johncox88's blog

Bioshock: Infinite trailer

Aug 16

JohnGames bioshock infinite trailer View Comments

I loved the teaser trailer for the original Bioshock and this one is in the same first-person style.

Video Game T-Shirts

May 26

JohnGames gaming, left 4 dead, merchandise, nintendo, shirts, t-shirts, tees, tshirts, vice city, videogame View Comments

A recent post on the PC Gamer site about game related t-shirts inspired me to do my own list. So here it goes…

Gaming tshirts are a bit of a problem for me, I like to wear them for sentimental reasons, or to show off my affinity for games but a lot of them are pretty hideous or just plain boring and tend to be the really baggy type of t-shirt that just make me look like the raging geek that I am.

BUT, some are pretty nice, and these are the ones I will tell you about. I’ll start off with some that I actually own. Both of these are from 80stees.com, the Tanuki Mario one gets quite a lot of admiration from other people but the design on the Zelda one is a bit more abstract so it’s always nice when someone recognises what’s on it. I prefer the Zelda one since it’s a bit more fitted.

This one from threadless is pretty nice, classic red and yellow soviet propaganda design made from control pad images. I may be tempted to buy this if it weren’t for my aversion to threadless’ seeming “Hey everyone look at my tshirt aren’t i so cool and unique?!” philosophy. Again, another design that isn’t blatantly geeky is this Vice City themed one from Rockstar. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, down a mine, on the moon, you’ll have seen numerous annoyingly unoriginal people declaring that they “heart” various 2 letter acronyms; Now you can too!

But obviously sometimes you just want to go all out and declare your undying love for all things videogame. And short of marrying your playstation or painting your pet hedgehog blue, these t-shirts from redbubble.com are probably your best bet.

So you’re a videogame geek and you want a t-shirt, why not combine your love of games with your love of zombies; because everyone loves those undead brain-eaters! Valve, as with everything they do, sell some excellent merchandise from their online store. The first t-shirt below feature the left 4 Dead 2 survivors silhouetted against a nice sunset and the second is towards the more repulsive end of the t-shirt spectrum, showcasing a Spitter doing what spitters do best. I like the fluorescent spitter goo though.

This one isn’t a t-shirt but it’s still clothes and it’s really nice. Show any potential co-survivors that you’ve got their back with this zip-through hoody emblazoned with the Left 4 Dead healthpack on the back.

Other noteworthy items are these belt-buckles that are pretty cool as well as being shiny and have the added bonus of avoiding getting caught with you pants down.

This one is in no way clothes-related but I love Left 4 Dead and Valve and they have a range of limited edition special infected plushies that have been designed by the man that did the Left 4 Dead and Team Fortress 2 greetings cards. This friendly Boomer stands at 13” tall and has a bingo-wing span also of 13”. AND IT MAKES NOISES! Yes, he can belch, gurgle and vomit at your whim. This is just the first of a range of 6 plushies that will be terrorising your other soft furnishings in the near future.

BOOM.

Some App Recommendations, Just ‘Cause.

Mar 28

JohnApps, Games Apps, foursquare, just cause 2, webOS, what's for dinner, yelp View Comments

HOLLLAAAAAAA

Yet again I open up my blog authoring software with nothing in particular to say.

I’ve been playing quite a bit of Just Cause 2 the past few days and it’s a LOT of fun. The missions are ridiculously repetitive but it’s still enjoyable overall. EXPLOSIONS. I just wish I could see what the sexy DirectX 11 effects are like. But I’m poor so meh.

Other things to note are some nice WebOS apps I’ve been using lately.

Firstly FourSquare, which is similar to yelp, it’s not quite as extensive as yelp’s list of venues but it focuses more on its social features. This is typified by the “Mayors” feature, with this the user that “checks in” most to a specific venue becomes the mayor, encouraging some competition between friends and allowing venues to reward their most loyal customers. You can also write tips for people to see, recommending places to go or activities to try or write a to-do list of stuff you want to do.

The only downside is that I don’t know many people with smartphones let alone people that use the app so it’s usefulness in finding new places to go is a little more limited than yelp. I usually end up finding places on yelp then adding the venue/checking in there on FourSquare.

Another app is ‘What’s For Dinner?’: A nice little app that lets you browse through recipes, add them to your own recipe book and also create shopping lists based on the recipes. You can paste in recipes text to make entering your own a little easier. The full version (that I can’t purchase because paid apps aren’t available in the UK yet) lets you attach photos to recipes and add tags so you can separate recipes by course/style to help you narrow down your collection.

Watching Good Will Hunting at the moment. It’s quite entertaining so far.

Borderlands Vs. Fallout 3

Jan 22

JohnGames, Rants borderlands, compare, comparison, fallout 3, review View Comments

Late to the party…

All the sausage rolls are gone and the attractive people have paired up on the dancefloor; All that remains now are the fatties, the ugo’s and a tray full of tuna sandwiches… on brown bread.

Touted by the developers as a ‘funner’ alternative to Fallout 3, Borderlands was fairly well hyped, and received favourable reviews.

I really like both games, Fallout 3 for it’s storytelling and fictional world, borderlands for its mindless violence and co-op.

But upon completing Borderlands I realised that Fallout 3 wipes the floor with it in almost every respect.

Now although both games require you to run around the respective game worlds, each game has some quick-travel features. Fallout 3 lets you warp to any previously discovered waypoint on the map as long as there are no enemies nearby and Borderlands has cars and warp points. The addition of cars is nice but the physics on them is ropey at best, poor collision detection, the handling isn’t great and they just don’t feel as fun to drive as they should. Also the warping isn’t very well thought out, some locations have more than one warp-point but it’s hard to remember which one is closer to where you need to get to. Fallout 3 shows you on the map where you actually need to go (rather than where the transition zone to the next area is) and lets you warp to the nearest waypoint. A much better, more intuitive system.

On the subject of transition zones, Fallout 3 seems like one large play area. The only times you have to sit through loading screens are when you enter a town area or dungeon. Borderlands doesn’t have one contiguous overworld, it’s split into areas connected by what are essentially big warp pipes. It makes the game world seem a lot less immersive.

The ‘gazillions’ of weapons in Borderlands was a massive exaggeration. It seems like there’s a lot but in reality there’s only the elemental/levelled versions of each of the weapon types. Fallout 3 has less weapons overall but they’re a lot more varied and are a bit more satisfying to use thanks to the VATS targeting system. Although, getting headshots with the revolvers in Borderlands is a lot of fun.

The main issue I have with Borderlands is how it handles the story. i.e. it doesn’t. A lot of it is told via audio recordings that you collect in various missions. But I found myself not listening to them most of the time while I made my way to the next one or I would get distracted by enemies. I got the gist of the plot but there’s absolutely nothing to help the player engage with or be interested in the story. And the arbitrary  way the bulletin boards dole out missions isn’t that fun, you start to think “why should I do these missions for some random person that I never see?” and what’s worse is getting missions from the actual  non-playable characters, the missions are only displayed as text that I never read. You see “kill so-and-so” and close the mission window and go and kill them. The NPC’s just seem so static, you’ll see them stood around but they’ll only say one line to you unless they have a mission and it pops up with the block of text.

Fallout 3 always kept me engrossed in the story, perhaps it was because it used scripted sequences more and showed your avatar as a baby and child. Perhaps it’s the better interaction with the NPC’s; actual voice-acted dialogue with a good choice of dialogue trees. Perhaps it was just better. The characters were a lot more thoroughly developed and I actually cared if some of them lived or died. The voice acting definitely keeps you more involved than textboxes, and when you enter a conversation the camera view changes and you can’t move till you’ve ended the conversation which, while inconvenient some of the time, means you actually pay attention to what’s going on.

Most of all, it was the ending to Borderlands that disappointed me. I was fighting my way through what I assumed was near the end then all of a sudden there was a really short cutscene (bearing in mind there hadn’t been a cutscene since the beginning of the game) and an ensuing boss battle. I Killed the boss far too easily, there was none of the ARGHAHRA FINAL BOSS fear that I usually have in a game, it wasn’t even as nerve-wracking as some of the earlier bosses in the game.

Perhaps it was because I hadn’t followed the story properly but the final boss seemed to come from nowhere and was a massive anticlimax, literally. You’re sat there getting hot and heavy with some armoured soldiers and aliens then all of a sudden you’re at the final leg. But the game can’t take the pace and blows its pixellated load all over the place.

It just sits there; pants round ankles, covered in cum, cock rapidly diminishing. The feelings of hopefulness and exhilaration now replaced with disappointment and regret.

Another cocktease of a cutscene plays and you’re rewarded with one tiny extraneous dribble of a mission that requires you to take an item to someone AND THAT’S IT. Game Over man, game over. Nothing left to do but play it again. CBA TBH TTYL

SO YEAH, overall I much prefer Fallout 3. That’s not to say Borderlands is a bad game, it’s just not as great as it could have easily been. I’ll assume some of its shortcomings were because it was a new title and perhaps wasn’t afforded as big a budget as Fallout 3, (the follow-up to Bethesda’s massively successful Oblivion and the 3rd in a well established franchise)

“Games Made Me Do It”

Nov 21

JohnGames, Rants bullshit, computer games, journalism, media, murder, video games, violence View Comments

Why does the media always have to blame the actions of mentalist kids on videogames all the bloody time!

Recently in France, police foiled an attempted shooting spree in a school when the a boy’s parents reported his suspicious behaviour (and their missing rifle).

Bastien was said by friends to have been devoted to World of Warcraft, the hugely popular online game in which the player takes the role of a fantasy warrior from the Middle Ages. Christian Sadowski, the Mayor of Allonne, said that he knew the family well and that the boy was a fan of computer games. “Many young people end up finding it difficult to tell the difference between dream and reality,” he told The Times.

This was taken from an article on The Times’ website with the headline:

Computer games fan ‘planned school massacre’

It describes the game as being set in the middle-ages, apart from being pretty wrong, they don’t seem to grasp the fact that there weren’t any rifles in the middle-ages. If the boy had marched into school with a suit of armour, broad sword and spell book then I might be more inclined to believe that WoW was what made him want to kill all his teachers.

Obviously the writers didn’t want to bog down the reader with any boring facts or foundation for these accusations so left them out completely. Well done

‘Boy Urinates; Murders 16′

Of course it’s not his parents’ fault. Oh heavens no. It’s not their fault that they’re didn’t take proper precautions to secure their rifle and ammunition or that they were irresponsible enough to let their 13 year old son play games “up to one or two in the morning”. No, that’s not it at all. And the article rightfully skipped over these facts.

‘Pjamas Blamed For Tragic Shooting

So this is more sensationalist journalism with completely unfounded and incorrect facts and attention grabbing, meaningless headlines to add to the pile. Shame.

‘”Coco” Boy Kills parents: Cereal Withdrawn From Shelves’

This is probably the subject that pisses me off the most. Media outlets that just blindly blame things on video games because they can’t blame TV or Rock & Roll for them any more. When our generation grows up and everyone realises that games have shit-all to do with crazy peoples’ desire to stab and shoot others what will jornalists blame then? Fridges? Pavements? Socks? We all use them, their must be some sort of causal link between them and murders.

If somehow I become a journalist, I’m going to write articles on recent murders and blame them on evil spores from Mars.