New GamesTM is Out

Issue 36 of GamesTM was delivered at work today and it’s the first – hopefully of many – with some of my stuff in it. I’m fairly light on the ground (the only time you’ll ever hear that used to describe me) but this one was nearly finished when I went for my work experience so I only really got to pick up a few loose ends, but the next one due in October will have more. Anyway, for anyone who actually cares enough to look for stuff that I had my hand in this is all of it and the pages on which you can find it:

  • Pages 10-18: Datastreams – the small news stories in the sidebars.
  • Pages 80-85: A Tale’s End – feature on the death and future of point-and-click adventures; most of the screenshots were taken by me.
  • Pages 136-139: A Breed Apart – retrospective on Alien Breed for the Amiga; screenshots taken by me.
  • Page 176: Text Life – the text messages that I had to make up in a fine display of journalistic integrity.
  • Page 177: Contributors – I’m listed in the list of contributors, although it’s annoyingly under the name “Ollie Dean”. My cousin, Matthew Dean, is also listed as a design contributor as he’s on design at Highbury.

It should be available at all good newsagents across the UK in the next few days for the fairly reasonable price of £4.

iPod nano

iPod nano

Damn, that thing is gorgeous. We’ve been expecting updates to the iPod shuffle and mini for a while now but Apple seem to have cross-bred them and created something that has the best parts of both of them. They’ve made it absolutely tiny, and given you the choice of cool white and sexy black. In making it flash-based they’ve also given a real benefit to picking it over the standard iPod – it might have a relatively small amount of storage but it’s significantly smaller (unlike the mini), is entirely skip-proof (unlike the mini), and has a screen and enough storage for a decent amount of music (unlike the shuffle).

Despite the fact that I’m an Apple fan I’ve actually never owned an iPod and at one point was downright hostile towards them. I have an iRiver iHP-120 which I still think is a far better player for the same price – driverless operation, Ogg Vorbis support (far better than both MP3 and AAC), longer battery life, FM radio, line-in recording, voice recording, better sound quality, etc – but I’ve recently gone off the idea of a complete music library in a slightly bulky player and have been looking at a possible flash player. The 4GB nano looks ideal for that and I think it also works as a pretty huge USB flash drive. Much bigger than my current 256MB drive, at least.

I’ve been planning on paying a visit to the Shinjuku Apple store in Tokyo which is supposed to be one of the, if not the, biggest Apple stores in the world (on a related note, check out this video of the queue for the opening of the Ginza Apple store). According to the Japanese online Apple store the 4GB model costs the equivalent of £135 compared to £179 that it costs here, so something tells me I might be buying it there.

Finally Playing Warcraft

I wrote back in February that I felt like I was missing out by not playing Blizzard’s insanely popular MMO, World of Warcraft, and although it took me long enough to make the jump I’ve started playing it today. I’m still on a break from spending, but the new PC Gamer UK comes with a full copy of the game (both PC and Mac versions) on their disc complete with 14 days of free play. It’s a limited account (you can only get to level 20 and you can’t trade with other players, for example), but it’s better than nothing until I can afford to pick up the real thing and take on the monthly fees.

If you’re in the UK and have been dithering about whether or not to take the plunge it’s a very good way to see if you like it – £5.99 for 14 days of WOW, complete with a load of other demos and mods on DVD and even a free copy of PC Gamer thrown in. I doubt that’s how the publishers like to see it but that’s how it is with me.

Anyway, what are my impressions? Since the trial copy, like the retail version, contains both the Windows and Mac versions on the same disc I was interested in using my PC (Pentium 4 2.4GHz, 1GB RAM, Radeon 9700 Pro, Windows XP Home SP2) as the primary system and installing it on my more modest iBook (1.2GHz G4, 768MB RAM, Radeon 9200, Mac OS X 10.4.2) for portable use. I started as a Tauren who admittedly don’t have the most graphically-intensive starting area but the iBook seems to hold up well. It’s obviously never going to win any awards for graphics on that hardware but it’ll be fine for quick blasts when I’m away from home. I’ve yet to try it on the PC because as soon as I had it installed on the iBook I proceeded to play about three hours of it.

The game is, as I’m sure you’ve heard, very addictive. Quests take a decent amount of time but whatever you’re doing you find that “just one more” syndrome takes over, whether you’re promising yourself “just one more quest” or “just one more level”. I’m not entirely convinced by the combat and it can take an annoyingly long time to travel long distances, even on the tiny section of map that I’ve explored, but the size and scope of the world is so immense that it’s easy to be immersed in it. This is my first MMORPG (unless you count Phantasy Star Online and very short stints in the Guild Wars and City of Heroes betas) and already I can see how some people become so addicted to them. Blizzard seem to have succeeded in their usual trick of mastering a genre on their first attempt.

If you want to meet up I’m a level 4 Tauren warrior on the Arathor server, and the character name should be obvious. I think you need to have a European copy of the game to play there but I’m up for some play if anyone wants to.

Yenned Up

A week from now I’ll be twelve hours from catching a bus to Heathrow airport to catch a plane to Paris where I’ll catch another plane to Tokyo and spend ridiculous amounts of money. Sitting on my desk right now I have ¥193,000 (£955 in real money) and a clean credit card just waiting to be blown on inordinate amounts of PSPs, games, DVDs, CDs, and alcohol. I’m getting really excited about it now.

We already know that we’re going to be hitting Akihabara almost as soon as we get there early next Thursday, then the next few days are going to be split between TGS, Sony’s PS3 event, and general Tokyo stuff. The Studio Ghibli Museum is booked for the Monday and we’ll probably spend a day in Kyoto (via the bullet train). After seeing the piece on Japan on a budget on BBC Departure Lounge we’re now thinking of visiting Edo Wonderland, which is a kind of a feudal Japan village populated by actors playing the parts like the “living museums” that you find across America. The best part is that if you book in advance you can hire costumes including ninja ones, complete with katana.

Game Prices in 1995

If you ever feel the need to complain about the possibility of next generation games costing $55-60 or more, just take a look at this. The prices are Canadian but even so it works out as $80 US for a SNES game and $420 for a Saturn, and even more if you take ten years of inflation into account. It only goes to show that my constant assertions that they’re doing their best to give a decent deal with the current generations and that we pay a lot less to play the latest games are true.

I’m going to be picking up my Xbox 360 launch games (which apparently and sadly might not include PGR3) for £50 each, safe in the knowledge that I’m not having to pay the £60-a-time that I willingly handed over for a new N64 game.

Think of the Children!

While not quite up there with ClearPlay (seriously, is Ong-Bak even a movie with the violent parts taken out?) in the idiotic-and-secretly-evil stakes, I’ve just seen via Edge Online that there’s another new secure system to do the difficult and tedious things like raising your children for you and stop the kids playing those evil games for more than they should. Game Guardian houses a PStwo console and, through a PIN system, lets you set how long it can run before the system gets powered down, probably without warning.

It’s convenient because even though the kids are still playing GTA, it’s OK when they can only play it for an hour. Edge point out the obvious frustration of being shut off mid-mission, but imagine the fun if it decided to shut down during a save and completely corrupted the memory card, losing all progress from all games. That would make Little Johnny much easier to live with, wouldn’t it?