you jumping from rock to rock like a Super Mario Brother and with the keyboard; it is just not possible to control your character. I kept falling over stuff and off stuff and soon just gave up.

Maybe the game gets better later on and maybe if I tried for 125 more hours to learn how to control my fall-down-drunk character the game could have been fun, but I simply don’t have the patience.

 

 

Alone in the dark still sucks.

Remember when I reviewed Alone in the Dark (AITD) and called it a piece of shit? The game really sucks but I gave it some benefit of the doubt, I played it on a PC but the game seemed to be designed specifically for a console.

Well, I played it on an Xbox and the game is still a piece of shit.

A hallmark of horror / survival games is the fact that the controls are hard to use. The developers purposely make you feel clumsy, you feel out of control, if that monster attacks now you won’t be able to escape, you will be doomed. This mechanic heightens your sense of fear, but the AITD developers confused fear with annoyance and mind numbing boredom. The controls for this game are so clunky doing the smallest of tasks is a chore.

Then for some reason the developers felt that it was necessary to spontaneously change the camera angle for no reason while you are walking. Walking along minding your own business and BAM suddenly you are staring straight up the dude’s backside. Or at his legs, or his forehead, etc, etc. it really sucks. This game sucks. Don’t bother spending your valuable resources on it. Don’t bother wasting your valuable bandwidth pirating it. Avoid!

Tell the whole world what you are doing

Tell the whole world what you are doing

 

I am new to Xbox Live. Only got it last week. Keep that info in the back of your mind when you read this.  

I was playing Pac-man on my Xbox when I received a text message – “Dude you suck”. Puzzled, I strike back with this clever reply – “huh?” In return I got, “Pac-man is for losers”. Shit. Apparently other people can see what you are doing on your Xbox, I did not know that. If only I was doing something manly like watching porn or something, but I got caught red handed playing Pac-man. Embarrassing. 

Turns out, Xbox Live is even more intrusive than Facebook. You can fine tune your privacy settings but by default people can see everything. They can see what games you have been playing and they can actually see how you are faring with the game.  

From now on only manly hard-core games like Gears of War and Batman for me! 



Gonna miss you Boom Boom Rockets!

Apple is watching you...

Apple is watching you...

Apple patents software that will punish you if you do not watch their advertisements...

I don’t like watching TV. Too many advertisements. It is none stop, but I can understand that. The money the advertisers spend, gives me the opportunity to watch the program for free. (Kind of free, anyway).

 

So the deal is, I watch advertisements and in return, I don’t have to pay every time I watch South Park. So I think it is fair to say that when I pay to watch something I don’t have to watch advertisements or at least get the option to not skip the adds.

 

The other day I bought the Sin City dvd. I have seen the movie years ago and really loved it so now I want to see it again. Problem is when you play the dvd, it starts out with about 20 minutes of unskippable advertisements. Clicking the menu buttons does nothing, you shall watch all 20 minutes of uninteresting shit.

 

Luckily, I can decide that in 20 minutes from now, I might feel like watching Sin City so I can put the dvd in, go make some popcorn, come back later and enjoy the movie.

 

Of course, somewhere in the world, someone is sitting, thinking that shit is unacceptable. How dare they not watch the things they don’t want to watch! I shall MAKE them watch. (Reminds me of a scene in Sin City).

 

The person is not Lex Luther but Steve Jobs from Apple. He has filed a patent for a program that measures your response to an advertisement and if your response is not what Steve wanted, that program will shut down your device till you respond.

 

The idea is, until you watch their ad, you can’t listen to music on your iPod or make calls from your iPhone.

Wow, are we behind or what?

Google, the number one company on the internet, might one day become the internet.

They are aiming to create a 1-gigabit-per-second network. This network will be a 100 times faster than any other network in the USA.

 

The plans are still hazy and more of a dream than a reality but Google intends to construct a test network for 50 000 to 500 000 users.

 

If this goes from dream to reality, anybody in South Africa with a website that hoped to compete internationally can kiss their dreams goodbye.

 

Now would be a really great time for Telkom to wake the hell up or soon we are going to be so far behind that catching up will be a nightmare.

Do some more good

Do some more good

Last week I wrote about how you can donate some of your computer’s time to help fight cancer. 

This week I would like to point you at some other sites where you can do some good.

A company called the GreaterGood Network has a collection of sites, each dedicated to a certain charity.

Some of them are:

World Hunger site

Breast Cancer

Child Health

Rainforest

Animal Rescue

Basically all you have to do is go to the website and click a button. Once you have clicked on the button, money will be given to a charity.

Now the first thing that comes to mind is – this is too good to be true. It is too easy.

 I poked around the internet to find out if this GreaterGood Network is a legitimate company. It turns out that they are owned by CharityUSA a registered charity in America and that the money they make for the sites they operate does go to charity.

 However there is a dispute as to how much of it is going to charity. CharityUSA says a lot goes to charity, other people say they don’t give as much as they claim to give.

 So even if you have a problem with how they have been giving, a percentage of your clicks will go to charity.

 Also – by clicking on this article 10c gets donated to a good cause! When it comes to deciding how many times to click on this article there is no right or wrong answer, but I would like to suggest six thousand and forty three times.

Out source your good deed of the day

Out source your good deed of the day

 

Does your computer stand idle sometimes? Want to give something to the community?

There is an easy way to help - http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org 

 

World Community Grid is a grid computing project. What that means is, it is a worldwide network of computers working together to solve a problem. You download a small application from their website and install it on your computer. When your computer is idle it will request data from WCG servers and do some computations on the data and send the results back to them.

Millions of people worldwide have joined and are working together. To give you an idea how powerful this project is – the research they have done so far would have taken one computer 40 000 years to complete.

Currently they are working on Muscular Dystrophy, Cancer, Aids and Influenza research. There are also research into human DNA and a project that analyze proteins strains to enable farmers to grow more nutritious rice.

 
It is really a worthwhile cause to join. Think about it. Your computer is doing your good deed of the day; you are free to be your bad self.