With Shattered Horizon, they have eventually done just that. What caught my eye with this was the price bracket, as I’d previously bought a Futuremark product I was able to pre-order this game directly from them for 25% off. What a great idea, rewarding customer loyalty with real world perks. If only other game publishers would adopt this strategy. So, with my discount I got the game for a mere ~€12. This price initially had me worried that I will be screwed by pay-for DLC. They are currently promising dedicated servers and free DLC but only time will tell I guess.

In game though, it loads super fast and the menu is minimal to say the least with only really 3 areas: Play, Options and Ranking, the last one I will have little interest in. So, like usual, I configure my controls and the first thing I notice is that the controls are also super minimal. You only have 1 weapon so of course you can’t pick any others, but still, I was surprised how quickly I had my controls set up (I’m a lefty so unlike you righties I can’t just jump into the game right away). After this, I configured my graphical settings and set everything to max to see if my PC could handle it. I’m using a 4870×2 and a fairly beefy PC so it should. It runs the hog Crysis fine.

After confirming my graphical settings I then noticed something else that I found odd. This companies bread and butter is benchmarks, yet there isn’t any benchmark in game to see if my PC can handle the graphical settings. There isn’t even a SP player mode so you have to jump right into a game and hope that you PC won’t start displaying a sideshow while you’re being shot at. Admittedly I haven’t really looked into the LAN options yet to see if I could host an offline game, which probably would be a better option.

Soooo…. finally, the game. I, pensively, like it. It’s different. Graphically it feels crisp and clean, what you’d expect from the sterile environment of space. It reminded me of Mirrors Edge tbh, with clean lines, blinding light from the Sun and solid blocks of colour on the space platforms and structures. The detailing is minimal though. The surface of the asteroids have fairly low resolution textures as far as I could see and there was minimal bump mapping on them. Overall it looks nice and runs well but it’s not groundbreaking in anyway. Given that it’s space it’s true to form, but even being able to enter a space station and move through a hydroponics bay for a brief bit of greenery would of been nice.

For audio, there is 2 modes you can toggle, Silent running and Sound Simulation. The Sound Simulation is the default setting. It basically is the games way of making up for the fact that sound doesn’t travel all that well in space, so playing a game where people can attack you from 360 degrees of angles in 3 dimensions and not being able to instantly hear where the bullets are coming from would of been a huge drawback and more of a gaming frustration than anything. Kindly, for space purists, there is another mode that you can enable, which makes the experience of floating through the void seem a little bit more authentic.

In this mode you mainly hear the noise of yourself breathing inside the suit and the muted sounds of your gun firing. At first I thought this mode was mainly just for a personal preference but I soon realized that it’s some form of stealth mode to move undetected. It disables the lights on your gun (which tell you which grenade is selected and how much ammo is in your clip) the booster on your backpack (leaving you with basic thrusters) and the majority of your HUD. I’ve yet to find a use for it in game, but I gather it must be so that you, when moving or trying to flank, don’t show up as a red blip on your enemies HUD.

For gameplay, it feels basic. The idea is simple, float around, get to locations, take out the enemy. You can stick to surfaces but your movement is so impaired that you largely are just making yourself a sitting duck. But then when in space you are wide out in the open and inertia plays such a big part of getting around that if you are getting shot at the chances are you will die (more so if your back is turned to the enemy as your thruster pack can be shot and explode). The booster pack is really your best friend as it can quickly make you change direction and get you to cover (which is why running in Stealth mode with it disabled is such a drawback). On top of your 1 machine gun, you have 3 grenade types. EMP (disables the enemies suit), an explosive one which basically pushes enemies out from behind cover and, my favourite, Ice. Ice basically creates a smoke screen to block the enemies line of sight. It saved me more than a few times when I was defenceless floating in the void of space.

Anyway, I only managed to get about an hour of gaming in with it. I’ll post back here with an update once I’ve some more time getting used to it and learning the levels and modes.

Update: Recorded a video yesterday to showcase the levels in Shattered Horizon.

The shows main cast are made up of Jason Schwartzman, Ted Danson and Zach Galifianakis (love this guy, if you haven’t, watch his “Between Two Ferns” series). The plot centres mainly around Schwartzmans character Jonathan Ames who is a struggling writer who moonlights as a pretend private detective. Overall though, the plot is of little relevance, the main meat of this show comes from the solid writing and acting between the characters. It’s quick paced, witty and, perhaps not hilariously funny, but it will definitely keep a smile on your face for the entirety.

The pilot wasn’t the strongest if I’m being honest, not compared to “Modern Family”’s pilot which instantly pulled me in and had me laughing out loud. The show has been slowly improving in quality though over the past weeks, with each new episode adding layers to the characters, and getting the viewer accustomed to the quirky sense of humour it portrays. Even the writers don’t seem sure on how to define it, so they’re describing it as a “Noir-otic Comedy”, which I tend to agree with.

Overall this gets my stamp of approval as a one to watch, and it’s also been renewed for a second season by HBO. So check it out.

For my previous posts in this series, see this link:

15 Addictive Online Games

I actually have accumulated WAY more than 15 good flash games, but I’ll pick the cream of the crop for this post.

Robokill: Man I blew so much time on this game. I actually played it with a 360 controller using xpadder to map the controls to the keys used in the game. There are loads of weapons and levels in the free version, but if you want to play more you’ll have to pay for level 5 onwards. The screenshot doesn’t do it justice, this really is a great browser game.

Frantic 2: In my original 15 games post, I recommended the original Frantic flash game. They’ve now released its sequel. It’s pretty much been improved in nearly every way.

Ice Breaker: Really, really good game. I’ve seen this type of game before, but never produced with such a high quality. I have a soft spot for good pixel art, which this game has. It also has excellent music. The gameplay requires you to make cuts in the ice to free the trapped Vikings and get them back to their ship. Easy at first, but you will scratch your head in some of the later levels.

Okami Flash Game: Just keep getting the items to progress. The more items you get in a row the greater the multiplier. Simple enough graphics but effective.

Don’t Look Back: Very simple and old-school looking game but damn is it good. This one pretty much distracted the entire office where I work for about half an hour until we’d all completed it. It isn’t that difficult, but some of the puzzles will have you scratching your head in confusion.

Retroshoot: Very addictive game. It’s a throw back to the old arcade side/up scrolling shmups. On a few gos, I managed to get to lvl 11 before having to use a continue.

Koi2: Words can’t describe this game. I’ve played it quite a few times and I still can’t work out “why?”. I think the aim of the game is to shoot your hand at the woman on the other side of the table and poke her in the eye… just play it and see for yourself.

Domo-kun’s Angry Smashfest!: Domo-kun and the powerpuff girls. KEELLL THEM!!! I love the artwork in this. If this game had been released on the Genesis when I was a kid I would of bought (and probably paid £60 for it also, man how things have changed)

Amberial: Get a bouncing ball to the finish line. A lot more difficult than it sounds.

Giraffe Attack: Short but hilarious game. A basic upscrolling shmup. Music and graphics are excellent.

Canabalt: Great game, and what’s even better about is that the level is randomly generated so no 2 games of it will be the same. Just keep running to the right, the more you survive without hitting anything the faster you’ll go.

Cat Cat Watermelon: Simple (to begin with) physics based game. Just stack the cats and watermelons (as well as some other objects). The music is also retro-awesome.

SAS Zombie Assault 2: Similar to Left4KDead, it’s a top down shooter. Hold the house and fend off the incoming Zombie horde.

The Unfair Platformer: This game wants you to lose. It’s really a trial of attrition, how much failure can you handle before you quit, lol

Queens: I love the simple Pixel Art in this. Like the previous game this ones aim is to make you lose. You’ll pass it by correctly remembering the areas and timing your jumps.

Anyway, to cut a long story short it snowballed. I started looking around and none of the devices had the battery life I was after, so I looked into portable DVD players but eventually I settled on getting a netbook. Sure I could of gone with the iPhone of the netbook world, the Samsung NC10, but I wanted to try something different, and liked the battery positioning on the Dell Mini 10 series. Along with it I also bought a spare 6  cell battery which will hopefully, with its stock 6 cell battery, give me 16 hours of power. Plus this way I got to kill 2 birds with one stone, the better half also needs a laptop, so, outside of travelling, this will be hers.

After weighing up whether I wanted the higher resolution screen of the Mini 10 or the better graphics card of the Mini 10v (why make us choose Dell?) I went with the extra grunt of the 10v (check out the gallery below), and about a week later I received it in the post. To save an extra €50 I bought the ubuntu version as well. I’d like to say I’m switching to linux and ubuntu but I work with linux enough in work that in the evenings and on a plane I like the ease of use of Windows. So I have a spare XP license lying around that isn’t being used since I moved over to Vista so I thought I’d install it onto the netbook.

Thing is, there are no CD drives on netbooks. I could of bought an external drive but that would be negating the money saved on getting it with ubuntu so I resolved to learn how to install it from a USB flash stick.

If you search yourself, you will probably come across this tutorial. Ignore it, it is outdated, takes longer and I ran into multiple problems using it. I’m sure it worked fine 2 years ago but a better utility has been released since. Funnily enough it took me a lot more digging to find it though. Hopefully you’ll have found this post, or the utility before trying out the old method first.

Here is where you can download the program:

EeeUser.com: WinSetupFromUSB

Here is a FAQ if you run into any issues:

Installing XP from USB FAQ

… and here is a brief guide I found for using it. It really is simple compared to the other method.

1. Get the program (linked above) and install it
2. Copy your XP source to hard disk if it’s not there
3. Run the program and select the XP source
4. Choose your USB disk. Click on HP Format tool and format it FAT16 if USB disk is less than 2GB and FAT32 if it’s more than 2GB.
5. Click GO and wait until it’s finished. If you want USB letter to be U: answer YES when it asks you.
6. Boot Eeepc off USB tapping ESC key during boot. Choose Windows 2000/2003/XP setup.
7. Choose First part (Text mode)
8. When in Text mode setup, delete ALL partitions on the hard disk and install. I am assuming you are installing to the first partition if you are going to create more than one partition. If not- use “BOOT.INI adjustments” in the program and change values accordingly. There are tooltips on each element of the interface, just hold the mouse over it.
9. Upon reboot boot again from USB and select Second part (GUI mode) and continue installation
10. Upon reboot boot ONCE AGAIN from USB and choose Second part + Start for first time
11. When windows is fully loaded give it a few minutes before unplugging the USB disk.

I’ve highlighted 2 important steps in the process that I initially overlooked. If you are familiar with the installation of XP, you’ll know that after it finishes copying over the files, it reboots and then you can let it boot from the HDD. You can’t do this when installing XP using this method, you have to boot from the USB stick a second time, and then a final third time to get into Windows.

I don’t know if it was something I did wrong during the setup, but I found after finally booting into Windows XP for the third time that I couldn’t boot into Windows without first booting from the USB stick. If you experience this issue here is how I resolved it.

Navigate to the root of your C: drive and set it so that you can see hidden files, open the “boot.ini” in a text editor:

Here is what the unaltered contents of mine looked like:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS=”Microsoft Windows XP Professional” /fastdetect

I changed it to this:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS=”Microsoft Windows XP Professional” /fastdetect

I then saved it and restarted and it worked.

I’ve been using it for a couple of months now without issue. Truth be known it’s mostly being used by my other half but I get the odd bit of use out of it on flights and on holiday for watching TV shows (it handles 720p mkv’s fine) More recently, on a trip to Scotland, it came in very handy for getting an instant copy of the photos one of our kayaking instructors had taken during the day by using the SD card reader built into the netbook.

If you are thinking about getting a netbook I highly recommend this one.

So here I am, playing the game. Like always, this review will contain updates as I play:

Update 1 – 28/09/09: Oh its Valkyria not Valkyrie

A problem that is becoming all too frequent with PS3 games is trying to get into the actual game for the first time. I put in the bluray, start it up and immediately I’m prompted to install an update. 5 minutes later the game loads. I know it’s optional, but the bluray is so slow that, if given the option I’ll always install to the disk. So another~15 minutes go by before I can actually load into the game for the first time.

The game is set in some pseudo/fantasy WWII scenario, but instead of the Nazis we have the “Imperial Alliance”  and instead of the Allies we have the “Atlantic Federation”, and instead of soldiers we have teenage girls and boys. The whole war has started over some fantasy mineral called Ragnite, about which I know very little at this point in the game.

I watch a fair bit of anime so the plot is really of little concern to me, they all follow a relatively linear progression. I’m mainly interested in the gameplay, something I’m finding, thus far, there is very little of.

I think I’m maybe 2 hours into the game and I’ve played all of 3 short levels. In between which there are a plethora of cut scenes and inane conversations between the characters (just watched a nice verbose discourse between the 2 main characters over the specific details of the uniforms they are wearing).

Coming off the back of MGS4, I’d really hoped the cutscene to gameplay ratio would be higher. Admittedly I’m just over the tutorial phase hump of the game, where they try to teach me the game dynamics whilst also instilling in me the overarching purpose of it all, so, for now, I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt.

I just really hope the game starts to increase the number of playable levels soon, without having to wade through 4 or 5 separate cutscenes to get there.

Update 2 – 01/10/09: Who doesn’t love loads of menus

Played a bit further into the game now. I’m just about to invade some forested area and break the enemies supply routes. The number of cutscenes between each playable level is a joke, and the dialogue is mostly inane jabbering that adds nothing to the game for me.

On top of this, as I’ve been progressing, they’ve been adding more and more menus, and sub menus that I have to load in and out of frequently. For what? There is no reason for them. Rather than having a separate menu for equipping weapons, another menu for upgrading weapons, another menu for upgrading my squads stats, another menu for assigning squad members to my team… etc, they could of just combined all of these areas into 1, easily. Further, when you load into a menu, some character pops up to welcome you before you actually get to do what you wanted in that menu, they always have to be skipped or listened to and can’t be disabled. They remind me of the paperclip in Windows XP, except I know I am going to have to suffer them until the game is over. The Drill Sargent is particularly irritating, popping up multiple times while you are in the training menu.

The sad thing about all this, much like MGS4, is that the gameplay is actually very enjoyable. I find myself loading up the game in the time before I go to work in the morning and playing through one of the skirmishes (missions you can play as much as you want to earn XP and money). I only hope the game gets it together as I progress and ratio of time I spend in and out of menus and watching cutscenes starts to lower in comparison to how much of the game I’m actually playing.

Update 3 – 16/10/09: A.I stands for Astounding Ineptitude

Wow, has it been over two weeks since I last updated this post? This game has really been a slow burner for me. I only complete about 1 or 2 actual gameplay missions a day, at most (it’s usually just 1). My routine is this, before I go to work in the morning, I start up Valkyria Chronicles and watch the inevitable 10 minutes of cutscenes before I get to the next playable mission in the game. I then change to the HQ tab and upgrade weapons and unit stats… etc, reorganizing my squad for the next mission. I’ll then try a skirmish to get some points so I can train more and develop my weapons. I then go to work. I come home and I play 1 mission, I then see the plethora of following cutscenes laid out before me once again and go “forget this I’ll watch them in the morning”… and the cycle continues.

The game plays out like a very bad anime. Like Pokemon or Bleach (oh no I didn’t!). It tries, nauseatingly, to mirror WWII with set pieces and plot lines (i.e. I just played through an area that was supposed to be a parallel to the Nazi Jewish Concentration Camps) It all feels wrong, very wrong. I’m playing as these kids developing weapons to more effectively bludgeon and kill the enemy, whilst I’m supposed to believe they care that a building with some miners in it was burnt down. These children are sociopaths. They get up in the morning, put on their prissy outfits, makeup and do their hair into fancy buns then proceed to march onto the battle field and shoot anything that moves in the face. They then go home and talk about bugs and trivial teenager issues.

I dunno, I’ll stick with it to see it through to completion. I just hope I’m past the midway point already.