DaveMoran | The Blog

Back to normal

Dave — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 10:50:37 +0000

I’m back at work after two weeks off but had a good Christmas, it was Max’s first which made it very special.

What’s in store for 2009? Well at the moment time is taking up with looking after my family, watching Max reach his first birthday.

Of course there will be some time for gaming as well, I have a huge list of games to get through now including Fallout 3, Left 4 Dead, & Prince of Persia!

I hope to make some more improvements to the blog over the year as well, in fact I have already made one. I noticed on Los Havros’ blog that he was using a new comment plugin that look really good called Intense Debate. I have now installed that on this blog and I think it looks really good.

I’m off to write some reviews….

Happy Holidays!!

Dave — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 15:42:47 +0000

I thought I should quickly wish everyone who has read or commented on my blog a fantastic Christmas and New Year. I may write a post over the next week or so if I get a chance.

Currently I am up north so no gamng for me for a little while, but will try and grab some deals in the sales!

Enjoy your time off.

Emotion in games

Dave — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 07:46:48 +0000

I sat down last night to carry on the single player campaigin in Gears of war 2, Marcus and Dom had taken a detour on the way to find the locust stronghold to try and find Dom’s wife Maria.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to say anymore about what actually happens. BUT of you don’t want anything spoilt don’t read this until AFTER Act 3 on Gears 2!

But after the certain cut scene, I felt quite emotional about what had just happened, something that had never happened to me in my gaming life. I actually had a tear in my eye!

It got me thinking about how they had managed to get me so into the game, I’m pretty sure it was a mixture of music, atmosphere and some great voice acting and last night it was a lethal combination.

After thinking about it afterwards I couldn’t think of any other games that were really effective at bringing out the gamers emotions, but hopefully in 2009 there will be some games that do. Which games have grabbed your emotional side?

Fable II DLC Delayed

Dave — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 13:51:16 +0000

Lionhead has confirmed that the Fable II: Knothole Island downloadable expansion pack has been delayed until January 2009.

An announcement on Xbox.com yesterday said the pack had been pushed back from 22nd December until “late January”, which the developer confirmed this morning.

Xbox.com cited “unexpected technical difficulties”.

2008 Gaming Roundup

Dave — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 14:24:53 +0000

Can you believe we are already in December? It’s been a great year for games on the xBox 360, with some fantastic titles out, which I’ve been lucky enough to play most of.

I’ve narrowed down my review to 5 points and I’ve made my top 10 games I’ve played this year, they may not have been released in 2008 but I have only got round to playing this year…

1. Best/Favourite Game - Call of Duty 4

I couldn’t decide between Call of Duty 4, FIFA 09 or Gears of War 2, all are great games with good multiplayer (Epic have worked hard to address the early problems). But based on the amount of hours I have put into playing it Call of Duty will have to be the winner..

Runner Up - Gears 2 - Great game, can’t wait to get more into multiplayer…

2. Worst/Biggest Letdown - Assasins Creed

Some parts of this game were fantastic, the beautiful environemnt, the wonderful movement of your character, but so repetitive and eventually boring. I had to force myself to finish the main story, but I won’t bother going back to finish off the achievements.

Runner up - Fable 2 - It’s a brilliant game, but some of the bugs and the way Lionhead dealt with missing codes and messing up Pub Game pre-orders really annoyed me.

3. Surprising/Hidden Gem - Burnout Paradise

I’ve always loved the Burnout series, but randomly picked this up. As I expected, it is a great game and the opne world worked really well, but what suprised me was the support and extra content from Criterion,and it just keeps coming! It’s a real shame other games haven’t followed suit.

Runner Up - Fallout 3 - For some reason this didn’t pick up on my Gamedar despite loving oblivion, but what a fantastic game!

Honourable Mention - NXE - Well Done Microsoft

4. Best XBL Moment

I’ve had loads but mainly some great matches on COD 4, search and destroy is fanastic mode, and I may have to get back into it at some point…

5. Will 2009 Better 2008? - Yes

Two Words - Bioshock 2…

My Top 10 Games this Year Are:

10: Tiger Woods 09

9: Mass Effect

8: GTA IV

7: BF: Bad Company

6: Fable 2

5: Burnout Paradise

4: FIFA 09

3: Fallout 3

2: Gears of War 2

1: Call of Duty 4

What about everyone else? Feel free to post in the comments.

Nokia N96 review

Dave — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 12:04:35 +0000

Nokia N96

I had already written about not being able to decide what to do when it came to upgrading my phone. In the end I decided I would go for the Nokia N96 so I could get the BBC iPlayer.

On first impressions there isn’t too much of a difference from the Nokia N95, the keypad has been slightly improved as well as the buttons around the phone. It’s what inside the really counts….

The N96 has 16gb already inside plus a card slot that can push that figure up to 24gn. The software is still the slame and much like the N95 the firware is quite sluggish, though there is a new update that will help with that.

BBC iplayer for N96

It’s a shame they didn’t upgrade the camera, you still get 5mp but it’s still a good camera, the intergration with flickr is much better. The music player hasn’t changed much, but they have made a couple of improvements with gallery, like being able to tag (and Geotag) your pictures.

My favourite feature so far, has to be the new BBC iPlayer which allows you to stream shows over 3g much like the iPhone, but most importantly download shows to the phone over a wifi connections. Shows come in between 100-200mb so far which means a fair few shows to watch.

The phone also has the ability to allow you to watch Live TV but this doesn’t work in the UK which is a bit of shame.

Overall the phone is pretty good, not massively different from the N95.

Chelsea 1 - Arsenal 2

Dave — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 09:07:14 +0000

We’re not having the best of seasons, but this is our third fantastic win of the season.

First it was away at Fenerbache, then beat Utd at home, and now Chelsea away. Yes, Van Persie was offside for the first goal, but after the second 2 minutes later, Chelsea still had over half an hour and didn’t create a single chance. Scolari can sod off!

We back in the title race but I am not getting too excited as we are quite capable of throwing it all away again on Saturday against Wigan.

Arsenal name Fabregas as captain…

Dave — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 13:36:05 +0000

Arsenal have named Cesc Fabregas as their new captain, replacing defender William Gallas on a permanent basis.

Gallas, 31, was stripped of the captaincy for Saturday’s 3-0 defeat at Manchester City following controversial comments about his team-mates.

But Wenger revealed the Frenchman will play in the Champions League against Dynamo Kiev on Tuesday.

Wenger said: “Fabregas will be the captain, permanently. I do not have to explain to you why.

FFJ Wallpaper

Dave — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 11:33:11 +0000

FFJ / RCC gaming wallpaper

A lot of my online xBox time at the moment is with the gang from FFJ360.com, with the introduction of avatars we’ve all been creating ours and most of us have them now. I thought it would be cool to make a wallpaper with all of them on to download, and here it is!

To download it all you need to do is click on the picture then when it loads right click and save the image…

When the other create their avatars I will add them on too…

NXE

Dave — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 11:30:18 +0000

Tomorrow is the 19th and if you are an xBox fan you should know whats coming, if you don’t I will tell you. The New xBox Experience (NXE) should be hitting your box at some point tomorrow and there are going to be some great new features.

Now you can have avatars

First of all you now can have your own avatar, much like on the Nintendo Wii you can now have a visual representation of yourself that isn’t a gamer picture. A lot of people have said they don’t like this idea but I think it’s quite cool. Hopefully the developers will come up with achievement related clothing (like a special t-shirt for get “seriously”) but we will have to wait and see.

Possibly my favourite new feature will be installing games on to your hard drive. I’ve got a brand new elite so I have plenty of room to put games on. The games range form 4-6.8gb so I can easily get 15 games on my machine though I doubt I will put that many games on there. It will make everything much quieter and in some cases quicker. If you only have a 20gb hard drive you should check this out.

As I write this xbox.com is down for maintenance whilst they prepare for the NXE, but what do they have in store? Well, as the screenshot suggests you will now be able to purchase points and DLC plus grab hold of the latest demos. When you get back from the office turn your xBox and the downloads will start, sweet!

The marketplace on the xBox has also been improved as has the whole dashboard experience, based on reports from the lucky people who got on the preview, it’s meant to be a lot quicker though still not perfect.

I’m excited about tomorrow (I’ll have Gears 2 as well) but I wouldn’t be surprised if there are a lot of problems over the next week, but we’ll have to wait and see…