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.





Posted by louiecat @ 1:51 pm EDT | Permalink | 7 Comments

the host

just finished watching this. bloody fantastic. see it.

Posted by louiecat @ 7:09 pm EDT | Permalink | 4 Comments

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…

Posted by louiecat @ 9:52 am EDT | Permalink | 2 Comments

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.


Posted by louiecat @ 1:41 pm EDT | Permalink | 0 Comments

(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.


Posted by louiecat @ 8:49 am EDT | Permalink | 3 Comments