Hulk Vs Wolverine/Thor

I am a sucker for the odd anime/cartoon film, and as I have a young son I get to use him as an excuse to watch cartoons and anime whenever I want. So when I got the chance to watch the new Hulk Vs DVD earlier today with him I jumped at the chance.

I don't mind the Hulk but he has never been one of my real favourite characters of the Marvel Universe. Don't get me wrong I have nothing against the big green/grey/red guy but I always preferred watching the Spider-man cartoons over the Hulk. Then when it came to reading material I would pick the Silver Surfer and Thor over and other comic.

We decided that we would watch the Hulk Vs Thor cartoon first of all, and I have to say I was a bit disappointed in it overall. The story is ok at best but just felt really underwhelming over all. What could have been a great story of two of Marvels strongest characters just felt like a let down, with a bit of a crap story. It does entertain in parts, but it isn't something that I would recommend to watch unless the alternative is an episode of American Idol or Big Brother. (It really is quite a big let down)

How great it is that Hulk Vs Wolverine is a polar opposite to Hulk Vs Thor. It has a pretty cool story which will keep you entertained, and also has a few surprise guests appearing that are a major part of the storyline. The story also covers some of the origins of one of the titular characters. The real star of the show for me has to be neither the Hulk or Wolverine though, it is someone else that I felt stole the show with some funny one liners and light hearted moments.

I would have to say the Wolverine story is a lot more graphic than the child friendly Thor one, but that should really come of no surprise as Wolverine has claws after all. The big question is though is the DVD worth buying when each story only lasts 45minutes or so? I would have to say no unless the price is right, so if your going to pick it up get it while it is on sale, if not rent it or talk a buddy into buying it and steal it from them.

Conquest Online = Epic Fail

Lord of the Rings Conquest is a game I enjoyed playing, or should I say I enjoyed playing upto a point, That point being when I jumped online to play a few games. The story mode is pretty good overall and plays quite similar to the Star Wars Battlefront series, as you strive to take over all of the bases and defeat the bosses such as the Balrog or Elrond.

There are four different units to play as in the game as you go about the task at hand, such as the warrior who as you would expect just hacks and slashes his way through the enemy horde, with his special attack setting his sword on fire to do more damage. The Warrior can take a fair bit of damage and is one of the strongest characters in the game.


You can also play as the Archer, a character that has a few different arrows such as a poison arrow and a flame arrow, with the best special move being his triple shot. As you would expect the archer is a ranged fighter that isn't great at close combat.

Then we have the Scout, the scout is one sneaky bastard with the ability to turn invisible and sneak behind foes before killing them with one strike. The Scout is probably one of the characters I enjoyed playing as the most with the Archer.

Finally the last standard unit is the Mage, the mage can drop a fireball which kills enemies as they walk over it as well as having the ability to heal himself and other units. It is a shame that he is weak as shit and dies in 2 hits otherwise I probably would have used the character a lot more.
Joining the 4 standard units we have the Heroes and Villans that the Lord of the Rings universe is known for, such as the biggest bad ass of them all the Balrog. Most of these are just more powerful versions of the standard units, some are fun to play as while others are just a pain in the ass.

As I said the game is pretty short in all with about 6 or 7 missions to each campaign. So what is left to do after the single player? Online multiplayer of course and this is where the game starts to become a let down. Units seem to be unfairly balanced in the online mode, with some characters being a joke. After you get so many points in a game online you get asked if you want to become a hero. So you pick yes only to be let down when you find out you have ended up as Gimli. Gimli is probably the worst character to play as online, he just seems really weak and you get pissed off as your charcter does no damage at all.


There is no party system as such so you have to invite your friends into each game, and you can't pick to play on any level as the servers have the maps on an endless loop. So the only way to skip the map that your thought was a bag of cack is to quit out and join a new game.

Online the game is crap and it could have been fantastic if only they made some changes such as....

• A party system that works
  
• The ability to make sure your friends end up on your side
• Balanced units making the game fun
• Being able to vote to skip maps
• Gimli being removed from the game for being fucking useless

With just these few things being fixed the game could go from being a lame piece of cack nobody will be playing online in 2 weeks time, to being a real contender for peoples attention and an alternative to the usual crap like Gears 2 and World At War.

Ah well hopefully we will see that Star Wars: Battlefront 3 game get a release on the 360 sometime soon, one thing is for sure I won't be playing this game until it arrives.

Shitty Game Design

You know what really bugs me about gaming? Shitty game design, we all experience and suffer because of these design flaws. Some are a lot worse than others though and can make you just want to pick up your controller and throw it at the nearest wall. Now not a lot of things in games get me really angry, annoyed yes but angry no.

Talking about annoying things let's discuss invisible walls, Why the heck do we need these nowadays just throw up some brick wall or a bottomless pit or something. It just makes it seem retarded that you can walk up to a certain point and see a vast open space in front of you, Yet you can't walk past a certain point for no apparent reason at all.

One thing that also annoys me that is invisible wall related is items that get dropped just outside of your reach after killing an enemy. You know these item's that you really want as they could be really useful in the game, but you can't pick them up due to the retarded invisible wall. It is like the game designers are just doing it to piss me off.


Take Ninety Nine Nights where they take it to an even greater level, where they incorporate with the Trolls in the game. Upon killing a Troll power ups appear on top of the dead troll. You can't walk through the dead body or jump over to get it, so you have to wait until the body vanishes to grab it. This wouldn't be a problem if the power ups didn't vanish at the same time as the body. As a result this makes the whole power up and item drops for killing a troll redundant.

Also what is with the locked doors in games, if I have a grenade, crowbar or axe I should not have to go and find a red key or blue key to open a wooden door. Heck I don't need those to open a door in real life as my foot can open most doors with a kick in the right spot. So why do I need to find a key in a game as the heroic character when he/she surely has all the tools at their disposal to open a door with ease. If I was playing as George Bush then fair enough, although he probably would end up being locked out and the game would end.


Staying on the subject of doors this is something that annoys me a lot, and probably you as well. There is nothing worse than pressing up on the analog stick to walk through a door, only to end up coming back out of the same door and back into the area you were just in, as the camera angle switches when you reach the other side. How the hell can a solution not be found for this in games, it really is dumb. I don't walk through a door in my house only to find myself back outside the door 2 seconds later as I forgot to stop walking forwards. So why the heck do I have to stop walking forward in a game once I have gone through a door? The answer is because of shitty game design by thick as shit lazy ass coders.

What really annoys me though, in fact it downright pisses me off is games like Call of Duty: World At War. While playing on Veteran you expect the game to be a challenge by making the Nazi's harder to kill, maybe more enemies and the ability to kill you in one or maybe two shots. What you don't expect is the Nazi's to have some superhuman ability to carry fifty thousand grenade's each and throw them at your character with precision aim every millisecond. This leads to the game not being a challenge but being about luck. At one point I was hitting the button to throw the grenades back, and unfortunately the 9th one killed me.


We all love a good challenge in a game, what we don't like however is something retarded that ends up killing us through no fault of our own. We can all live with the fact that we fucked up in a game and died because it was our fault for rushing out or doing something dumb, but when it's something out of our control it really pisses me off.

We live in an age where games are supposedly getting better all the time with realistic looking graphics, amazing physics and all other bullshit. It is a shame that so much is being done to improve these area's yet nothing is done to improve the things that annoy us. With a few changes an average game can become a good game, or at least make it so you want to play it for a bit longer.

Maybe I am just getting fussy about what I expect to see in a game, but at £40 - £50 a game I think I am entitled to an opinion at least. Screw invisible barriers, dumb AI team mates or opponents and all the other crap that pisses me off as I play. Game companies need to ask us gamers what annoys us in games, then listen to us and fix a few of the realistic annoyances we have with the games they make, maybe then gamers won't be such miserable bastards that complain all the time about what is wrong with games.

Man Flu

So I currently have a really bad illness known as Man Flu, as all males will know this is a deadly virus that can lead to death. I really have it pretty bad as I sit feeling sorry for myself while trying to get random females walking past my house to feel sorry for me, and dress in a nurses outfit and take care of me until I am better.


Apparently very few women like being screamed at in the street, yet they moan when they don't get any attention at all. Women are complex beings where answering their questions normally leads you into a whole host of problems, and not answering is just equally as bad as they say you don't care. The thing is they are right, we don't care what dress you wear as long as we can get to the restaurant on time so we can eat. Instead of waiting 5 hours for you to decide what to wear only for you to say "forget it I am not going now as I have no decent clothes". Something we all know is a lie as you spent £200 on clothes just days before. Another thing we will never answer is the fat question, we tell the truth and you go mad, if we say no you won't believe us anyway and say we don't care. Please stop asking us stupid questions that are impossible to answer without getting ourselves into trouble.

So yeah as I was saying I currently have Man Flu, normally I would ring in work sick and play video games all day with the central heating on full. Unfortunately I have started a new job so I had to go in and work, as a result I feel worse now than I did this morning, and really haven't been in the mood to play any games at all. So I have spent the evening watching TV and shouting at women passing by until the police asked me to stop doing it.


For any females reading this unsure what Man Flu is, or how deadly a disease it is to us males. It is comparable to the trauma you ladies suffer when you see a pair of shoes you want, only to find out that they don't have them in your size. So please if you see a male with Man Flu please treat him with the dignity he deserves, and refrain from saying "Grow up and stop feeling sorry for yourself, it's only a cold".

Why Won't You Pause? Dammit

You know what really annoys me, when your playing a game and have to go answer the door. You think "I will just pause this cut scene while I see who it is", only to find out that the game won't pause or the cut scene skips. This is something that happens pretty often to me, it seems as though everyone waits just until the cut scene starts before deciding to call and ask if I want new windows or with some retarded questionnaire that I don't want to answer. Heck even the pizza guy gets in on the act and chooses the exact moment to deliver my food, not 10 minutes before when I was wandering aimlessly across some field fighting some generic monsters, or shooting some terrorist scum in the head just so I could reach the next part in the story.



With the 360 on the odd occasion there is a way around this with a couple of games, such as pressing your guide button to freeze the cut scene up until you are ready to watch it. This doesn't always work though as sometimes the action will just carry on regardless. I like RPG's and one of the main element's of a good RPG is the story, in fact it is probably what helps make or break an RPG and forms many people's opinion of the game.

Games like Lost Odyssey, Final Fantasy X, Metal Gear Solid 4 and quite a few others let you pause cut scenes and it sound's like nothing, but it really is great that you can do something so simple in these games. If anything it has helped people enjoy the games a lot more as they know what is happening in the plot lines. (Except for MGS 4, nobody knows what Kojima is on about)


It is just a shame that so many games are ruined like this for me and quite a few other people at a guess. This could be simply solved with a few easy steps such as........

• Placing a large man-eating lion outside your front door, which really would be a good idea except for the cost of keeping a lion, and the inability to leave your house for fear of being eaten.
• An intercom system set up so people can buzz you from the front door and say what they want, enabling you to tell them to sod off without having to answer the door.
• Employing a butler, this would be a great idea but would leave you even less money to buy games. Plus if there was a murder committed everyone would accuse them of doing it, resulting in the press camping outside your house and banging on your door that the butler will no longer answer.
• A replay option that is available in the menu to replay the last cut scene, enabling you to answer the door and watch it when you get back.
• Finally how about just giving us gamers the option to actually pause a cut scene, other games let us do this. It wouldn't be to hard to implement into a game and would make for a better experience for gamers.

Will some game developers actually ever listen to their audience and add features like this to their games, or will myself and many others never be able to find out an important part of the plot, while that asshole came to the door asking if we have thought about changing our gas suppliers.

My Love/Hate Affair With My Nintendo DS

I have a DS, more than likely you also have a DS as well, with around 10 or so games probably. That seems to be the average amount of games a casual DS player owns, and in this selection of games most people will have about 2 that they actually play, and 8 others they bought as A) They thought they may enjoy them and didn't or B) They were on sale or recieved them as a gift.

It got me thinking though, out of my DS games I play only a few and I only picked up and dusted my DS for the simple reason that I got an R4 card so I can play emulators on it. Something I still am yet to do, the R4 card sits among the pile of junk on my desk yet to be opened. (My desk is a complete mess with takeaway menus, scraps of paper, CD's and other crap piled on top of each other for sorting out. Something I have been sorting out for about 6 months, and it keeps growing with new things getting balanced on the mountain of shit that needs throwing out)


So as I was saying, I am now playing my DS again Nintendo's little portable machine that can be enjoyed everywhere. Everywhere that is if you don't live in a place full of scum that wouldn't think of smashing you round the head to steal anything shiny, heck even for 2 lousy pounds. (My town just seems to be getting worse all the time, and as it's the largest town in Europe that is a lot of junkie scum in one place)

Maybe you think I am being over cautious but with the local newspaper not even covering stabbings that happen in the town anymore you can see something isn't right. Heck two people got robbed and stabbed only the other week 500 yards away from my house, and about a month or so ago someone broke into a 70+ year old womans home just down the road from me and raped then robbed her. (Come to Bolton the smack capital of the UK) So as a result I am limited to where I can play Nintendo's delightful little machine.


So I am left with very few choices of where to actually play my DS, like in my garden when the sun is shining and it's not raining (That's about 4 weeks a year) or somewhere in my house, and we all know where that is 90%. (Toilet gaming is indeed FTMFW!) I have this wonderful little machine that makes me able to play games anywhere as long as it is charged up, But why would I spend my time looking at a little screen when I can play games on various systems on a 42inch Hi-Def TV. I love my DS its great and lot's of fun, at the same time I hate it for never actually using it as Nintendo want me to use it. Let's all play games using Wi-Fi while sat on the bus, or while your sat in McDonald's eating your extra large fat burger and fries with a diet coke. (Why the fuck does it never look like on the picture on display? I want that burger not the shitty excuse for a burger that I get. You know the one that looks like it has been taken out of the trash)


I know this isn't Nintendo's fault, it's mine for living in a junkie filled town full of scum. The thing is I really want to use my DS a lot more, I just can't seem to bring myself to play it anywhere other than on the toilet these days. The fact that is my only use for the system just fills me full of regret, and a little sad that I live in a place that isn't part of Nintendo's perfect world. As a result I hate my DS for making me feel this way, just as much as I hate the junkie's and scum that seem to be breeding like rabbits and dragging us back down the evolutionary scale.

Second Day At Work

Well I started a new job yesterday, so today was my second day at work. I have to say it's pretty cool, with my first day being pretty easy. While the office is pretty busy I just got asked to do something then left alone until I had finished, no asking if I was nearly done or any pressure at all. As far as first days go it wsa pretty sweet, especially when I found out we don't have filters on the computers, so I can browse what I want to and search for things on the net (Cat Porn) when I am waiting for my next job. I wasn't even looking at the clock to see when it was home time, as a result I ended up staying an extra 20 minutes until I got asked why i hadn't gone home yet.


So with my first day done and left feeling happy at what a cushy job I had the day before, I went to work for my second day. It turns out that word has got around that I can help out with other bits and bats on the pc, so I am now getting asked to do other stuff like spreadsheets, registers and reproducing booklets that they have lost the computer file for. This is all after what I know I have to do in the mornings like making sure all the work placements have turned up and marking them off on the register before phoning through to another department to tell them who isn't in.

The sad thing about it all is it's great, as every little job I am asked to do only takes me a short amount of time. Since half the people aren't really great with computers they think everything is a big job, when really half the time it's pretty simple. As a result I get to say sure I will have it all done in about an hour, then just get it all done in 10 minutes or so and do something else. (Taking my DS in to pass the time on Friday to save sitting there all the time)


Since I have shown an ability to work with a few different things on the computer, my name has been put forward to go and help out with the learn direct group in the other building. If I can get on there helping out from time to time, it would be great for my resume. I may not know a lot of things, but I know a few bits of things here and there so I should be able to bullshit my way through it. I think it is just mainly working with beginners though teaching them how to use Microsoft Office and Excel. (I have used Excel for 2 days and it seems piss easy)

The only bad things are I keep getting told to take a break, even though I am already doing sod all and trying to browse the net in peace. There is only three women I would sleep with that work in the offices where I am, and last of all there is no decent graphic software for editing so everything looks crap. Which ended up with me uploading an image to my photobucket so I could fix it at home for a project I have been working on today


September 2007 to December 2008 life pretty much sucked balls for me, thank fuck 2009 seems to be better. I know this entry was pretty shitty but meh, expect me to get back to moaning how the women in the office refuse to sleep with me, or posting something game related soon. Heck I might even throw up a picture of me looking like a spaz at work.