New Year Resolution

I think I've used this before, but I don't care....

Today is apparently the best day to buy a new monitor. Then you can make a New Years Resolution of 1680x1050.

A Foolish Consistency....

Number one son is very confused about the way that I insist on producing a blog post every day. Even though sometimes there are intervals when nothing appears and the posts are obviously made retrospectively. Well, I don't care about any of this. Obviously.

So, that's Sunday sorted...

Playing Unknown Songs

Number one son brought home a copy of Guitar Hero 3. This is the new fangled one with the wireless guitar, which is very nice. It also has a very wide range of different songs supplied with it. Hardly any of which I've actually heard of, which is a bit of a problem really.

The first Guitar Hero was packed with tunes that I knew. They were not the original versions, the weasel words "..as made famous by.." appeared next to most of the artist names, but that didn't matter to me. At least they were covers of stuff that was familiar.

The new version seems to have gone the other way. Rather than copies of very well known material they now use original versions of stuff that nobody knows. So I end up trying to pick may way through a tune that I've never heard before, and don't particularly want to hear now. They've also fiddled with the two player mode and added stupid battle modes where you can snap your opponents strings and overload their amplifier, which all seems really silly to me. Add to that some daft duelling parts in career mode and I think we are talking about video game franchise that is in the process of jumping the shark.

Mass Effect

Some modern computer games are deep. Very deep. Mass Effect is like this. Far too deep for me. It is a role playing game where you have to interact with a whole bunch of people to get the job done. What happens to you do depends on what you do, and how you treat other people.  This aspect of the game is very impressive. To someone watching the gameplay it looks very natural, and the feeling of actually being there talking to the other characters is very strong.

Number one son bought a copy of Mass Effect for the Xbox 360 last week, set himself up as a straightforward, honest and caring engineer, and went out to right a whole bunch of wrongs across the galaxy.  He doesn't like the inventory management, but he does like the gunplay and the plot is quite compelling. I've seen the game on sale for less than 25 pounds, which represents fantastic value for something which could keep you busy for a rather long time.

Special Weapons

From "Star Wars weapons development, the early years"

The "Light Shovel"