My Favourite Topic To Whinge About

Political Correctness...

...It always reaches a peak around Christmas & Easter due to the absurd way in which the British Government and its various associated arms decide to abandon any semblence of national identity for fear of offending someone of an ethnic minority or who does not hold the same beliefs as they do.

Exhibit One

The advent calendar which continues past Christmas Eve and on until New Years Eve. Why, you rightly ask? Because "they did not want to upset Sutton's ethnic minorities..."

Now, I may be wrong here, but I had the amazingly bizarre idea that Advent was somehow a Christian event and that as a result those who were not followers of said religion would not wish to partake of it. So as not to be flamed by idiots, there's nothing to stop non-Christians from celebrating Christmas (or Winterval as Westminster Council have helpfully renamed it in order to avoid offending Ethnic Minorities) but if they do so, then surely they'd want to coutdown to Christmas Day. If, on the other hand, they choose not to celebrate Christmas, then why do they need an Advent calendar in the first place?

As per usual, none of the Ethnic Minorities questioned could understand what the fuck all the fuss was about: "Asked if he would be offended by an advent calendar which focuses on Christmas, Wallington councillor Lal Hussain, who is Muslim, said: 'Of course not I would not be offended. To Muslims Jesus was a prophet anyway...'"

I swear, at some point in the near future, I'm going to snap. When that happens I intend to go on a wild spree of political incorrectness across the country - actually offending nobody but still apparently offending everyone who isn't a white heterosexual christian male aged between 18 and 35.

Rant over until the next papers arrive.

Final Thoughts, I promise...

...I've just got home & read through the xmas edition of PCGamer, in which they have a preview of Deus Ex: Invisible War - yes, that's right, it's not out in the UK for ages because, as part of Europe, we have to wait for the multi-lingual version which takes a good few months to do.

Anyway, the preview is done in a kind of Theory-Rebuttal manner addressing concerns that people have expressed about various issues of the game and assuming them it will all be OK. The relavent ones read as follows:

Theory: Due to the dual-console development this is going to be a dumbed down travety. Forgot all the clever stuff in the original.


Theory: Invisible War is debuting on the XBox. This means that what should have been a technology-pushing game is going to be held back due to the limited power of the two-year-old-PC that sits inside Bill Gate's console machine. It's going to look substandard.


Theory: By streamlining all the elements, it's become a dumbed-down console shooter.


A more ironic article you could not wish for.

Third Thoughts...

...Well, I've just completed Deus Ex: Invisible War 3 times so I thought I'd share my final thoughts. Actually, I suspect that there is a 4th ending, but I haven't been bothered to try it yet.

As with the original, you can change your mind right up to almost the last minute, with a slight twist in that a choice made slightly earlier in the game precludes one of the 3 in the final decision. Equally, the outcome is "positive" no matter what you go for.

I have to say that the storyline started to disinterest me towards the end. There was always the feeling that you could randomly jump sides at any point without any real consequences and it sort of lost coherency towards the end. Having said that, it was still better than the majority of game storylines, so I'm not really complaining about it in general, just the fact that it started to lose it towards the end.

As for the game itself, one thing still bugs me above all else - the ammo. In a single firefight with maybe 3 or 4 enemies it is not only possible, but easy to use up all of your ammo, even if you started with the maximum you can carry. Sure, on the later levels there are clips lying around all over the place, but never at the crucial moment when you're ambushed by a rocket launcher wielding bastard in power armour. Also, due to the pathetic range of weapons, the only reliable and effective backup weapon is the plasma sword, which while doing a fair bit of damage is still just a melee weapon.

And the inventory is still too small.

Spad.

Second Thoughts...

...Well despite my slating of Deus Ex: Invisible War in a previous post, I have to admit that I'm still playing it.

I still have serious issues with the game, and I've got 6 spare biomod canisters that I'm never likely to use & I have "full" ammo that will be totally depleted by one large firefight.

However, the game has a saving grace - the storyline. As with the first game, it is very engaging - even the unrelated sub-plots, like the coffee wars, are intriguing and keep your interest. I've yet to abandon any sub-plot due to boredom - although it can get frustrating given the number of load points in the game. One of the most fun features of the story is the NG Resonance AI that you encounter in places - great fun for some little mini-missions.

The plot twist is typically impressive and I really didn't see it coming. That's not entirely true - I knew who the "real" enemy was for quite a while, but the rest caught me completely by suprise.

It's an amazing achievement to have a game that I was able to write a mini eassy on the faults of, yet create a plot so involving that I'm going to play it to the conclusion.

If only this game hadn't been written for the xbox, it could have been one of the greatest games of all time.

Deus Ex - Invisible War...The Review

I've just spent the last hour or so playing DX2 and I'm not impressed. Having said that, I'm going to stick with it a bit longer in the hope that it might improve, but I'm not optimistic.

The story seems pretty good so far, although I don't like such an early choice as to who you ally yourself with - it may well be that you can change around later, but I preferred the original.

The game has been totally and utterly ruined by the need to have virtually the same code run on the Xbox. None of the great stuff is there from the original - no localised damage, lame one-click hacking, dire "console-y" interface, mouse support clearly added as an afterthought - especially in menus. None of the cool computer interaction that took place before - no account names and passwords to find, no attempts to crack ATMs and only dull, unfunny news reports & adverts on the public access terminals.

Speaking of which, the mouse is horribly jerky, to the extent that there is no compromise - it's either too sensitive or too jerky so that you can't actually target anything accurately.

Speaking of which, even the first enemies you come across take 2 or 3 headshots to down and, and the worst thing of all - Every weapon draws ammo from the same source, only at different rates. So, you can never have ammo in reserve for a backup weapon, unless you want to go melee in the middle of combat. AND there's no reloading.

In fact, I'm so pissed off that I'm going to go and play the original, just so I can truely remember just how fucking amazing it was and just how poor this Xbox port is.

It's 4:15am...

...Which can mean only two things. Either, I'm drunk, or I have a coursework deadline at 9am tomorrow - can you guess what it is yet?

That's right kids, I've got a coursework deadline. Not only is it a coursework deadline, but it's a shit coursework deadline - that's shit coursework, not shit deadline, although I suppose that is also shit when I think about it. Anyway, the work in question is designing a coffee maker, which sounds like a sensible project for an engineering student - except, of course, that it isn't. Why? Because it doesn't actually involve any designing in the engineering sense, just drawing a bunch of pictures and sticking some bits of magazine onto paper. In other words, it's a secondary school graphics project but with a slightly more complex final product.

I say slightly more complex, but I think I actually put more work into my school graphics project than I did into this - after all, I used to spend hours putting creative & apropriate boarders onto my A3 sheets before I starting doing any actual "work", whereas this is all done on plain sheets of paper. Equally, rather than sifting through magazines, cutting out pictures, I just did a Google Image search, saved every image I found and whacked it into Paintshop Pro. Pathetic isn't it.

Elsewhere in my life, Burn FM has a new committee, my house needs cleaning and I'm still single. See, my life is full of exciting events that I just can't wait to tell people about.

Actually, that's not strictly all as, fingers crossed, I should be going to see Feeder play at the NIA on Monday - assuming they send the tickets through on time, which they didn't manage to do last time. I'll give you a nice Gig Review on Tuesday, if you're good.

Until then, Spad out.