This is for the brits(since as far as i know you cant by BULMERS in america) and i am reviewing this against its non-alcholic counterpart (in this case apple juice) and i will keep it short and sweet since i have already had a few *hic*.
they way i will do this is to take a swig of the cider and then take a swig of the apple juice and compare the taste, non of this "clarity test" crap! i will tell you about what matters, the taste!
so of we go, my first thoughts are that the juice seems to lack the tangy flavour of fresh apples where as the cider has all the tang you could want! Also the cider is very "drinkable" as stupid as that sounds, what i mean is that unlike some other alcholic drinks you dont feel that you have had your fill after one can. Wheather this is a good thing or a bad thing dependes on your political view, also the apple juice doesent really taste of any thing at all but a sort of flat appley flavour like you have just put a apple through a mincer and you then compliment then goo with half a gallon of water.
so i best rap this up, all in all cider will always be my first choice just because i can and if you are under eightteen then drink appletise it is almost as good.
p.s if any one at BULMERS read this you can put "recommended by the binary blog!" on the side of the cans. also never stop putting it in big glass bottels, it makes me feel more classy!
Sunday, 27 January 2008
Wednesday, 23 January 2008
the melancholy death of oyster boy and other stories review
This collection of weird and wonderful stories was written by Tim Burton (apart from the title story) who was the genius behind a nightmare before Christmas (one of the best films I have ever seen) and several other great and not so great films (I’m looking at you corpse bride) and in this book he shows again why all of his films have a breathtakingly dark sense of imagination and humour.
First off I will clear one thing up, I am a Tim Burton fan boy through and through every one of his films I have loved and this book received the same amount of excitement when I spotted it as a American may have when they see a hamburger (also I know that is a stereotype and that there are lots of healthy and sane Americans you just cant see them round the bulk of the obese ones) so that is why for the first paragraph I will rave about the book then I will try to make some bad points.
This book is a collection of short poems about people who are a bit “odd” to put it lightly, I shant ruin any of them but trust me when I say that if you saw one of them in the street you would cross the road (and in the case of the Americans gun them down with a glock in one hand and a milkshake in the other). A great thing about the book is that apart from having poems witch are wickedly dark (and I mean dark) there are also some great pictures to go with them and if you have ever seen a nightmare before Christmas then you will recognise the distinct art work of Tim Burton. The advantage to this is that when you are sitting reading the book people that look over your should (the nosy sods!) will look at the pictures and will say things like “what on earth has that man got on his head!” or “are you right in the head?” instead of things like “ha are you to stupid to read a book with out pictures” etc. in fact when I was sitting in my living room at least two people stopped what they where doing and looked at the book for five minutes and then wondered of in a strange trance (then again I do know some weird people).
Ok now I must name a few bad point (as is said in the reviewers charter just below “thou shalt not take in with the devils of gamespy”) so here we go bad points………hmmm bad points…….this is harder than I thought….here’s one and it is so stupid that the fact I am actually pointing it out proves just how good this is, the book is not child friendly I know that that is a stupid complaint but it is the only one I can think of. Also it is a pretty stupid compliant, after all the title alone should put of all but the most stupid parent and if you are thick enough to by this then chances are your children will probably all be to busy popping out the next generation of inbreed hicks.
99%
First off I will clear one thing up, I am a Tim Burton fan boy through and through every one of his films I have loved and this book received the same amount of excitement when I spotted it as a American may have when they see a hamburger (also I know that is a stereotype and that there are lots of healthy and sane Americans you just cant see them round the bulk of the obese ones) so that is why for the first paragraph I will rave about the book then I will try to make some bad points.
This book is a collection of short poems about people who are a bit “odd” to put it lightly, I shant ruin any of them but trust me when I say that if you saw one of them in the street you would cross the road (and in the case of the Americans gun them down with a glock in one hand and a milkshake in the other). A great thing about the book is that apart from having poems witch are wickedly dark (and I mean dark) there are also some great pictures to go with them and if you have ever seen a nightmare before Christmas then you will recognise the distinct art work of Tim Burton. The advantage to this is that when you are sitting reading the book people that look over your should (the nosy sods!) will look at the pictures and will say things like “what on earth has that man got on his head!” or “are you right in the head?” instead of things like “ha are you to stupid to read a book with out pictures” etc. in fact when I was sitting in my living room at least two people stopped what they where doing and looked at the book for five minutes and then wondered of in a strange trance (then again I do know some weird people).
Ok now I must name a few bad point (as is said in the reviewers charter just below “thou shalt not take in with the devils of gamespy”) so here we go bad points………hmmm bad points…….this is harder than I thought….here’s one and it is so stupid that the fact I am actually pointing it out proves just how good this is, the book is not child friendly I know that that is a stupid complaint but it is the only one I can think of. Also it is a pretty stupid compliant, after all the title alone should put of all but the most stupid parent and if you are thick enough to by this then chances are your children will probably all be to busy popping out the next generation of inbreed hicks.
99%
Friday, 18 January 2008
tech help
ok the title is a littel inaccurate, what this is actually about is getting the oblvion expansion (for the 360) to run. some people have been having problems with it mostly people that bought the boxed version so here is a littel guide to getting it up and running.
First things first if you have never had your 360 connected to the internet and you have owned it for over a year then the shivering isles just wont run because you need to have the most up to date oblivion patch for the game to run it as part of the main game so there are a few remides for this the first is to take your 360 to a freind or relatives house and using there internet to downlaod the patch(all you need to do is connect it to the internet then play the game and it should ask if you whant to downlaod the patch) also an important note is that your hard drive must be on the xbox YOU own, if you put it on to your friends machine then download it when you get home (thanks to microsoft and there penny pinching ways) the machine will just ignore the patch and continue to not play it.
But if you have no easyly accesed broadband connection then you can phone up microsofts xbox support branch and have them send you the updates on a cd (you can get there number from the xbox website www.xbox.com).
well there you go also another thing about the importants of using your machine to download the patch, i have no idea how you delete a patch after you download it. If any one knows how then feel free to share your knowlege with all of us.
First things first if you have never had your 360 connected to the internet and you have owned it for over a year then the shivering isles just wont run because you need to have the most up to date oblivion patch for the game to run it as part of the main game so there are a few remides for this the first is to take your 360 to a freind or relatives house and using there internet to downlaod the patch(all you need to do is connect it to the internet then play the game and it should ask if you whant to downlaod the patch) also an important note is that your hard drive must be on the xbox YOU own, if you put it on to your friends machine then download it when you get home (thanks to microsoft and there penny pinching ways) the machine will just ignore the patch and continue to not play it.
But if you have no easyly accesed broadband connection then you can phone up microsofts xbox support branch and have them send you the updates on a cd (you can get there number from the xbox website www.xbox.com).
well there you go also another thing about the importants of using your machine to download the patch, i have no idea how you delete a patch after you download it. If any one knows how then feel free to share your knowlege with all of us.
Saturday, 12 January 2008
MASS EFFECT Review
MASS EFFECT is a game that has been both blessed and cursed with a littel thing i like to call 'hype fever' symptomes include, gaming magezines publishing 8-page and up spreads on said game and crazy cliams being made in big shouty letters like this "THIS IS THE GAME OF THIS (console)GENERATION!!!" on posters and the like. Recent monthes have seen 'hype fever' reach almost pandemec level with barely a month going by with out some game suffering through it, and when i say suffering i mean it hype is is the most deadly of all the double edged swords, with a positive that is worth its weight in gold(publcity) and a con that could ruin the game (not living up to the hype).
Over last year i saw a few game suffer a serious(if not terminal) blow at the hands of hype fever, the one that jumps to mind is bioshock with so many promises made (and some of the more important ones being kept "great story any one?") but i wont linger on that lets just say that it wasnt all that.
MASS EFFECT is a great game lets make no mistake taken for what it is it is a fun engaging space opera with a likable cast of charters and a accesable combat and leveling up system that makes it easyer for all of the RPG virgens (like me!) to get to gripes with the depth which the game hides beneath its sleek graphics(more on them later) so just bear that in mind as i point out every littel trivial problem because here arent any big ones.
I will start from the beginning of the game, by that i mean i will take you through the charecter building screen and all that jazz. So on my first playthrough i made my own charcter to see how much freedom i had to make an ugly sod and i almost instantly ran in to a problem and that problem was a lack of choice and a interface that was frustrating to use i found my self just calling him titty and staring to play witch is never a good sign in a game like this, but in retrospect i think that those of you familer with that kind of screen (maybe bioware use that setup for all there games this is the only one i have played)then it will not be a problem? and if that is the case then ignore all that stuff about it being hard to use. maybe i am just thick?
So moving on to the main game. as soon as the first video was over you go striaght in to a conversasion with the pilot of your ship(who is voiced by seth green...just so you know!) and you get to see the graphics in action, and the first thing that struck me was "wow all the humans look like play-doug but the aliens look real!" and that was for me a really bad point, if you cant make humans look real then why the hell is it that the aliens look like i could touch them?there are some serious problems with your engine. and that leads on nicly on to my next point, and that is that the engine sometimes lags to fuck! with a gunfight being nothing more that a mess of disjounted frames and sound effects the last bit of the game suffers the most for this since it has some rather spectacular stuff going on in the backround.
On the plus side the leveling-up system is very well used and the enmies dont level-up with you ala Oblivion! so that is a plus and you can use the charcter from your last play through in the next campign witch makes getting some of the achevments easier, but this also has a flaw to it in that you also keep all the swag you had at the end of the last play through witch can be worth a rather insane amount of money giving you a lot of spare cash to by all the best armour and guns.
that final point could be good or bad depending on your view but i think it is a mixed blessing.
So to rap this all up MASS EFFECT is a flawed game but if you can look past the somtimes juddery frame rates and the play-doug humans you will find a deep exciting world to lose your self in for 20 hours, and in the end that is what gaming is all about.
also it has shagging whitch is always welcome!
score 85%
Over last year i saw a few game suffer a serious(if not terminal) blow at the hands of hype fever, the one that jumps to mind is bioshock with so many promises made (and some of the more important ones being kept "great story any one?") but i wont linger on that lets just say that it wasnt all that.
MASS EFFECT is a great game lets make no mistake taken for what it is it is a fun engaging space opera with a likable cast of charters and a accesable combat and leveling up system that makes it easyer for all of the RPG virgens (like me!) to get to gripes with the depth which the game hides beneath its sleek graphics(more on them later) so just bear that in mind as i point out every littel trivial problem because here arent any big ones.
I will start from the beginning of the game, by that i mean i will take you through the charecter building screen and all that jazz. So on my first playthrough i made my own charcter to see how much freedom i had to make an ugly sod and i almost instantly ran in to a problem and that problem was a lack of choice and a interface that was frustrating to use i found my self just calling him titty and staring to play witch is never a good sign in a game like this, but in retrospect i think that those of you familer with that kind of screen (maybe bioware use that setup for all there games this is the only one i have played)then it will not be a problem? and if that is the case then ignore all that stuff about it being hard to use. maybe i am just thick?
So moving on to the main game. as soon as the first video was over you go striaght in to a conversasion with the pilot of your ship(who is voiced by seth green...just so you know!) and you get to see the graphics in action, and the first thing that struck me was "wow all the humans look like play-doug but the aliens look real!" and that was for me a really bad point, if you cant make humans look real then why the hell is it that the aliens look like i could touch them?there are some serious problems with your engine. and that leads on nicly on to my next point, and that is that the engine sometimes lags to fuck! with a gunfight being nothing more that a mess of disjounted frames and sound effects the last bit of the game suffers the most for this since it has some rather spectacular stuff going on in the backround.
On the plus side the leveling-up system is very well used and the enmies dont level-up with you ala Oblivion! so that is a plus and you can use the charcter from your last play through in the next campign witch makes getting some of the achevments easier, but this also has a flaw to it in that you also keep all the swag you had at the end of the last play through witch can be worth a rather insane amount of money giving you a lot of spare cash to by all the best armour and guns.
that final point could be good or bad depending on your view but i think it is a mixed blessing.
So to rap this all up MASS EFFECT is a flawed game but if you can look past the somtimes juddery frame rates and the play-doug humans you will find a deep exciting world to lose your self in for 20 hours, and in the end that is what gaming is all about.
also it has shagging whitch is always welcome!
score 85%
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