louiecat's Blog - 2old2play

Forz of one

I'm LOVING Forza 2. Its the best driving game I've come across in years. I have even bought a steerring wheel. I look like a right prat mind, sitting on the sofa with a a great plastic dashboard on my lap and a steering wheel in my hands, sweating and grinning like some kind of dangerous sexual criminal.

Its the steering wheel that makes it all work so well though. Its taken me about two weeks to get the subtleties of control down, but damn if it doesn't feel the closest thing to actually driving a car other than actually driving a car.

I haven't got very far in the single player, but thats all I'm playing at the moment. I have no wish to have the beautiful illusion of my "expertise" shattered online by some young gun who lives inside their 360. Hey, I even came second with all the driving aids off and with the AI set to Hard. I'm nails me. Speedy Gonzales.

The main reason I haven't got very far is that I'm enjoying actually DRIVING the cars. I've only bought one car with credits so far - the Honda Civic Type R, of course - but I've won quite a few. No Ferraris as yet, but the variety in my garage is more than enough to play around with for the moment, and the endless variables with upgrades and tuning is awesome even with just 12 cars in your garage.

My favourite car so far has been the Peugout hot hatch - I've primped and tweaked this baby until it can go round any corner as if it were a dragstrip. The front wheel drive cars are the easiest and the most satisfying for me at the moment because they feel like MY car - I can feel when the understeer begins and just enjoy that judder and squeal as I keep it on the edge round another bend. Blinkin fantastic. Rear wheel drives are trickier. I'm not used to them yet, but the feedback from the wheel should allow me to get a handle on that.

The other reason why I've not been able to get far in Forza is the massive extension work going on in the house at the moment, plus the need to actually keep working for a living.
I've been busy updating the site, and have finally got my backside into gear to produce a teeshirt.

Bought Flat Out Ulitmate Carnage the other day too. Little bit disappointed, must say. Looks splendid though and good fun with a beer, but not a keeper methinks.
I like the way that when you drive your car off the track and crash into a tree (which happens often to me) the grass underneath the chassi simply pops through, as if the chassis has simply disappeared. Oversight on the designers' part? Or just pure laziness......hmmm, lets see.

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Monkey Temple and MySpace

new stuff at the site by Monkey Temple. I love these textures and am hoping I can get some canvases out of Mr Temple soon.
PLus, finally, finally got around to putting up a MySpace page.
Chuffed because although I only have one friend so far, its the immortal Michael Berryman!! (well, probably only a goon who helps out with his page anyhow....)

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Polar Bear canvases are a GOOO!!!

This little guy is now available as a canvas. I've done 25 of them and I've got one myself - he's my favourite character of all and he looks great at 20 x 20 inches.
Have a browse at the olde online shoppe!!!

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fun job

well chuffed - I got a double pager in my favourite videogames magazine !

Its nice when you get the chance to contribute to a magazine you subscribe to and I've always loved the art direction in Edge. It was a mad dash to finish though since the deadline was very tight and there were alot of characters to draw -

hope you can recognise all of em!

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latest meanderings

So, in between bouts of motorstorm, Virtua Tennis and Guitar Hero 2, I've managed to get some work done too! I've been generating some content for a website on recycling, which is being sponsored by Pepsi, so I had to add little pepsi icons everywhere of course....the guys I worked with are in Seattle and on the whole it was a really easy, rewarding experience.

I found it strange to be working for poeple who are eight hours behind me, but the nice thing was that when they asked for something to be ready in the afternoon, it seemed like I had an extra day to get it all done. We had some telephone conferencing after 7pm my time some evenings, which meant I had to delay my wine drinking and gaming till later.......

heh heh

Have to say, that playing Guitar Hero2, although immense fun - especially going head-to-head with my brother, who was staying at the time (I convinced him to buy a copy immediately, which he gladly did) - is a killer on my tendons and I find it hard to play for long periods. Since I make my living using my hands, I'm not anticipating EVER completing this game on any level other than medium!

Anyhow, with the Seattle job ended, I've had time to do some personal work, so here is the Toucan I did yesterday as a prezzy for my mum!

He makes me laugh, so he passes the test and I've stuck him on the portfolio site. You can see him in his full glory here

Speaking of laughs, I had a great time that was totally unanticipated with some co-op Gears of War with a very good mate from the UK-based Terrible Gaming Stats Network. I never thought I'd go back to Gears single player once I'd finished it, but I'm loving doing this on Insane level and only finding the wretches the difficult thing so far. After having attempted the rather stale and disappointing Resistance on the PS3, Gears is like coming home to a very good meal indeed!!
Also gotten in a few drunken and hilarious rounds of co-op Rainbow Six Vegas, where I managed to fall off a ladder under heavy fire and die. But somehow, it just made everything so much more enjoyable.........I continue to not understand why I ever attempted to enjoy adversarial games on xbox Live.

Other news....none really........trying to find someone to sell my greetings cards and just looking around for the next job....getting irritated by Virtua Tennis 3's stupid BGM, and getting bored with the missions in Crackdown....I'll collect the orbs, but bollocks to those bosses baby......

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finally got my website in order

At last! Finally got some wares to display at on the portfolio site. I've never done much website building in the past and I must admit I found the whole process frighteningly easy. I kept it simple without bells and whistles that take time to load (and I can't do anyhow).

The shop was a joy to do. PayPal is stupidly easy to utilise and there you go its up and running!

Anyhow, if you fancy a gander at the work, go ahead. I'd love to know what you think, so drop a comment below or send an email from the site. Its highly encouraging to get feedback, so if you hate my stuff, lie.

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the host

just finished watching this. bloody fantastic. see it.

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Really Advanced Warfighting?

Well, it is possble, as Calvin once said to Hobbes, to "live and don't learn".

I went to stay with my brother in London for a coulpe of beer -fuelled days. He lives in Streatham, where he owns a rather nice, spacious flat with a nice spacious living room and in the nice spacious living room there stands a nice, spacious telly. Its a Sony Bravia and it is a beautiful thing. Thankfully, he also owns a 360, so it was nice to have a bit of a gaming fix while away.

My brother doesn't play much and a few weeks ago he bought a copy of the first Advanced Warfighter at a knock down price. He hasn't really got into it since he is a little bit intimidated by the controls and hasn't got past the tutorial yet. This was impressed on me more powerfully when I picked up a control one morning, thinking it would be nice to stroll through a couple of the early levels and enjoy killing with impunity and ease. I ahve played most of the levels and over that time I became - for me - quite proficient at soldiering, in my cautious, creeping way.....

I was in for a bit of a shock. I was shit at this. Even the tutorial was a challenge of sorts. It felt like a completely new game. One that I had never played before and one that made me feel like I had ten fingers on each hand. I kept going into zoom mode when I wanted to crouch, I kept trying to reload when I wanted to grab a grenade, and worst of all, I kept going the wrong way.......

I realised the problem. I had been playing Rainbow Vegas rather than Recon for a while and Vegas was a simple game. It had simple, exciting maps, straightforward, visceral gunplay and that brill cover system. Ghost Recon seemed like floating in a blank ether by comparison.....intimidating spaces, complicated or unintuitive controls and somehow more complex missions, but that might just be the sense of disorientation you get from the maps....

Going back to it after a long break makes me think that to the average Joe, videogaming must seem like an intimidating, complex world of joysticks, coloured buttons that have strange symbols on them and combinations that scare them to death.

That’s why I think that gaming will never become truly mainstream. Its too hard and too weird for normal people!

At least the Wii is having a go and I must admit, I have had my neighbours and my wife playing Wii Sports and loving it. They didn’t think of it as a videogame, but just as a game – something fun and social. That said, they would never in a million years pick up and play Twilight Princess…

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Absolutely inspiring

For those of you who either subscribe to or can get their hands on the latest copy of Edge magazine, there is a superb article detailing the development of the new Media Molecule PS3 "game". It sounds and looks absolutely beautiful - a stunning turnaround for Sony if this comes off the way it seems to suggest. New ways of playing by creating and sharing content in the "New World" of YouTube and MySpace.

I for one was blown away by the suggestions of what this game could offer. The idea of a whole new community sharing content that includes any sounds and pics you can get onto your ps3, plus characters you design in game and levels you create for other peebs to play over the Network.
I - like many others I'm sure - never saw this type of thing coming. Brilliant! Hope its as good as it sounds! (and looks - it looks photorealistic)

check out Edge's online article here

they also have a very cool cover for April's issue (174) not in shops till end of week in UK.

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(Cracked) down

I dunno.......I bought Crackdown a few weeks back. I was really looking forward to it too. I still have fond memories of those first few moments playing Vice City and giggling like a schoolboy while mowing down my first pedestrian and feeling like Damien in a big van. That feeling hasn't been matched by sandbox type games since. I was really looking forward to pretending to be a big black man with a super suit and bouncing all over a city I didn't have to unlock by doing missions that drove me round the bend with their extreme difficulty spikes and remote control helicopter bombers.......

but it has been a disappointment. I like the bouncing around and collecting green orbs. I even like the driving and the explosions, but the missions are the same mission over and over again and for someone like me, who doesn't have that much time to play, they are tiring. Its basically a shooting mission replayed in different locations and at varying difficulty levels: shoot everything until you get to the boss. Then punch him or her in the face until they are dead.

Granted, there are different ways you can go about this and I did have real fun on the lighthouse mission, but there are only so many ways to skin a cat, and to be honest, I don't have the time or the inclination to be really inventive and learn to set up ramps to jump into buildings and go all "Just Cause" on a boss.

I guess I have learned I like to be led a bit more. I like Ghost Recon AW single player. I can take it at my own pace, its linear, I can pretend to be an expert marksman and when I'm done I feel like I've gotten somewhere.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for spontaneity and the unforeseen in a game, its just that I don't have the time and simply can't be arsed to play exploit the so-called "chemistry set" the director of Crackdown described it as.........I mentioned Just Cause above. I have to say that I have had much more fun with this game. I found that it was much easier and more inviting to try different things out during the missions and it was much more likely that something utterly mad and wonderful would occur as I did - a helicopter was never far away, I could always get airborne from a car or boat and there is NOTHING that beats escaping by the skin of your teeth after a successful mission by riding a big motorcycle of a cliff and then freefalling to safety as the tropical sun goes down......in Crackdown, I'd still be on the ground, emotionally as well as physically.

The most exciting bits in Crackdown are when you're airborne - or nearly airborne. When you're scaling the agency tower to jump from the top or bounding around like a roided-up Easter Bunny from rooftop to rooftop......but even then you're not really doing anything.....you're not really fighting baddies and you're not really free...not in the same take-your-breath-away way that I found with Just Cause anyhow.

The thing with Crackdown is that even with all that freedom, you're not really taking off and flying, and if you really look, there isn't much to do in town.
Just Cause's world was big, wide and empty, but somehow you could enjoy that emptiness more, and the main missions, albeit limited in number, are much more FUN. In Just Cause I can feel that I've achieved something after only 30 minutes, much like Ghost Recon, and both games make me feel like an expert spy or soldier for a moment or two. But Crackdown doesn't do that. Unless I'm bounding about collecting orbs, then I feel like a kid at christmas who has just found out that of the huge pile of gifts under the tree, only two were for him, and one was another pair of socks for school.

My feeling is that Crackdown is as empty as Just Cause, and certainly not as ambitious. It smacks of laziness on the part of the design team. If you take away the agility and the orbs, theres nothing there but bullets.

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first (last?) post

Just acknowledged my age and joined the forum here at 2old2play. Been looking for a group of individuals whose reasons for playing videogames (online at any rate) mirror those of my own. Well....you look good onscreen anyhow and I hope not to find too many hidden arseholes who play far too much Halo and speak about getting their next achievement point like its the be all and end all of their sad little lives.

My worst experience of xbox live was a game of Halo 2. I have never been back since. An American got me so angry I actually swore down my microphone and realised then that I had lost all pretence of dignity. I realised that this was not playing. This was not fun. This was, simply, shit.

I loved Halo. It was the game that revealed what videogaming could be about. I couldn't wait for the next stage, the next scene, the next world to unfold. That's always been my main reason for playing games. Much like a child at Disneyworld, its the hyper-realism, the RGB colours, the mad inventive worlds and the constant excitement of wanting to find out what's around the next corner. Its not about finishing games even - I've only finished two games in my relatively short gaming life. One was Halo.

I reckon the growth of the multiplayer and the stress many put upon it as the "future" of gaming has led many of us to forget the simple pleasures of simply playing and exploring. I have spent many a session of multiplayer wishing I was fishing in Animal Crossing or exploring in Splinter Cell....and usually it was because the people I was playing with were too concerned about being good than having fun.

That said, I have had some of the best times with a few good mates playing co-op Summit Strike or Six. Usually with a few beers in me and while we all laugh like hyenas when one of us - once again - blows the head off a teammate (and not always by accident).

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