This will be my entry into the Contest to win the Comic Con swag offered up by aborto.



First up is the main man and vigilante of the team, Rorschach from the Watchmen graphic novel. I chose him as he is an excellent improviser and in any situation can think on his feet as well as being extremely strong and clever.

Rorschach doesn't carry weapons but due to his technical abilities he can conjure up pain in many forms. He fights dirty, just like the city he protects and I like that in a fighter. Add in the fact he's tactically brilliant not just in fights but in general and you would have one heck of a brawl if you were against him.

This man can handle multiple foes at a time and can deal with them swiftly and brutally, as shown if you've read the novel, played the game or watched the film. I do not want to be around when he dishes out the pain whether it be with just his fists, or his flipping pepper shaker.



Second in my line up is Fei Long, the tongue-in-cheek character from Street Fighter. As a mock up of Bruce Lee, but wielding great power in the right hands *cough* moi *cough* , Fei Long is a great adversary. He has the same attributes of Bruce Lee physically, aesthetically and mentally. He is not a superhero, he is an ordinary human trained to the peak of physical form.

Everyone reckons Chuck Norris is the strongest, most bad ass mother fucker on the planet. I don't think you'd be saying that so much after watching Way of the Dragon my friend, and considering Fei Long IS Bruce Lee (y'all just don't know he's back and funnier than ever), that makes him thee baddest mofocker here ladies and gentlemen. Now get on your knees!



This guy will snap your neck...upside down. How about that for a slice of fried gold?

I present to you, Sam Fisher, Splinter Cell's deadly lead character.

Sam would be great in pretty much any situation. He's great with any weapon, be it his great big, fat, meaty p---err knife, or his sniper-come-assault rifle, so you know he'll be good with it. He can either be the long range character, sitting at the back, dispensing his med kits, sniping people, or he can be up close and personal with his CQC (Close Quarters Combat) skills, laying the smackdown, holding people hostage or just breaking some poor guys and gals necks, poor sods.

Non of this stupid emo crap, whining about being a bit wet, not working for anybody but himself, using car mirrors for spying equipment. Oh no no, I'm talking the real deal boi. Modern Warfare 2 Night Vision Goggles, eat your heart out!


This is Sam Fisher, and he's outside your door aborto, coming to get that swag for me!

So that's my three man line up, Rorschach, Fei Long and Sam Fisher. I just noticed as well, that all these characters are great improvisers.

Hope you enjoyed the read :]

Long time no blog Dtoid. It's been nearly a month now since I last blogged as I've just been lazy and playing games, as well as having nothing that sparked my mind into creating something. I'm not sure how to start this so I'll just delve right in with a list on how Sony can improve the PS3 and it's popularity.

1) The XMB (Xross Media bar)



For those of you who don't know, the XMB is the vertical and horizontal navigating system with which you do all your tasks on the PS3. Personally, I think it looks gorgeous, and looks very nice. However, there are issues which are constantly trying to be improved by the Playstation team (I hope).

Loading Times

The first issue is Loading Times. Generally navigating around the PS3 is not an issue, however, loading up the profile should be instantaneous, unfortunately, it isn't, it's fast, just not Xbox fast. Another area that should be instantaneous is your friends list whilst in game. Do you know the main reason why it loads slowly? Because of the avatars. Every time you look at your friends list, it has to load each image. I'm all for the avatars, as they provide a personally touch to your name, but they should not be such a hog on a very powerful system.



Of course however, developers and Sony are always learning about the PS3's architecture (as with the Xbox and Wii I'm sure), and some of these issues may be wiped away eventually. But Sony need to get their act together and listen to the community.

Trophies and Syncing

Trophies also used to be an issue, but Sony fixed their loading times fairly well. They could be a tad faster in game, but it's nowhere near as bad as it used to be. There is one thing that bothers me, Syncing.

Say you are playing Street Fighter IV, you check your Trophies, then switch to Dead Space. If you check your Trophies again, you will have to do a short Syncing process which shows a progress bar from 0-100%. It doesn't take long, but the point is, it shouldn't be there in the first place. Sony need to get on with research into how to get rid of that process. Changing game should not mean "Syncing" the trophies every time you do. If anything, this process if it cannot be removed, should be done in the background (like PC's do and possibly Xbox's do) either whilst the game is loading or as the game is being played.

Make Vidzone more noticeable.



I'm note saying "Force it in our faces Sony", but make the default top XMB symbol on the Music category like on the image above. This is just a minor annoyance as the service is a really good one at that. It lets you browse pretty much ANY music video that's ever existed, free of charge, with reasonably good video quality, extremely good audio quality and a great streaming loop.

By default, the default music XMB symbol is Playlists. Now I know that's only one down from Vidzone, but it just raises the awareness and usage of the product if it's the normal symbol. I would understand if the reasoning for not putting it at the top is because then people might constantly keep loading it when they just want to play normal music tracks, but i don't think that's how Sony thought about it.

System Settings

Allow System Settings (or at least some) to be changed whilst in game. Now I'm no PS3 software engineer, but I know for certain that some of the settings could be changed whilst in game. I won't list them as their are too many little options that should be adjustable.

RAM

Reduce the RAM usage, or fix the XMB to work in the way a PC works, with background processes going on so that nothing needs to load. At the moment the PS3 uses 74 MB of RAM, whereas the Xbox only uses a tiny 32MB, half of that of the PS3. Did you know the XMB reserves 48MB of RAM AT ALL TIMES? That is atrocious and is more than the Xbox alone.

If you don't know, having a lower RAM footprint is better :) Now it seems in the last mystery PS3 2.80 update, they improved it's RAM usage slightly, but not enough and it needs to be made even smaller.

http://www.gamezine.co.uk/news/games/u/uncharted-2/the-real-secret-in-ps3-firmware-2-80-$1314390.htm

2) Home

There are three main issues with Home at the moment.

Game launching.

There are simply not enough games that support it. This isn't Sony's fault, as shown here:
http://www.thesixthaxis.com/2009/07/22/game-launching-in-home-not-sonys-responsibility/

But they should be contacting the game developers to make Home spaces and to include the Game Launching ability when they release a game or as an added patch. Instead they are relying on us, the community, to do it ourselves. Doing it this way takes much longer and is not a guaranteed method. All Sony have to do is implement one rule. This rule is to force developers to include Game Launching, just like they did with Trophies, therefore making any game release after 2009 to include Trophies.

Making Trophies takes a lot longer than creating a simple code to start up a game from a Invite or Request, so I believe it is just Sony's laziness that is the cause of this.

Ghosts.

If there's something strange, in your neighbourhood. Who ya gonna call? GHOSTBUSTERS!



Just....just....get rid of them Sony. Make the clothing and face features less resource hungry on your internet connection and the PS3.

Trophy Rooms.



THIS. This is what Home needs more than anything I think. At first I thought these rooms might not be practical, but they are damn cool! But these spaces would provide a few purposes. You can talk about the game in hand to people in the room. 90% of the people there would be there because they want to talk about the game, want to pick up the game and find out more about it, to Game Launch from that area, to compare trophies, to browse around and see what trophies they are missing or want or that just look good or to just socialize.

Sony, if you ever see this blog, there are about 10 reasons that I will give you for free as to why to implement Trophy Rooms/game spaces as a priority and as a mandatory rule to game developers. Surely Sony has some people sitting around brainstorming somewhere, and if they don't, hire me and people here with great ideas god dammit!

3) Adverts.

Since I've owned a PS3, guess how many adverts I've seen for it? FOUR.

Four adverts. In 3 years. That is ABMISSMAL. Sony, how do expect people to notice your product, when they've never even seen it before? The four adverts I have seen are two This Is Living adverts, one being the grenade one, and the other being the crazy puppet circus/latex-fest combined with fluffy dogs advert, and the game Transformers and Harry Potter.

This Is Living adverts were a complete waist of time, and did not get across the message that the PS3 is a game and media machine combined. And the two games adverts weren't exactly good or popular games. They need to advertise in Europe more like they do in America or Japan, such as these:





The thing is, I've never seen these adverts in Europe, I had to go on Youtube to look them up in the past, and I only found two. That's pretty bad. These below are not the way to advertise a console:






I'd buy this game Sony.

Just some tips Sony, take 'em or....lose your market share :]

Wow, feels like it's been a long time since I blogged, and it's only been two weeks and two days. Playing games, replying to people on here and finishing off college has been a big time eater, but well worth it.

So onto the topic, which I'm surprised not one of the editors has wrote about yet (you can use it if you want editors), which is Sony patenting a motion control system that sees ordinary objects as controllers. It sounds kind of good in one way, as it has infinite possibilities. A bad way is that someone could just use a dildo (or perhaps their nether regions), but I guess all the better for sex games ey.

When I get through my backlog of games I will hopefully try to write more as not writing in 2 weeks feels like I'm not contributing at all. I would write more but I'm off to play games as usual and chill, as I'm shattered for no apparent reason, other than being a tad lazy today. Here's the link to where I found the Sony story;

http://www.siliconera.com/2009/07/02/sony-patents-a-motion-control-system-that-uses-ordinary-objects-as-controllers/

Whad'ya think ladies and gentleman? Shopped or not shopped?



(Edit: I'm actually finding it hard to find these two pictures of the actors on the internets, also, not hotlinked anymore)

Even though they may not be the best suited acted for the roles of Snake and Liquid, I still think they're two of the best actors around (yeah yeah flame me all you want for that wat'ev)

I absolutely adore the MGS series, and I would kind of like a film. However everybody knows how movies adapted from games have failed (except Ghostbusters and a few others). If it was Kojima actually directing it, I think it would be pretty good as he has always wanted to be a director, and look at his games/career/portfolio.

I can imagine Bale doing the whole deep-voice-can't-understand-what-you're-saying jiffy but enough to be like Snake and understandable, but DC doing Liquid and his over the top (but still awesome) villain act is hard to imagine.

What do you guys think? I'm pretty sure the majority of you would not want a movie (I kind of don't either). Hypothetically, if it was 100% confirmed to be made, who would you cast as well? and would you go see it?

P.S. I kinda like it;



P.P.S. The sun rises in 2010

VIDYA GAMEZ!!!!!!!

First off I'll say this, props to Funktastic, ChillyBilly and everybody else who collects or religiously collects games. One day I will (hopefully) be like you; gods of memorabilia.

Now in England, where I live anyway, it is very hard to come across anything retro related. So far within 50 miles I've found 2 (yes count em 2) niche shops that can serve my purposes. These are CEX (Computer Entertainment, you may have heard of them) and a random shop that's f****king shutting down in 6 weeks and I only found it today (called Games Booth). I honestly wish I had stores like you guys in the US for games.

But boy oh boy did I get a good deal today. As I've made a list of what I'm wanting to buy back, I've been looking around for deals and little niche shops like I said. These two delivered greatly. For just £25 I got;

N64
Doom 64 (£2) - ($3)
Super Mario 64 (£4) - ($6-7)
Lylat Wars (never played, I can't wait!!) (£2) - ($3)



SNES
Mario All Stars (5, flipping, pounds = win) (£5-$8)
For anyone who doesn't know, this is Super Mario Brothers 1,2,3 and Lost Levels.

PS2
Max Payne (£1.50)
Jak and Daxter: The Precursors Legacy (£2.50)
Jak and Daxter 2: Renegade (£3.50)

Sonic Gem's Collection (£5)
This is Sonic CD, Sonic The Fighters, Sonic R, Sonic 2 (already have that on the Mega Collection), Sonic Spinball, Triple Trouble, Sonic Drift 2, Tails Skypatrol and Tails Adventures.

Along with the Sonic Mega Collection I already own; Sonic 1,2 and 3, Sonic and Knuckles, Sonic 3D Flickies Island, Dr Robotniks Mean Bean Machine, Game Gear's Sonic 1 (there's a difference), Sonic Chaos, Sonic Drift 1, Sonic Labyrinth, Game Gear's Mean Bean (different), Sonic Blast. That's just pure awesome sauce on a disc for me :]

All that, for TWENTY FIVE POUNDS ($40). Amazing. That is well worth my money. 19 games, at just over a pound on average.

A How To

When I go into games stores or any stores for that matter, I tend to be polite, ask the right questions etc. Before ChillyBilly mentioned his great game collecting blog I followed these mental guidelines anyway. If anyway doesn't, get started and follow his advice :)

It seriously pays off. On Sunday, my Dreamcast arrived (hallelujah indeed), hand delivered from the seller (what a nice, courteous man he was) and I've been looking for Trickstyle, Shenmue 1 & 2, Toy Commander, Crazy Taxi, Ready 2 Rumble Boxing and Sonic Adventures 1 & 2 in stores.



As the guy I am I was nice to the clerks (proper gamers themselves) and;

1) I got lowered prices
2) The man in CEX directed me to TWO shops that sell Dreamcast games, because I asked politely, and he could tell I knew my shit :) I also asked if I could replace the damaged Jak 2 case and he said "of course you can mate", now that's proper service and treatment of customers :)

*Sad face*

The only, only, only downside of the day was having to pass up buying Shadow of The Colossus. The lovely designed exterior was ripped on the front as well as having a tear on the spine. But inside was perfect. It was £25 (the same as all the games put together (which seems a lot, I don't know)).

UK dwellers

On a side note, if anyone in the UK can offer places that are great for retro games, old systems, anything that isn't just your normal Game/Gamestation. The equivalent of Goodwill, Target from the US, but in the UK. Needs to be a shop, not online (as obviously Amazon/eBay can satisfy that part)

So on that note, I have only dipped my toe into the start of the massive sea that is collecting games, and I want MOAR!!!!


Jim Sterling's past still haunts him to this very day

in the last 1-3 weeks. The reason being is because of updates. For those not in the loop what happened is;

1) the Air Support was made "better" by improving how much damage it did.
2) the Assault class was made weaker

Now by all means the Assault update was a welcome change (even if they are still a bit overpowered and can take a rocket to the face). But it's fine now anyway.

My peeves with the game are how it's managed to get worse. The magnum pistol is just ridiculous. I don't care if it's extremely powerful in real life it shouldn't take one shot to kill you. A Desert Eagle doesn't do that and neither does shooting an enemy with a rocket either sometimes. It seriously needs to be taken down a notch IMHO.

Now onto the Air Support. This has pretty much turned the AI based Air Support into Call of Duty 4's helicopter, which sucked big hairy balls and everyone knows it. I was happy with it before. It got kills fine and is now a pain in the ass. I understand in real life air support would be a nasty thing to have and really would hurt people the way it does, but this game is far from reality and shouldn't have ever been upgraded and should stop being like Call of Duty (I know that's not what they were aiming for anyway), but they are doing it unintentionally.

My next issue is turrets. I think they are underpowered. They are taken out with the slightest of ease and don't do any damage. It takes donkey''s years to get a kill with them and even the most inept player can just avoid dying from them. I can as well but its the fact it has no punch behind it. Turrets should be able to swing the tide of the battle I think.

Spot and Mark. I haven't had the chance to play around with this feature yet but it is a ability for the Scout (Sniper) which allows them to see every (or most I believe) enemy on the battlefield and mark them with a blue cross-hair. Now this sounds extremely biased considering they can detect targets behind buildings or huts. I could understand if it used some sort of radar but no, it's just pure BS. What I don't get is how I constantly manage to sneak up to Scout's and take them out, without them once turning round or seeing me approach from the side or even nearly in front of them/behind a hut with this ability on?

By all means, I love Killzone 2, virtually everything is balanced well, the gameplay is fun, the mayhem is a laugh and the graphics are great. I'm usually not one for complaining about games and I normally see great things but today I especially noticed how much it's changed the game for the worse (and I'm playing good as well), I just think they've suddenly unbalanced the game.

I wouldn't be surprised if I was slaughtered (especially by Jim, unless he agrees) for this post, but it's what I honestly believe. Does anyone agree on any of these points?

P.S.
Oh, another point I would like to make is I've never understood why the engineer only gets a Shotgun, it's just stupid. It makes it an extremely hard class sometimes when trying to place turrets. At least offer a SMG or the team specific rifle (so you would have to have the Helghan or ISA gun depending what team you spawned, no option).

P.P.S
I actually didn't take inspiration from Edgy's Wii article I just got sick of all these "bugs" in Killzone today whilst I was playing.

P.P.S
I believe this is my first rant as well. :/ Somebody called weedus has now got a blue red effect avatar (forgot the name).