I have recently finished and thoroughly enjoyed playing Red Dead Redemption. It’s a massive game with a fantastically written storyline, gorgeous graphics and lots of wild west style phrases that make you feel like your 12 and watching Bonanza on a Saturday morning (I think their next move should be to make a pirate game so I can get a similar feeling but replacing Bonanza with The Crimson Pirate). It is fair to say I loved this game enormously, but it also irritated me and I shall tell you why.

Within the game there are many tasks to complete, some are integral to the story line and have to be completed in order to progress, others are there to either enhance the storyline or increase your skill or your characters wealth. One of the none essential areas of the game is outfits, throughout the game you can gain new outfits to wear rather than the default one you start the game with. Each outfit, is split into items to be obtained in different ways. Some are gained by completing missions, others by finding them around the game and some are bought from specific vendors, it could be quite complicated but the developers saw fit to give you a check list in the menu which includes instructions on how to obtain each piece so you know where you are with it. “Well that all sounds very straightforward and well thought out” I hear you say, and you’d be right, except I found a glitch.

It seems to be that Rockstar games hate me, I don’t know what I’ve done to upset them but whatever it was they are relentlessly unforgiving. In Grand Theft Auto IV I was unable to complete the game, the final mission never presented itself to me, you receive a phone call giving you details of the final mission but alas this phone call never happened. Some glitch occurred meaning I was left to drive around aimlessly waiting for the call and it never happened. I felt robbed, and stupidly I hadn’t employed the alternating two save games technique that everybody knows you should. I drove around for a solid two hours hoping the call would come through and even tried again months later just in case but it never happened. In Red Dead the glitch is slightly less frustrating, I have obtained an outfit item from a vendor but it has not been checked off on the list meaning I can’t get the achievement for unlocking all outfits (and yes I have tried dropping the item and repurchasing it, alas it did not work). While this is in no way detrimental to my game experience unlike the GTA IV glitch it’s frustrated me because I did intend to get that achievement, being unable to achieve something through lack of skill is one thing but being unable to even try is more so, in this case I feel it is anyway.

It could be worse, it could in fact be a hell of a lot worse but it just seems a shame that the shine has been taken off of these two great games for me.

Last night I had a shift working with a young Autistic boy in his home so that his parents could go out and spend some well deserved time together. It was a good shift we blew up balloons, bounced on a trampoline, shreded magazines and for a brief period got lumps kicked out of me. I set off to the young boys home with the address entered into maps on my iPhone and a podcast playing away. My iPhone was sat in my charging cradle/ FM transmitter effectively broadcasting the podcast to my car stereo and showing me the maps without me having to hold it, all is well.

As I got off the motorway to drive to the young boys house the signal died on my phone preventing the map from updating, this was really frustrating as I hadn’t needed them till this exact point. I knew the house was only about 2 miles away but 2 miles of housing estate is a lot of houses.

Driving around trying to get a signal and growing more and more frustrated I got annoyed by the usually entertaining podcast I was listening to. I pulled the mini jack that was sending the audio to my stereo from the top of my iPhone to silence it. Signal returned shortly after and I made it to the job on time, phew. Upon returning to my car to come home I wanted to finish listening to the podcast so I plugged in my cradle sat the iPhone on it but met some resistance when plugging in the mini jack. I tried again and felt less resistance and it went in. I set off driving but the sound quality was shocking, lots of static and the sound was real quiet I couldn’t make out what was being said. I pulled over to take a look and realised what had happened. I wanted to cry.

When I pulled the mini jack out in frustration while driving I must have done so at an angle and snapped off the end of the mini jack inside my phone. When I tried to put the mini jack back in the resistance I felt was the broken off end which I then proceeded to push right to the bottom of the headphone socket. I am planning on getting an iPhone 4 in a week or so meaning this won’t really affect me for to long, however I was planning on selling it and this will probably mean I can’t or have to take less for it as a result. I am not a happy bunny, at all!!!

How long have we been waiting for this exactly? It feels like forever. Rumours have been popping up and disappearing only to reemerge months later for years now. Apparently the iPhone was born out of tablet research and technology’s and now the iPhone and the iPod Touch get their big brother the iPad.

I have a very mixed range of emotions to it. It’s gorgeous, it’s sexy, like the iPhone it just works so simplistically while still being complex and most importantly of all i want one. However i also feel a little underwhelmed. Maybe it’s the mass of hype and build up to it that have made me feel this way or maybe it’s the fact that it is pretty much just a large iPod Touch. For me i would use it in place of my iphone while at home. It’d live under the sofa or the TV cabinet or similar and would be used mainly for the web over wifi so surfing, blogging, Twitter and probably games/apps to. I can’t see it going any further than the garden though and as a result I really don’t see the point in 3G versions.

I think the bigger news i think is the book store. It’s another business model for apple to rake it in from and the way it appears to work is very nice but again this is just a variant on the app store so is hardly groundbreaking.

I want to play with one and I’d love to own one but it seems a bit extravagant when the biggest impact it would have on my life is to preserve my iPhone battery a bit.

I will probably give it a miss and just wait for the next iPhone though

Update: Say I buy an iPad, I buy it to use on a commute. I get on the train, I sit at one of the highly coveted tables. 1 person at the other side of the table has a laptop/ netbook and is watching a movie, surfing the web, emailing or whatever. His laptop screen creates a natural barrier giving him a degree of privacy, a degree of privacy only achievable by me if I hold my iPad for the entire time. Not that great

Wii

Originally uploaded by corneiliuz

Well both Christmas and new year are over now and fairly soon everybody will settle back down into their lives and carry on as normal, apart from me and my family that is.

Christmas was great, we ate good food, we spent time with friends and family and my gorgeous amazing partner bought me a Nintendo Wii under the thinly guised veil that it be a family present (course it is). But the whole period has been overshadowed by the impending birth of our son, he’s still not here and waiting is getting frustrating especially through a period where so much is going on. I can’t wait for him to get here so I can see him, I just wish he’d shift his arse.

So now we know our son will be born in 2010 and it all sounds a bit Sci Fi, surely we should all have hover cars or be slaves to the robots or something by now? But people will settle in and crack on, but this year is HUGE for my little family and here’s a list of reasons why starting with:

our son will be born
I will (hopefully) graduate Uni
i will start my career
we are potentially moving house
Ruby is starting Nursery
I’ve promised Jen I will propose at some point in the next 365 days

so in the words of Montel Vontavious Porter “Big things popping, little things stopping”

have a great 2010 people looks I sure will

Yesterday was our little girls 3rd birthday. A fabulous occasion which everybody enjoyed thoroughly especially her. Some family members came round for present unwrapping and party food etc. It was all going nicely until i had a brain wave. “hey” i thought to myself “I’m on the XBOX 360 preview program, why don’t i take advantage of that by putting Last.fm on for some background music”.

This idea it appears was only great in theory, it appears my previous experience of Last.fm was no indicator of all of it’s content. I had only previously listened to things like Foo Fighters, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden etc but was aware that more family friendly music was available. I switched my XBOX on, moved through the menu’s to Last.fm and selected a station appropriate to our daughters musical taste being Lady GaGa. The musical offering was as you can imagine, Lady GaGa, Katy Perry, Jessica Simpson, Britney Spears, Pussycat Dolls and weirdly Heidi Montag. Pop music basically. Last.fm on your XBOX displays a slide show of photo’s of the artist while their song is playing, it appears at this point it should perhaps change it’s name to Lust.fm. The ensuing photostream of pictures could have been likened to softcore porn which is something i normally would not have complained about (other than the god awful sight above), but seeing as the music was mainstream pop listened to mainly by young people and the XBOX does try to market itself as a family console i thought it was pretty inappropriate.

Scared I’m sounding like an old fuddy duddy right now but i don’t think anyone would knowingly put the above picture and many like it on the telly knowing that their 3 year old was in the room. I am certain as well that there are far more “family friendly” pics of these artists available for use.

Update: I sent a link to my blog to Last.fm through twitter about this, they responded saying it was an issue they were working with Microsoft on. They also sent me this link to a post made by Major Nelson on his blog. It refers to the new features like Last.fm etc not being available to under 18′s right away as they are working on parental control’s for these features, this is of course is great news especially in light of the things i was saying about family orientation.

It would appear though that my issue would be unresolvable. My 3 year old does not have her own XBOX LIVE account where i can set parental controls to protect her from adult materials for obvious reasons, she’s 3. Therefore as with any other adult themed materials for the XBOX it would be up to me to not access those materials in front of my daughter, and that’s fine. I would never play any games in front of her that involved blood and gore or sexual themes, but the issue is that i was trying to listen to music, music which as far as i am aware does not require pictures of the artist in scantily clad attire or in some cases completely nude with limbs obscuring breasts. So my only answer is to not use a service I’d like to take advantage of, shame really.

Elite

Originally uploaded by corneiliuz

Look at it, all black and sexy. Last night at around 20.45 i was stood in Sainsburys buying an XBOX 360 ELITE much to the annoyance of the shoppers behind me who had to wait while somebody brought me it. Unfortunately for now it’s only got my 20GB HD from my original XBOX 360 in it due to the whole RRoD issue. Plus i need to get hold of a Data transfer kit in order to get my save games and DLC off the old drive. But that is not important, what is important is:

A/ I have a working XBOX

and

B/ I HAVE A WORKING XBOX

Listening to the Tech weekly podcast from the Guardian earlier this week they had a segment on a BBC4 TV show that starts on the 29th of September called Electric Dreams. The premise for the show sounds really interesting, they take a family and put them in a house completely decked out (as far as technology is concerned) as if it were 1970.

This means no internet, no colour TV and not even a freezer. Then everyday they advance the technology in the house by one year. I think it will be really interesting to see how the children in the family react to the lack of tech. To them cable/ satelite TV, games consoles and the Internet are common place everyday items that have pretty much always been there. I also love the attention to detail the single black and white TV in the house will only show TV shows from the year they are in ie 1970, when they get the internet in the day representing 1997 it will be the internet as it was in 1997 which i think will definately be worth watching the kids reactions to that.

30 years of tech from 1970 to 2000 in 30 days, talk about a rollercoaster.

Posterous looks pretty cool, yet another addition to the mini/micro blogging select in crowd. I like the way it works (emailing links, pics and videos to your account) as it is nice and straightforward. I’m also a fan of the way it compliments instead of try’s to be the next big thing (you can set it to auto post to other services ie. FaceBook and twitter) everything linking back to your posterous account. In this way it serves as a hub for your other services and hosts your images mp3′s etc in one place.

Other services can also post to your posterous which then auto posts to all your others, say for example audioboo. It brings together several audiences by linking them all together. I do like it although i found it hard to get to grips with. For example wordpress can be linked. This is all well and good but i already have a widget that auto posts blog links to twitter. The result of this was i had two tweets referring back to what was essentially the same blog post in two places. This required tweaking and ultimately not really being able to do what i would have liked it too. Another gripe i have is that when emailing  web content links to your account it only ever (for me and please tell me if i’m doing something wrong) is it will only post a link to the site in question instead of the content. If however you use the web bookmarklet it posts the web content with a little acknowledgement link to the original content on it’s site. This i feel is a nice feature but does not appear to be something i can do on the fly from my iphone (again please tell me if I’m doing something wrong).

All in all i think Posterous could become a very big part of my online life with it’s way of alerting all (or most) of my communities to whatever arbitrary uninteresting thing i feel the need to tell the universe I’m doing on a daily a basis in the vein hope that somebody will find it vaguely interesting.

Oh dear, the new World of Warcraft expansion has just been announced. I love WoW i really do, it’s totally immersive and back in the day i used to lose days in it, quite literally. These days however i really don’t get time to play. WoW is not a casual game, at the moment i only really seem to have time for a game i can quickly load up on the XBOX and play for as little as 15 minutes sometimes. Sometimes it’s even more casual and i just load up Peggle on my iPhone. I really would like to get back into WoW but the fact of the matter is if i want to follow other pursuits in life (which i do) i just really do not have the time.

All this being said, i’ll probably buy it and i’ll probably have a good crack at it, well you got to aint ya.

WoW Cataclysm Homepage with Trailer

WpTouch

Originally uploaded by corneiliuz

Just added wpTouch to my blog and I think it looks really cool. It optimises your blog for viewing on touch enabled mobile devices like the iPod touch, iPhone and also devices running the Android OS. I’ve seen this format on other peoples blogs but only discovered I could add it to mine this morning and am very happy with it so far.