The cost of Rocking

So I sat down and had a think about how much Rock Band/Guitar Hero has cost me so far and it all got a little out of hand...

Xbox 360 Elite: £240
GuitarHero WT Band box: £100
Beatles Rock band: £40
Guitar Hero Greatest Hits: £30
AC/DC Rock band: £30
John Lennon Rickenbacker guitar: £90
HD TV to play it all on: £450
Mic stand and extra mic: £50

Total so far (not counting DLC): £1030

Ho hum!

Get back... get back... get back to where you once belonged.

Sooooo, it's been altogether far too long. Or not long enough, depending on your viewpoint. The last four months have been eventful, that's for sure. Two holidays, a new xbox, a summer with no football, a new season of fantasy football and much much more has transpired since the last post in April. I'll be back blogging regularly again so do stay tuned for my usual mix of random thoughts on stuff what does interest me.

First up. Scotland vs Holland tonight at Hampden in World Cup Qualifying. A win is almost certainly required if we are to secure a play-off spot. The country is buzzing again after a decent second-half display against a not bad Macedonia side and whilst victory over the Dutch might be somewhat far-fetched given that they are ranked 3rd in the world at the moment but stranger things have happened in football and especially to the Scottish national team so we shall see. It's a huge blow not to have the talismanic McFadden available after the yellow card debacle just before half time on Saturday and one does wonder who amidst the side can cause problems for the Dutch defence. We shall see... 'Mon the Scotland!

In other news, today sees the release of Beatles Rock Band and I have to say I am wetting my pants in anticipation. Plastic instrument-based karaoke has never been so good! :) I expect to spend a lot of my free time with this for the foreseeable...

Catching up...

Happy zombie Jesus weekend!

It's been a while and much has transpired. None of it is particularly important though and can be summarised thusly:

Football: The long and short of it, after 32 games this season is this: If Hibs dont beat Rangers and we can beat St Mirren away then we'll have sneaked into a top 6 place by a short nose and can concentrate on clawing back the gap to the euro places in the last 5 games. Draw or lose, regardless of what happens with Hibs and our season is effectively over with nothing to play for. We're completely clear of the relegation zone so the last 5 games would simply be a chance for McGhee to blood some youngsters and/or begin to organise the team for next season. To not make it now would be disappointing, to say the least, even with the horrendous time we had with injuries just before Christmas. The whole season comes down to this one game. If the players need any more motivation than that simple fact then there is something seriously wrong at the club. I know we can do it! As a 'Well fan for all this time though, you get used to disappointment...

Fantasy Football: It's two bad weeks on the trot and I'm languishing down in 7th again. Man Utd's decision to "rest" all three of my players didn't exactly make me grin and it seemed everyone around me had at least two scorers this week. By keeping Lamps as captain this week I've avoided being really finished off, for now. As it is, it looks like H is going to take it (something I will no doubt never hear the end of... "Next time, Gadget, *shakes fist* Next time!!!") but I think I'm looking at a disappointing end to the season. Oh well. Part of me wonders what might have been if I hadn't partially given up for 10 weeks and made no transfers. No excuses though, I've just been owned at every key point this season by what clearly must be more astute managers than I.

Star Wars: A Musical Journey was frankly amazing. The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra are note perfect (as you'd expect) and hearing those familiar themes from the Fox fanfare to the Imperial March live, in front of you, with THX super sound booming throughout the O2 was something pretty special. Best. Birthday present. Ever.

The rest of the long, long weekend consisted of the usual combination of partying/gaming/chillaxing and recovering. If you're reading this you were probably there for most of it, so I wont bore you with details. It all went better than expected though, so that's always good.

Played a fair bit of Resident Evil 5 over the weekend. I've been disconnected from the series for a while now (I think the original is the only other one I've played) and... it's changed... a lot. Co-op mode is great fun though (much prefer this mode to single player in my shooters these days, partner can cover up my glaring inadequacies in this genre!) although a frustrating bug meant my character lost all the cool weapons I'd bought/upgraded from the first few levels we'd played together. Oh well. Nothing like headshotting one of our infected African brethren to soothe your frustrations. Hmm, I smell a "5 things I hate about..." coming on...

Almost finished Preacher now. It's simply amazing. If you haven't read it and you're not a comic book geek, yet you like your material dark, humorous and razor sharp then you could do worse than starting here. Transmetropolitan is lined up for dessert. Yummy.

Last but not least I have a massive rant welling up about the G20 death, the police state, faux-democracy and all sorts but I'll save that for later (or just internalise it and go nova with a .45 one day on the bus to work, either/or.)

Stay frosty.

Some people are on the pitch...

Scotland 2, Iceland 1. Not amazingly convincing but it really is the result that counts at the moment. Job done. I think qualifying for the Finals is still something of a long shot because if you look at some of the teams currently in second place in the other groups... Well, let's just say, I wouldn't fancy our chances over 2 legs against too many of them... We don't play another competitive international now until August so attentions can once again turn to domestic matters (and fantasy matters!)

Big week in fantasy land. Only 8 rounds of fixtures left and following the disaster I had last time (curse you Gerrard and curse you no clean sheets for Man Utd and Chelsea) I find myself again with a lot of ground to make up. I've studied the fixture list quite extensively looking for opportunities to milk every last point I can in this run-in so hopefully I can make it back into 4th (or even 3rd) before the end.

The 'Well are at home to Aberdeen tomorrow in what is yet another must-win game. With Dundee Utd and Hibs facing each other at Tannadice (draw please!) it's a chance to move into the top 6 again and close the gap to the European places in preparation for the split. Hopefully McGhee has had the lads working hard this week as not too many of them will have been off on international duty (Clarkson is the only one I can think of off the top of my head, as Craigan didn't figure for Northern Ireland due to an injury). 3 points please lads. Nothing less will do.

Shearer takes over at Newcastle. I have to say I really didn't see that coming. I mean, obviously if you cut him open his blood is black and white but he has always stated he'd move when the time was right, both for him and for Newcastle. I'm not so sure that time is now. We shall see. It's hard to imagine a club of the stature of Newcastle being relegated from the EPL but when you take a glance at their remaining opponents there's not much comfort to be found for the beleaguered Toon army. Can their next Messiah lead them out of danger?

Friday drinks tonight, undoubtedly, then more drinking tomorrow (in the name of charity) and a haircut on Sunday. Rock. On.

Played some of the new Rock Band DLC last night. A couple of tracks from Offspring (moar plx!) and Get Up (Sex Machine) by the godfather of soul. Funking it up with JB on Rock Band is pretty f'n cool!

Have a good weekend folks.

5 things I hate about...

Empire Total War

To kick us off, I'm going to moan lyrical over the latest instalment in this franchise. So, in no particular order, here we go:

1. Friendly unit AI in battles. If history has taught us anything, it's that no matter how much you tell them to fire at will, line infantry will invariably stand around picking their noses with bayonets having several ounces of lead shot pumped at them repeatedly, with nothing so much as a harsh word thrown in retaliation. 'Concerned: Losing slightly' Yes, me too.

2. Time to play a game. Like the great dynasties of yore, at the rate it takes to proceed through even a short Grand Campaign, I'll have to pass on the mantle of stewardship to my sons and them to theirs if my family is ever going to see a campaign through. Real-time strategy? You're not kidding.

3. Thugees. Yes I know the term is accurate but DAMN, every time I hear the advisor chick's voice saying it I almost snort a lungful of my soup. For some reason I have images of 50-Cent's crew roaming around the sub-continent in their pimped-out carts terrorising rice farmers and cotton weavers. Don't be a menace to South Asia while drinking your lhassi in the jungle.

4. Enemy AI on the campaign map. Watching enemy manoeuvres sometimes feels like you are watching two very stupid dogs chase each other around, waving their tails like these virtual muppets wave their flags with seemingly no sense of purpose to it at all. One unit will march from point A to point B, about face and march to point C. Meanwhile, another, perhaps slightly cleverer muppet (but who really knows) will start from point C and march straight to point A. The end result? Nothing has changed except a wasted turn of movement and the player sitting there giggling uncontrollably as she ponders which region to next meander over and swallow up into her empire.

5. Difficulty. A vegetablised donkey could prolapse onto a board made of solid stupid and that dubious deposit could swallow a couple of valium, play this on hardest setting and STILL easily mince to victory. Hell, I could even play this on the hardest setting and mince to victory (although as point 1 above suggests, probably only using good old auto-resolve (or should I say auto-win by the way but that's technically sneaking in thing number 6 that I hate)). This is also pretty much only theory as due to point 2 above, I've not got a spare year to actually find out. If conquering the world was this easy, America would have done it by now.

*offers pinch of salt*

Got any more?

(((Note this is crossposted from my new blog over at GAX. I'll keep crossposting for a wee while even though it's also kinda doing that automagically. )))

For the Emperor!

It's Dawn of War, Jim, but not as we know it.

So Dawn of War 2 hit games shops all over the country on Friday and I managed to hold out until Monday to buy it. For those of you unfamiliar with the franchise, it's set in the world of Games Workshop's Warhammer 40K. Developed by Relic, the masterful team behind Dawn of War 1 and WW2 strategy masterpiece, Company of Heroes, DoW2 uses an updated version of the Essence engine from CoH, optimised for dual core DX10 systems. The game requires you to install Steam if you dont have it already and encourages you to get a gamertag from Live, so you can get Xbox-style achievements. Yes folks, I now have Gamerpoints. For shame!

So, trivialities out of the way, let's begin our adventure into Campaign mode. The first thing I noticed about the Campaign was that I didn't get a choice of which race to play. Having just recently finished DoW:Dark Crusade and DoW:Soulstorm, I had gotten used to the idea of having 7 races to pick from but here it was Blood Ravens Space Marines or quit to desktop. Fair enough, says I. Marines were my favourite in the first game anyway. After picking a name for my Force Commander (pick wisely as you will regret calling yourself Geneseed McBigballs when you have to see it over and over and over), you are taken into your first mission immediately. So, Force Commander Proteus (I've played Chaos Gate, I know they're all called Latin names...) and his accompanying tactical squad land on the battlefield and straight away it feels familiar. More polished graphics, for sure. I turned the settings up to full then tuned them down until it stopped warning me my system would have trouble. The landscapes are pretty nice, especially when you zoom right in. Details and animations are good and thankfully there seems to be enough of a range of them that you dont have 5 men performing what appears to be some kind of esoteric synchronised shrugging dance. Scratch the surface though, and the blood and guts of this game have changed in a big way. First of all, there's no resource collection. Now, I dont mean that in the same way you could say there is no resource collection in DoW, where you take a point and it will build up resources for you to buy stuff. There literally are no resources to collect. You dont "buy" structures or units. You dont "buy" upgrades within the mission. Instead you simply have your squads, each with a named squad leader. If a squad member is killed then you get him back by retreating to your nearest "relay" (think checkpoint) and a replacement teleports in. If your squad leader is incapacitated then another squad leader can revive him (in true Gears of War teabagging fashion by standing nearby and waving your arms in the air like some kind of steel-encased Obi Wan Kenobi). This feels really strange at first and you cant help but think to yourself, where the hell do I get more men, damnit!?

You move around and fight just like in CoH, with terrain features offering either no, light or heavy cover depending on what it is. Your troops are relatively smart and will jockey their position to make the best use of available cover, retreating behind walls or sandbags and the like when they catch sight of incoming enemies. Each unit has a few special abilities which are powered by energy and you have to constantly be micro managing this to get the most effectiveness out of your troops. This would be an unholy pain in the ass if it was DoW. But it's not. It's DoW2 and you get, count em, 4 squads of men maximum per battle. And we're not talking 10-strong steel legions raining explosive jacketed slugs of death. Oh no. The tactical squad is 4 men. The Assault and Devastator squads number 3 a piece and your Force Commander is all by himself. Generally in each mission you have 11 men, tops. The key to this working is the new wargear and experience system. Each squad leader character gains XP over the course of the Campaign with which he can boost one of four stats. Health, Melee, Ranged and Energy, would be the basic titles. Like in Mass Effect, hitting a threshold in a particular stat grants new abilities and unlocks access to different weapons or to additional equipment slots. Each point invested in a stat also boosts your associated skills, such as melee skill or ranged damage. It's actually a very fun process to level up, choosing what's the best direction for your squad leader based on the way you like to employ him and his squad in the battle. My only observation on this would be that against some enemies, they have structures which spawn enemies seemingly indefinitely until you destroy the structure. This would indicate that it's possible to "milk" these bottomless udders of XP for as long as you could stomach it but I haven't tested if the time/reward ratio is worth it. The other new(ish) addition is Wargear. In the last two instalments you could pimp your force commander with wargear but here every squad leader has a number of slots which can hold wargear of various descriptions. Weapons, armour, grenades, orbital beacons, medpacks, purity seals etc. It's very VERY much like WoW in this respect. Even down to the fact that basic loots are white text, uncommon are green and rare are blue (haven't seen any purples after 8 hours of gameplay but you know they'll be there...) Each piece of kit further enhances your stats or grants special abilities to the bearer. This loot "drops" from killing standard enemies (sometimes) and from the "boss" fights (always). I'm not sure if there are loot tables or if the drops are predefined. I have a feeling it may be the former. The bosses are good fun to fight and generally have one or two tricks up their sleeve that make the battle a bit more interesting than just mass select and click attack.

Which is not to say that the regular gameplay is anything like the drag-select and zerg that has been the bane of RTS games since, well, since forever. Try that here and you will be torn apart faster than Richard Gere's rectum at the hamster equivalent of Crufts. Each squad has to be individually manoeuvred into position, then the enemy teased into attacking you on your terms while you micro-manage your special abilities to maximise your firepower. As soon as each individual burst of combat is over, your troops regenerate health and energy very quickly so it becomes a series of small skirmishes that you have to carefully manage to be as efficient as possible. You do have some tricks that are limited use, such as grenades and medpacks but these can be topped up by breaking supply crates that litter the maps. I've never ran out of anything yet but I am only playing on default difficulty (2 of 4, I think).

It's really not like DoW at all, to be honest. It's more like a bastard half-breed of Diablo 2, and Company of Heroes set in the 40k universe, with elements of World of Warcraft thrown in. Hmmm. Win?

After a battle you are debriefed and given bonus experience based on 3 key areas: Fury (what % of enemies in the level you killed), Resilience (how many of your squad leaders were incapacitated at any point in the mission) and Speed (how quickly you completed the mission, which for me is always the lowest rating unless it's a computer attacks you type mission). If you score highly enough you can gain bonus deployments on that campaign day (in other words you get to do another mission before the day ticks over, which usually entails some bad shit happening somewhere or other, so it's a worthwhile goal to achieve these bonus deployments).

On the interplanetary scale, there are a number of worlds with available missions on them and after the initial couple you are free to choose the order in which you do these. Tactical considerations come into play here too though as some missions have a date by which they must be done and some missions lower the Tyranid Infestation level of the planet which I can only imagine to be bad if you leave it to build up for too long.

There is a continuous story thread going on as you play which seems so far to be much more solid than the dubiously loosely associated fluffy bits which proliferate the Campaign modes of Soulstorm and Dark Crusade.

I haven't ventured into the peril-fraught world of multiplayer matches yet. I understand you can play as Marines, Eldar, Orks or Tyranids in multiplayer, so I'll be giving that a try once I've played a bit more. It will be interesting to see how the other races deal with the 4 squad limit, or the fact that when fighting Tyranids and Eldar they seem to have buildings. I did notice there is an interesting Co-op multiplayer mode where two players can each take control of 2 squads in campaign mode (I'm looking at you Mr Oakley...)

In the future I can see expansions with other races which if you offered me right now I'd bite your hand off. This game is helluva fun, not many games can keep me playing for 8 hours straight and have me only switching off when I'm bordering on unconsciousness and a few hours away from my alarm going off for work. It's only been one day of playing but I'd recommend it to anyone with even a passing interest in RTS games. To me it's made some real innovations to the genre and is almost guaranteed to be a smash hit. If nothing else, it will sate your RTS appetite until Blizzard's Starcraft juggernaut rolls onto the scene. Relic ftw! 9/10

Catching up

Wow. Quite a lot has happened since my last post, despite it being but two short days ago. So let's start in order...

Motherwell lost. 1-0. To St Mirren. *sigh* Mark McGhee described it as one of the "worst experiences and disappointments of my managerial career". We were shite. St Mirren's new stadium has a lovely pitch which I'd hoped would be ideal for the style of football the 'Well have been trying to play ever since MMG took over but alas, the players didn't live up to it and there should a few of them looking at each other and asking questions. Once again our man of the match was loanee Cillian Sheridan. The rest of them need a kick up the arse. Tomorrow we play Sheridan's parent club (Celtic) which means the boy wont be allowed to play so we're really screwed for that one! With Hibs going down to bottom of the table Inverness today, a point against Celtic would move us above the Edinburgh side. We can but hope.

Thursday night was also the launch party which was a brilliant night. There's always something added to a night on the piss when people you never get the chance to see smashed (particularly your bosses...) are there and having a right good time. The food was good, the drink was free (thank god, £6.50 a tequila!) and the casino was good hearty fun (and more than a little competitive given that there was an iPod touch for the overall winner). As it was, it all came down to the last spin of the roulette wheel and my number just didn't come up. I had to make do with the "That's how I roll" prize (a bottle of nice champagne which I dutifully drank from the bottle) for my scrupulous honesty when it seemed everyone else was pooling winnings or colluding in one way or another. The irony of it all is not lost on me... Afterwards a party set out to go to Reflex, which was sadly closed. We ended up in the real casino where I placed one bet, won £100 and cashed out. All in all, Thursday was great.

Friday I had booked off for the inevitable hangover (which wasn't as bad as I anticipated) and spent most of the daylight tucked up in bed watching DVDs. At night I rolled down to Matt's for GTA4 goodness only to find he had loaned the disc for the original game to a friend and couldn't get it back for a few days. Bummer! We played some Tony Hawk and the new Street Fighter game along with some Rockband well into the early hours. The new White Zombie DLC for RB was good fun to sing! Finally we learn the lyrics of More Human than Human! Fun.

Saturday was spent meandering around the shops, contemplating whether to buy Dawn of War 2 or not. Decided against it on account of buying the complete edition of the first game just two weeks ago. I have a bad habit of doing that. Got home and checked the football scores and to my delight Beattie had grabbed a late double for Stoke against Pompey. Yes, of course he is in my fantasy team. All in all it was a pretty good day actually and I climbed to 4th place in the league ahead of tomorrow's matches. I'll not be in that position after tomorrow because most of my team has played where my rivals haven't but I'll be a pretty happy man if Everton and Liverpool dont keep clean sheets tomorrow. Ronaldo scored again, although he did get booked for diving, the cheating bastard. I watched it on Match of the Day and the gelled tumbler wasn't even touched. Honestly, it almost hurts to put aside my personal feelings in the hunt for more fantasy points where this twat is concerned.

One last thing of note about the football today which highly amused me is that Man United finally conceded after, wait for it, 1337 minutes of league football. Ho ho ho. (Half you are scratching your head going 'wtf?' right now I know, so allow me to link...)

So I wrote quite a lot today to make up for the day (and a bit) of radio silence. Well done if you made it to the end of this pointless drivel. I see my musings here have (at least partially) inspired a couple of you to start/pickup blog writing of your own. I look forward to reading your pointless drivel too. ;)

Jode out.

LC DLC FTW!

GTA 4 gets its first DLC on xbox

Back in July last year when I split up with the ex and moved in with my mate, GTA 4 filled many many hours of fun for more or less a complete month as we systematically took the game apart. It was pretty much my favourite game of last year (although my 2 month love affair with WAR comes close but once again, I was left disappointed with an MMORPG). The new episode, which Matt downloaded yesterday is finally here and once again we are getting ready to tear Liberty City a new one. I'm kinda sad that Niko Bellic isn't the protagonist this time around. I've not paid too much attention to the build-up for this so know very little about it but nevertheless I'm really looking forward to playing it. With conflicting schedules, it seems the first available window to try it out will be Friday, which coincides with an online event that will let you play against the developers. I'd really liked to have got some practice in beforehand but meh, what can you do? I'm sure much carnage will ensue.

In other news, this evening sees Man Utd play Fulham in an outstanding fixture that will hopefully see me jump a place in the fantasy league. Most people have Man U defenders and a fair few have the "gelled tumbler" as Captain so there is not too much potential for change in the league but you never know. I could really do with Ronaldo repaying some of the faith I put in him when I savaged my team to afford his exorbitant price, right before he went on a Nani-esque run of doing hee-haw. Things are really tight in the league around me at the moment and a goal or two could see me move up to 5th or 6th, which given I was down in the bottom half before an excellent January would be a decent achievement.

In real life football, it's the 'Well vs St Mirren in the cup replay tomorrow, with Celtic awaiting the victors in the next round. Bit bummed with the draw to be honest but I suppose to win the thing you have to beat at least one half of the Old Firm along the way (usually). That's exactly what happened in 1991 when we beat Celtic 4-2 in a replay at Hampden with Colin O'Neil scoring a wonder strike.



I remember it so well. What a strike! Could this be our year again? We need to dispatch the Saints first which wont be easy by any means. Mon the 'Well!

For those about to rock...

We salute you!

Picked up this for the 360 last week and gave it a good try out on Thursday. One thing. How the hell does he keep that up for an entire gig! His throat must be made of steel. I woke up on Friday spitting blood and feeling like i was swallowing sandpaper. And that had nothing to do with the beer, no sir.

Back to the game and the classics are all there. Thunderstruck, TNT, Dirty Deeds... The list goes on. The game is standalone but comes with a code you can tie in to your xbox live account to download the content for use with RB or RB2, so Matt O was the happy recipient. Makes sense really. I don't have a 360 and he's paid for the rest of the RB fun we'd had over the last year. The instruments and all that DLC probably add up to quite a scary figure... My £30 seems a small contribution.

Buy it. Today.