MJ's Blog

Blogger.com should really send out monthly emails to remind me to blog every so often because I really suck at remembering to actually put my thoughts down. So here we go with super quick summerising time:

Games:

Quantum of Solace - quick and simple. Kind of like a dumbed down Call of Duty 4 with meh graphics. Can’t really recommend at full price, so maybe best to rent or wait for some Credit Crunch style reductions. Either way it is better than the film.

Little Big Planet - bought it, put it in, played for about 2 hours and never picked up again. Doesn’t really have the WOW factor.

Mirrors Edge - nice. Very nice. Seems to be really short though - already more than half way through after a couple of hours. Some of the moves are quite tricky and the combat can really suck if there is more than one bad guy.

Far Cry 2 - addictive as hell and with a semi-respectable plot. Oh and the fire is really sexy in that it burns anything in its path. Multiplayer was a bit meh but has picked up as more people have put the game in their greasy hands.

Battlefield Bad Company - funny. The dialogue not the gameplay you understand. The weapons are bid and loud and the set pieces are fun if not a little repetitive. Never seems to end though - there is always one more mission. Multiplayer is respectable and lag free.

Films:

Quantum of Solace - oh dear. No plot and some non-stop camera flipping made it quite difficult to follow. Not as good as Casino Royale.

More next time kids. Remember to play safe now.

So the iPhone 3G has finally been released and 30 hours (give or take) after I picked mine up it has finally registered on the O2 network and I am good to go with all my mobile internets. Now even though I haven’t had 3G for the last 30 hours, I was able to unbrick the device via iTunes and have been playing around with it on Wifi.

A while ago I ventured into an Apple store to try out an iPod Touch but it isn’t a perfect experience, as you are having to use it in the store and without your email, contacts and calendar setup, so it isn’t an accurate test of the device. On that day I only really had a chance to test the iPod functionality and web browsing, which were both excellent but the device had been well used, so the screen was fairly irresponsive and the accelerometer was a bit off.

The experience itself has been incredibly simple. Like any iPod owner will know all you need to do to sync an Apple device is plug it in and let iTunes do all the hard work and thats exactly what happens with the iPhone 3G, which uses iTunes as its hub. Plug in the USB cable and iTunes springs to life and is ready to sync anything you need (e.g. musics, contacts, calendars, emails, applications etc) directly to the device. The process is incredibly simple and is made even simpler by some nice graphics that break down what is taking up all of the space on the iPhone.

With all the data uploaded it was time to test out some of the mobile applications. One of the first things to point out is that the iPhone will detect all available internet connections and use the quickest one, in my case that meant sizing up 3G and Wifi and realizing that Wifi was the way to go. All the standard applications are available; Mail for email, Safari for web browsing and the iPod software for listening back to some tunes, or watching some videos. The really impressive aspect of all of this is that they run just like they do on a Apple desktop or laptop. Obviously they are running at a smaller resolution and without a keyboard but they look identical, they run just as quick and the touch screen controls are so well designed and implemented that it shortly becomes second nature to pick up.

One of the key selling points for me was the MobileMe integration, which promises Exchange like push email, contacts and calendars for the iPhone. It is fairly simple to setup- just sync the mailbox details then browse to email settings and turn on push email, push contacts and push calendar and you have Exchange in your hand. Any changes that are made get sent back to “the cloud” and updated on your laptop and/or desktop and back to the web interface on me.com. Incredibly simple doesn’t do it justice.

I’ve yet to use my iPhone long enough to see how much of an issue battery is but it looks as though it does a good 5 hours of talk time, which should be plenty, assuming I’ve always got a charger to hand. I don’t intend to watch hours of video on the device, in fact the only videos on there at the moment are a couple of podcasts that only last for 10 minutes or so.

It’s finally happened. My box of toys (aka the XBOX 360) has given me the finger (read: Red Ring of Death) and is heading back to the mother ship to think things over and hopefully get a new heat sink and whatever else Microsoft think it may require. I suppose this is a good excuse to do something mildly useful with my life like reading more books or anything that doesn’t involve sitting in front of a screen.

UPDATE: I only called up MS on Saturday and UPS came and picked up my 360 today, which isn’t bad. The only problem is that it might take two weeks to fix it. *curses the heavens (and Microsoft)*

I knew it and so did you deep (oh so deep) down. Mac users are officially sexier than Windows users according to Adult toy seller Lovehoney, whose Google Analytics feed suggests that more Mac users use their site compared to Windows users. The Mac community spent longer on the site than Windows or Linux users but when it came to dropping some cash for some playthings the Linux community came in tops with an average spend of £48.55 compared to Mac users £40.38 and Windows users £34.59.

It appears that someone forgot to tell Microsoft that HD-DVD was more doomed than the next Sly Stallone remake because they just dropped the price to $129.99 stateside. As well the ultra cheap high def drive Microsoft will also chuck in five discs, which makes it a very nifty deal, assuming you only want to buy five high def discs until the next high def format (read: Blu-ray 2) drops. Amazon went temporarily crazy earlier and started selling the unit (*giggles*) with six discs for only 60 of your American dollars. Of course this reduction hasn’t made its way over to the old UK, so I will just keep on saving for that Blu-ray player (read: PS3). I’ve really got to see Superbad in high def.

In other slightly Microsoft related news Bioware dropped news of new downloadable content for Mass Effect, which will supposedly set us back 400MS points, last for around about 90 minutes and pleasure us with 50 more Gamescore. While this may sound like Pimms o’clock I would rather hand over 400MS points in exchange for a working Autosave system but that would be worth at least 1000MS points no doubt.