Computer game sales numbers...

I haz a crown. Scroink!

Im listening to episode #199 of The Instance - and their discussion of record game sales had me go googling... and I stumbled across a wikipedia page that got me thinking!!

>linky<

I as impressed by some of the numbers from the more recent consoles, then I seen the Wii... 76M sales of Wii Fit - when other consoles are topping out at like 20M...

Then I got to the mention of Angry Birds... 250M... I guess mobile phones are truly a good platform for gaming now! That is insane!

-V

Recent Accomplishments. Stuff I have been doing!

Its been a bit quiet on the geekery front the last week or two. I have been listening excessively to episodes of The Instance as I go about doing my job, but I thought I would put a summary of some of our activities here :)

1) Web design: My business site is now up: Frozen-Monkey Web-Design. (albheit still under construction.) The site of my first customer is also up - RCS Wind Services. I am enjoying doing the web design work, it can be fiddly - but I have done enough websites between hobbies and uni now that I have some experience and am building up a portfolio.

2) Jam Making: Me and the Mrs took the kids to local(ish) fruit farm and got a metric f-ton of strawberries, and decided to make the into Jam using our Kenwood Bread Maker. I must say, yummier jam I haz a tasted not!

3) Wine Making: Were turnin into a proper Good Life family here... Jam... Bread... now making our own wine. We picked up a starter kit from Tesco to brew 6 bottles in a week, aswell as slapping a batch of strawberrys together to ferment to make some strawberry wine for christmas time. Its quite entertaining. We have a lot of brewing stuff that has been passed to us from family - we are quite keen on putting it to use - there are a load of brewing websites about - although finding an actual brewer shop to get supplies from in person is a different matter...

Oh yeah, I have also been playing lots (too much?) of Transport Tycoon... Ive not been allowed to play WOW because its too time consuming, but we both tend to collapse on the couch in the evenings regardless and do nothing, so I have just been playing this... Pretty easy once you get the hang of things... (assuming you let building whilst paused be allowed...)

-V

Stoo's Reviews. Star Wars: Episode 3 - Revenge of The Sith.

I must admit... I want that outfit!

Well, I watched this one today. I reckon it is my favourite of the new 3 - but it sure does offer a different viewing experience from Episode 1. Where Episode 1 was aimed at Kids - this one I had to send the kid out the room at parts, and at other parts that I thought were not so bad, he run away and hid (E.G Sidius V Windu lightening face melty.)

My sole complaint about this installment has to be Vader at the end... NOooooooooooooooo oooh shiney. Considering I have been in the presence of some manipulative mofos in my life, none were so blatantly obvious than Palpatine with Annakin... its like... WTF dude, open your eyes! Hehe.

Its interesting actually how the Deathly Hallows pt 1 of Harry Potter follows this installment... watch them both back to back and see what comminalities you can find ;)

-V

Edit: Wow, that was a rather random and fragmented stream of comments... Oh well, deal!

Stoo's Reviews. Transport Tycoon Deluxe, nostalgia gaming?

Transport Tycoon came out circa 1995 if I remember correctly. It is not a particularly exciting game, yet for some reason I find it quite... addicting.

Well, I downloaded it courtesy of the linky previously mentioned and fired it up.

The open source version of this game works quite well. There are numerous customisable options so you can play at a reasonable resolution etc. I set it up and went for it... I managed to play for about 2 hours, but I kinda "won" (Has an income stream around 100k a year, and no real objective or competitors.) With no set objective to win without competitors it is quite a boring game... you can challenge yourself to take on certain objectives, but overall - its pointless (moreso than most games that is). I am not that keen on playing with competitors - they tend to be too quick/efficient and if you want any chance of beating them you have to physically block their routes...

Anyway, give it a go if your into these kind of asset management games, because as far as they go - this is a good one.

Nostalgia says 8/10 - actuality is 6/10 in my opinion.

-V

Star Wars: Episode 1 & 2 - comments

So me and the Squish-Monster have been watching Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace, and Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones.

What can I say? I put these on because they were more tailored to children... but I must say - Jared fell asleep during Episode 1 and scampered about the house uninterested for the latter half of Episode 2. I enjoyed the films - as long as Annakin "Nooooooo"walker and JarJar Binks were not on screen.

Now, it must be about 10 years since I seen episode 1, and I only seen 2&3 when they were released in the cinema... I have been enjoying the fancier graphics compared to the first, and the plot was fine, and I really enjoy the fight scenes in the new 3 - especially Darth Maul ^.^

I may go as a Jedi at halloween :p It only occured to me today that I have exacty the same facial hair as Ewan McGregor (Obi-Wan) and I often have my hair up the same way >.> All I need is a brown robe and Im sorted :p

Thats it for now. Good movies, some real downer points, and some great points, Id give them 7 out of 10 - good entertainment, but nothing provoking in anyway (Unlike Black Hawk down that I watched the other day and it makes me feel sad that I am no longer working in engineering that is tied to equipment used for the forces, but something much more mundane.)

-V

Old School Games: A source!

The link I tried to put up in the Cyberdemon post yesterday - which was provided by Mozillas HTML5 Evengalist, Christian Heilmann (@codepo8 on twitter) - but the link is now down, but I was given a very nice link by a friend of his on facebook (I wont name names in case he doesn't want to be named).

http://osgameclones.com/

Im just looking at this list and drooling of the possibilities of playing old games (even some I never got round to playing) and putting up some reviews on them.

I think the ones that catch my eyes the most have to be:

Doom,
Doom II,
UFO Enemy Unkown - Aka XCOM: UFO Defense.
Planescape Torment (I never played this before but it looked good.)
Transport Tycoon

Im sure there is probably more I would love to do aswell. (Commander Keen! Weee!)...

-V

Doom - The Cyberdemon!

Random post... I had a flashback to when I first played the original Doom - must have been circa 1993... just before I had a sound card. I would have been 11. This guy scared the everliving fuck outta me...

Back then we were running a 286 PC with a 20MB hard drive, and no sound card. The Doom Games were 15MB and came on floppy disks... If you got past the challenge of getting it on your hard drive - it was AWESOME. We did not have a sound card either, so the PC's internal speaker provided all the sounds... Usually the first sign this guy was near was Brrrowuuup, BrEeeeeeeeeewww! and that was you almost dead, or very dead...

Nostalgia. Oh, whilst Im mentioning Doom - here is a HTML 5 version - Doom for your web-browser basically. The page is missing as of the time of this posting, but it worked last week - so hopefully it will be back soon!

On a side note - this has inspired me to try to do some posts about games from my youth :)

-V

Writers block? Huh?

I had a crapton of post ideas, and now I cant think of what they were. Woot! Too long a day >.>

The Instance, ah - the joys :)

I have been listening to some old episodes of the instance as I go about my rounds, driving from site to site as part of the internship. I must say, it has been a good giggle. The news may be old - but the entertainment value is as good as ever. As is the nostalgia value.

I have been putting together some notes from the shows as I go, as a while ago I decided that it would be awesome to get a list of episodes with nice short decriptions and bullet points of the main content that can be referenced, as well as other info like hosts, run time, and links to the episode blog and audio file.

I now have the latest 4 on my HTC, ready for my trip to Glasgae tomorrow. God help me, I been struggling coping with the drive to/from edinburgh... I better hit the sack!

-V