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How to make an EmP
Ingredients:
5 parts anger
5 parts silliness
5 parts ego
Method:
Layer ingredientes in a shot glass. Add wisdom to taste! Do not overindulge!

Beneath a Steel Sky:

Sometimes clusmy but often brilliant. A fitting foundation to Revolutions opus, Broken Sword

Fable 2

Despite myself, I can't help but quite enjoy this game. I can feel Venter smirking from here.

Guilty Gear 2: Overture

I can;t decide if I like this game or not. It's an odd mix of Guilty Gear lore mixed with Drakengard and Herzog Zwei. Really bloody weird!

Fairytale Fights

Repulsivly adorable, but very, very samey.

Front Mission

Should be more fun than it actually is.

7 Wonders II

Shouldn't be as fun as it actually is.

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I'll tell you, blog topic header. I sat on my roof with a super soaker and the laptop and shot any kids coming up my driveway. Shot them with streams of water mixed with red food dye.

I put it to you, phantom readers, that I had the best Halloween of all of us.

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Raven Squad (360)

The bastard love child of a dodgy RTS and a shoddy FPS, rasied under powerlines and force-fed lead-based paint chips.

King of Fighters XII (360)

One mammoth step backwards.

FIFA '10 (360)

Friendship-ruiningly brilliant.

Risen (360)

Still yet to get old.

Half Life 2 (360)

Still yet to become worth my time.

Zeno Clash (PC)

Unplayable due to crappy laptop. Forces you to install Steam and, therefore, lame.

Mass Effect (360)

Much like WQ, doesn't care how little free time you have and demands your immediate and unceasing attention.

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HAHAHAHA!

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A while ago now, I was tricked into seeing Terminator 4. I say tricked because when we left the house, I though we were going to the pub. When we drove past the pub, I assumed we were going to a different pub. There was no pub. There was only something that had about the same effect on my poor brain as a cerebral bore coated in pure proof vodka.

I suppose it would be fair to say that if you turned off your brain then T4 isn’t an awful film. The effects are okay, there’s action aplenty and no actors in the thing are stand out awful, but the entire film seems to have been penned by particularly de-evolved monkeys. The ones you usually find working under Michel Bay.

In a nutshell, T4 is the attempt to complete the circle, being both the forth film in the series when looked at from a standard sense of continuity, and the prequel for T1 when you start fiddling around in timelines. The first film saw Kyle Reese travel back to protect John Conner’s mother from a Monotone Arnie and an Uzi 9mm; T4 sees John Conner looking for a teenage Kyle Reese so he can send him back in the first place. It’s a complex subject matter dealt with in the manner you’d expect from a writing team whose big hook for the last film was “let’s give the updated Terminator a nice pair of tits.” Time travel, at the best of times, is a hard subject matter to realistically portray, what with it being on the same scientific realms of realism as zombie Hitler rising from the grave to take flowers to his local mosque, but the series continues to treat it with the depth and maturity found in a brown wax crayon. Anything that tells me steel exoskeletons, flesh, bone, nano-rich liquid metal and nuclear reaction power cores can make the flashy jump back in time, but clothes cannot is fair game for mocking.

Things go so very far beyond this here, though. T4 asks you to check your common sense at the cinema doors in the same way the post-advertisements ask you to turn off your mobile phone.

It’s a shame, because the foundations for a really good spine are ever present from the get go. Sam Worthington shines as the film’s best asset by far as a remorseful death-row inmate who signs his defunct life away for the chance of medical advancements and redemption. Instead, the poor sap gets turned into the first link between humans and machines. He’s pretty much exclusively involved in any of the film’s sporadic high points as he struggles to retain his humanity and clumsily stumbles through any interaction he has when resurrected in the midst of the war against Skynet.

It’s here things start to get a bit silly. For instance, somewhere along the line John Conner started to buy into his own hype as the second coming of Jesus, helped largely by the fact that he seems to stroll unscathed out of battles that see every other living entity in a mile radius obliterated. He also answered the age old question of how he hacks Terminators to send back in time as his own metallic bodyguard services when he decides to hack into a human killing machine perfectly manufactured to double as a high-speed motorcycle. He does this by tripping it over and inserting a USB key.

I can only assume the reprogrammed protectors in T2 and T3 fell foul of a cunningly placed-banana skin.

In trying to keep the paradoxical link between both the first film and the third, the main plot revolves around both sides trying to find and procure Kyle Reese. Conner so he can send him back in time and keep the cycle that prevents him from dying before he’s even born and Skynet to end the cycle and change history in their favour. This dual race is somewhat squashed when Skynet captures him with the aid of Robozilla early on in the film. Then.. put him in a holding cell instead of killing him and winning. It’s a little like the Bond villain complex where they capture Bond, then damn him to an overly complex death before turning their backs and assuming that all goes well, but instead of the transgressor being an evil bag of ego, it’s a machine that’s supposed to think in pure reason and logic. Skynet’s supposed to be a metallic Spock with an army of angry can openers to do its bidding, but plays out more like Shatner after drinking a few too many at an after awards show.

Even a Commodore 16k would have known to cap Reese the second in has the chance for instant victory. Skynet, though, uses him for bait. Then tries to kill him afterwards and rues the fact that it fails to after bringing out an awful CGI Schwarzenegger as a foil which, despite it being an early model Terminator, takes the most over-the-top punishment yet. Even going so far as to shrug off molten metal, the very thing that killed the vastly advanced T-1000. It’s odd that T4 wants you to have forgotten these little bits of information from previous film as it often seems to exist only to recycle little throwbacks and one liners previously championed by the backlog . For all your “Come with me if you want to live”s and “I’ll be back”s, we're supposed to also forget that Conner’s girlfriend was a vet in T3 and, despite the attempted genocide of mankind, has somehow managed to go through medical college and gain the know-how to do open heart surgery with a rusty butter knife, a bendy straw and half a bottle of out of date aspirin between films.

T4 serves as less of a film, and more of an outright attack on the Terminator canon; even the new CGI robots pale in comparison to the early-early 90’s versions of the same machines who don’t randomly show up wearing an 80's forehead sweatband like they’re prone to do here.

It’s an overall boring and predictable film that does a Bale still stuck in throat-cancer Batman mode no favours, and while Worthington does himself credit, it’s in spite of the material he’s forced to work with instead of alongside it. Terminator is a series that’s long forgot what its actual strengths are and have instead started to incorrectly focus on some of the side dishes instead of the main course; the first two films ran on emotion. They gave you characters to invest in, stacked the odds immeasurably high and made you want to root hard for them to come out on top. All we have here is a lazy script that hopes to get by on name recognition and shiny effects designed to draw your eye away from the vast sea of plotholes, flaws and sheer idiocy that conspire to drag down any glimmer of hope the film might exhibit.

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How many of your reviews have over 1000 hits? I have a hundred. Because people dig me.

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Today with the double release of Junior Classic Games and Mystery Stories, I’ve stepped over the 200 review mark for HonestGamers. We shall now pause in wonderment that Venter has yet to erect a shrine in honour of all the free labour he’s squeezed out of me over the years.

Pause silently, and the galling lack of hammering hits you harder still.

It’s hardly the titles I would have liked to have bought down the big 200, but it could be worse. Review #150 was Nightmare Circus, still easily the worst game I have ever had the misfortune to play.

What’s next? Retirement’s probably not quite on the cards as of yet, so perhaps if I can break into uncharacteristic optimism; perhaps what comes next is a few game reviews I don’t audibly groan at the thought of doing.

This is, of course, the kind of thing that happens solely to other people. Stay tuned to see what I’ve been stuck with next. Laugh if you want, I certainly would be if this was happening to any of you.

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From an online blog I found on the hit-tracker that linked to my latest Darts review. Not sure why it's been babblefished to hell, but it amused me, so it goes up here. That's how this blog rolls.

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What do you weigh? Check it into the open, then be ineluctable to sabbatical feedback or break in in with complete of your own!

Systems > Wii > P > PDC World Championship Darts 2009 > Staff Review

Sign into your narcotic addict account to scrutinize or sabbatical feedback seeking this ruminate on. fundamentally Don’t have an account hitherto? fundamentally You can click here to unblock complete. fundamentally It but takes a baby, and it’s complimentary!

Review at Gary Hartley
June 06, 2009

History speech pattern, kids: PDC World Championship Darts started its life’s produce ago in the buttocks limit of 2006 modestly, spawning low-key versions on the unsubstantial PS2 and PC, to a quizzically gain reaction that novel a apportionment of people baffled.

I won’t fake it was a world-changing at any classification, but it showed that playing darts on a diggings soothe could be done far and as a be of consequence of really offered you, the languorous couch-bound boor, hitherto another expedient to let loose on holiday having that lengthy dead and buried due drizzle and wandering down your village boozer to interact with all those non-digitalised people. fundamentally But, also, in what was stereotyped to be its crowning profit from — the Wii. fundamentally

Rightly fuelled at the good fortune of their commodity, the indispensable annual update offered up the next year made the hurry onto the newer formation consoles, sprawling across platforms like the Xbox 360, PSP and DS. fundamentally With the Wii’s agitation detecting properties, a darts appropriation seemed the consummate affiliation seeking Nintendo’s newest soothe. fundamentally

It didn’t go into the open for b like onto far.

The throwing contrivance tied into the alien was fatuous and uncomfortable, and the vacation of the appropriation features produced in hellishly elementary methods.

Despite the other versions of PDC World Championship Darts 2008 being dainty steps up from their earlier incantations, the stimulus on the Wii was botched. fundamentally

But just now it’s 2009, there’s a latest developer on the denominate and reorient is in the blue blood! fundamentally There’s some alterations, such as latest pros being bought in (most unblock, James Wade, who gets a kudos because he’s a Achates of a Achates, not because he apropos won a big at any classification — go into the open for b like James!) and the throwing methods have been greatly complicated.

To hurl the dart, you have the wiimote in an savagely dart-like ceremony and have down the A button. fundamentally It’s unsure to engineer the be communicated elbows with of and your essential some shots last wishes as limit up peppering the accommodate randomly, as anything but a prepare hurl last wishes as move your shots all onto the accommodate, but it’s doable and a giving move up from the decisive game’s more awkward attempts. fundamentally detracting You convey it supporting you to replicate pulling the dart ago, then purge it brassy, like you were as a be of consequence of really playing darts, letting go into the open for b like of the A important as the shot’s power ticket indicates. fundamentally It’s the straightness of your hurl that decides if it’s prospering to be on aim, and it’s when you fire go into the open for b like of A that decides if you’ve onto or underpowered the stimulus. fundamentally Your hurl is despite that prepare effected at the incline of the darts your chosen performer prefers. fundamentally Which is despite that prepare more of a debase in scrutinize of that, the rectifying of decisive year’s wonky aiming aside, terribly lass seems to be latest.

Aiming, how, is a gigantic discomfort as the super-sensitive agitation adept makes mapping a stimulus annoyingly burdensome, day in and day into the open leaving you waggling away in frustration as the crosshair you reason to blurry flashes across the distinguish out with unrivalled make haste.

Credit can be dedicated seeking the pro players playing more like the pros they’re meant to imitate, but they up manure look like wax models novel into the open in the day-star seeking a lass too lengthy. fundamentally Things like the player’s entrances have been added this year, but they’re all the terribly lengthy cut-away of the performer in inquiry walking into the open to the terribly chorus of fan-chants and reserve music, flanked at the terribly scantily-clad girls as the decisive complete. fundamentally Unless you have a fatuous mane language, you’re purposes bang into the open of fortunes. fundamentally The create-a -character is up manure start lacking, oblation but the most elementary of creations at seeking someone short of to cast their own image onto the oche and ingest on the likes of Phil “THE POWER!” Taylor and chums.

2009 has made some giving steps up from its foregoing conception, but that all things it is so budget that it not fairly looks any characteristic of from the starting junket made two years ago on the PS2 isn’t something that makes it an hands down favourable mention. fundamentally Which would have made this wrap-up burdensome, if not seeking the filmy alcove entice PDC carries.

For the company of the vacation of you, it’s a dart’s appropriation, and I’m amazed you assume from this considerably into the ruminate on. fundamentally If you impecuniousness a darts appropriation, there’s no weigh twice series to rely on as lengthy as you can let pass that it’s just about as violently opposed to forward movement as the most hardened evangelical tub-thumper. fundamentally Thank you, despite the fact that.

For the fatuous halfway place emphasis on stamping-ground, it’s a appropriation usefulness tiring.

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Two reasons:

ONE! Yesterday, I all byt broke my leg in an irellevenat football match we were already losing badly and meant exactly nothing. On top of all the other problems I have with my mobility compliments of blown out knees and a laundry list of other manly spoerts-related injuries, I may be looking at a hell of a lot of physiotheraphy. Yay.

TWO! Just been sent a game that's meant to be the next Jagged Alliance which was viewed by many people as the only XCOM clone worth a damn.

Try not to die should I not show up as much, time-leaching, funds-draining website!

EDIT: Turns out not being able to move freely means more time on the laptop. Damn.

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***EmP has signed on***

EmP: I just listened to the entire new Green Day album
Bass: What? Why!
Bass: Are you okay?
EmP: No. No I’m not.
EmP: I just feel... really sad.
Bass: Who did this to you?
EmP: I got home, and I kicked the drum kit. I feel music has, as a whole, conspired against me and now I want it to die.
Bass: No!
Bass: We just got you to start listening again!
EmP: I feel like there’s a party in my eardrums. And everyone inside has AIDS.
Bass: ...
Bass: Wow.
EmP: I envy the deaf.
Bass: I’ll be there in half an hour. Don’t start drinking.
EmP: Too late.

***Bass has signed off***

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I rarely go over to FAQs anymore and when I do it’s more out of habit than desire, but I went yesterday and saw they were running their lame ‘best game ever’ bollocks which, what with FAQs being a snerd haven, is always won by some overrated Zelda game.

The bracket I saw was Deus Ex, Final Fantasy Tactics, Metal Gear Solid and Pokemon Gold/Silver. And Deus lost.

It came very fourth by a massive margin. Deus Ex, a game that turned gaming on its head, beaten by a game that asks you to watch poorly-rendered guards wiggle their butts, a strategy title that involves no strategy whatsoever and sodding Pokemon. Pokemon!

It's meant to be a gaming website, not a hive of infalliable dumbness.

/Nerd rage

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I’m going to break character and bitch about things:

1. Video gaming on television or in movies.

Directors, and I know you’re reading because I’m important and well respected in every industry ever, you’re all twits. Yes, twits. I know no one has used that as an actual insult since 1925, but I’ve decided that I’m bringing it back. Its first outing is to belittle you.

I’m reasonably sure that you’ve at least seen someone play a videogame in your lives, be it one of your spoiled children, or semi-secret mistress, or that Filipino pre-teen boy you had to bribe with a PSP after he threatened to go to the media -- the fact is gaming is so widespread and accepted in this day and age, it’s imposable not to notice it. So, the question is, why do you always portray gaming on both the small and big screen as people having epileptic fits and flinging fingers about the pads so randomly you fear they’re either electrocuted or in the midst of an uncontrollable spasm.

Even the worst case button mashers playing a hearty bout of Virtua Fighter don’t spasm at the pad in the fashion that paid actors trying to convince the watching audience that they’re not watching someone who is almost certainly homosexual pretend to be someone with at least some foundation in reality. You’ve slowly started to weed out the odd belief that driving on screen should be nothing but the actor constantly making tiny left-to-right-to-left corrections on the wheel and, in it’s place, it seems you want to bring a newer, shinier, more modern dumbness.

If the pad's not enough, why do you always feel the need to show that, when two people are playing what is obviously meant to be a multiplayer game, that the image on the TV is clearly that of a single player. In Scrubs recently, despite the entire skit being based around the fact that someone needed a second player to help them through a game of Halo 3, the actual game footage was of another game completely and was shot entirely in the one player mode. The only thing I recall about the motion picture release of Charlie’s Angels (aside from the undying hatred I still hold for the girl who tricked me into watching it) was that when a naked Drew Barrymore (pause for vomiting thanks to disturbing mental picture) fell down a bank to inturupt two urban kids mashing at their PSX pads like their lives depended on it, the TV showed them playing bloody Final Fantasy VIII. A one-player RPG that couldn’t be further from needing button mashing until Square finally pulls the pretence of interaction and makes all their RPGs overwrought masturbation in the unwelcome trapping of Advent Children.

You don’t portray football as people running around in circles screaming incompressibly and ignoring the ball, nor do you portray any other pastimes as something that can only be partaken in by lead-licking spastics still running far too high on a heady cocktail of sugar and caffeine. The idea of these programs and movies is to allow the viewer to slip into a suspension of disbelief and, here’s the kicker, gamers are bloody everywhere now and recognise this as too much to let slip. Thank Nintendo for making it accessible to barely-functioning foetuses and people half a breath away from death, but everyone knows that’s not what happens -- except for you! This has been a very nerdy call out, I concede, but you’re still a bunch of twits. Wear your mantle with the shame it desires. And stop making damn High School Musical sequels.

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Moving sucks. I mean, it really sucks, but the thing I hate the most is sorting out all my stuff into boxes and deciding what I want to keep and what I should get rid of. With this in mind, I decided to tackle the monumental dumping ground that has become the storage space under my bed which is a vast graveyard of plastic holding boxes I’ve crammed full of crap and forgotten about.

I think I might possibly own every PSX game ever made.

I also found more hats than any man should own, folders crammed full of half-written songs and fiction, enough books to open my own library wing and a billion odd socks. I found old love letters from long forgotten girls, a small army of Dreamcast VMUs (those things rocked), photos so old that I don’t recognise myself or the drunk-looking girl often hugging me and about £30 in small change. I’ve found millions of cables, half-built RC cars, forgotten music CDs and a small tribe of pygmies who declared me an evil God and pelted me with the collection of BB guns that has also lain under there in dormant. I didn’t find Lasty, which I was thankful for.

I did find my Master System. Hurrah!

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Unless you’re Venter (who has to cheat by having four billion reviews posted) or Zig (who needs to cheat by peddling smut and corrupting the minds of the innocent) I am vastly more popular than you on the internets. FACT.

Last night I overtook Midwinter in the hit tables. Mid was too busy wearing shorts to work to comment.

The blog post is now open to tributes and homage.

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