okay, so my birthday wasn't as bad as i thought. i quite enjoyed it actually, despite being almost completely broke (the things i do for games).

i had a couple of drinks with my sister, and then went to see the new pixar film, 'UP'. it was in '3D', and we had to put on special glasses.

the film was good. it was about an old man trying to get to a special location in south america. ever since he was a child he dreamt of adventure and being like his childhood hero (a pilot/adventurer). he met his future wife when he was about six, and instead of adventuring in south america he got married and obviously spent a lot of time with his wife. his wife passes away, and most of the film is about him trying to get to south america. it's quite touching.. a bit too sentimental for my tastes, but the details and brilliant; the film has some excellent cloth and lighting effects. it's an enjoyable romp...cinema tickets are expensive though. it makes you realize how good value games actually are.

the last pixar movie i saw was 'over the hedge', and this is way, way better. 'over the hedge' felt like a remake of 'toy story', but with animals, and it was just too... american? i don't know. i can't watch british animations such as 'wallace & gromit', because they're too 'british'. ;P what can i say? i'm unique. of course.

the 3D effects were good, if a little blurry. they felt like those little slideshow boxes that you press down with a lever, and view the 3D photo cards. anyone know what i mean?

what exactly is 3D? games don't pop out like that film, and they're 3D are they not? objects in life don't even appear to pop out as much as the film did (with the glasses).

what d'you guys think of 3D films?

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the PS3 is good. it's a 120gig 'SLIM'. i wanted to get a pre-owned one because they were a lot cheaper, but then i've heard stories of peoples' PS3s breaking (yellow light of doom? ;p), and so i didn't want to get an old one only for it to break down, with no warranty.

i wasn't even going to get one till next year...but i don't know, i felt i 'needed' one.

when i was in the shop waiting for the assistant to get the system, some guy came in and asked if he could trade-in his 360, and they were like.. "sorry, we don't do that anymore.. microsoft called us and said we aren't allowed to do that anymore". i hardly ever go to game shops, but that was a real suprise, because i've traded games and consoles in for years. times are changing.. and the 'PSPGO' is selling 'quite well' according to the bloke in the shop.

the PS3 came with some piece of sh*t composite lead, as usual. i haven't got a HDTV yet, so i used an old RGB SCART lead with my SDTV instead. at first, the screen was green.. it annoyed me because this was what happend with the PS2 when i tried to watch DVDs on it - gave me a GREEN screen!! thank god, i could adjust the settings on the PS3 menu to make it normal. so now it looks good - as good as my old consoles looked. it's not HD, but it will do for now. anything beats that composite nonsense.

the console itself is alright.. nothing too special. it looks a lot cheaper than the 'fat' PS3s. the cute new logo just doesn't suit the image of the console itself. it basically looks like a smoother, rounder PS2.

controller is wireless. that's cool. no more wires (well, almost)! i still think the 360 controller is superior..it looks nicer and feels nicer. this is just another dualshock.

the menus and stuff on the PS3 are really nice. as soon as possible i got it online. it was easy to make it communicate with my wireless router. it only took a few minutes! online is free, which is a good bonus, even if its perhaps not as robust or comprehensive as LIVE. i just like flicking through the menus though.. the little noises that are made. i'm really impressed with all the 'next-gen' interfaces; the wii has a calming ambient hum in the background, and navigating is in itself, fun.

noby noby boy

i had a curious browse through the playstation store. i know what i was after, and it only cost a mere £3. it's just weird. you spend so much on the damn hardware, but some of the games are so cheap.

in 'noby noby boy', you stretch a snake-like 'boy' around a little town.. and um, gobble stuff up.. *shrugs* and that's it. but it's so much fun! you get to stretch boy as much as you want, and he gets ridiculously long. you can eat pigs and cows, or give little 'mouse police men' rides by jumping and floating in the air. it's such a chill out game as well.. leave it, and come back and the music changes, and so does the landscape. it holds my attention a lot more than wii music, wii sports, or electroplankton. it has much more depth and variety than those so-called 'non-games'. plus, what game allows you to fart cats out? huh? huh? ;p

it's great though, because you can grow together with other players. once you sign in to PSN, you can record the length of your boy (hehe) and then upload it to make 'girl' grow. 'girl' is a snake-like thing as well, but she's travelling to other planets based on the cumilative length of all the boys in the world. the best bit is that the other planets are actually new levels you can roam about in.

noby noby boy is the game i wish i was playing for a while now... a bright future for games, if followed on this path.

bayonetta

to play this, i had to make a japanese PSN account and sort of blindly enter a bunch of kanji and hiragana into data fields and hope i was doing it right. eventually i suceeded and was able to d/l this free demo from the playstation store.

for the uninitiated, it's like devil may cry, but you play as a horny witch, hell bent on dancing semi-gothic beasts to death.

bayonetta has the basic attacks; triangle for punch, and circle for kick. square triggers her pistol, and 'x' is jump, where she prances and pirouettes like a butterfly (she actually grows butterfly wings momentarily).

you do combos. punch, punch, kick! kick, kick, kick! kick, punch, kick! standard stuff. but it's bayonetta herself who transforms the gameplay into a more interesting beast. the demo, appropriately named 'first climax', lets you try out 'bullet climax' mode, where you give the left analogue stick a cheeky swirl, and then press square, and bayonetta will do a hand-stand, where you gain control of her legs by rapidly tapping square and pointing left or right (to move her legs). she has pistols that come out of her stilletos, and yeah, it's awesome.

the demo is pretty short, but you get to fight two bosses and several groups of enemies. bosses are the usual kind of devil may cry fare, but the game uses the power of the PS3 to make cool stuff happen. this one part, you're running down a bridge and a monster starts climbing up the wall behind you, and grabs the bridge with its massive hand, and swirls it about from left to right, all in real-time. it's heavily scripted, and very similar to some of god of war's bosses, but i love how seamless it is - there is no stupid cut-scene and then the fight.

the game has some girly R&B to grind to. it's refreshing to hear real pop music in a video game. i always thought the metal and rock music in DMC 3 helped the battles flow. if you can embrace your feminine side, and not take the game too seriously, it's all good.

all in all, i loved it. bayonetta is a beautiful character, and self-knowing, with little pretence or prudeness. she's a male fantasy, a dominatrix sure, but doesn't pretend to be anything more. i love her throaty grunts, and her obsessively sexy walk cycle. i hope we see more of a feminine side to her later in the game though, such as the butterly transformation.. maybe some unicorns or something? oh i know so much about girls don't i! ;p

and please, bayonetta does not look like sarah palin!! don't stop my climax!

little big planet

LBP!

haven't played it much. british TV personality and 'comedian', stephen fry introduces the game (is that the same with the U.S version?), which is a bit weird. there's something odd about LBP, lots of things make it feel odd. maybe it's the whole 'online feel', or the odd graphical look(sidescrolling, but in 3D). there's something 'meta' about it all.

it's supposed to be a 3D platformer, and you move from right to left, but there are three degrees of depth: sackboy can move to the foreground, background, or mid-ground, and often has to negociate between the three, as obstacles are dotted around. it's.. 2.5D shall we say?

it's quite conventional so far. collect stuff, aim for a high score, jump on platforms. what makes it fun is the physics. you can nudge stuff and it'll wobble about, or ropes will shimmy from side to side. i'm looking forward to getting deeper in.

maybe i can play some of 'your' levels? ;p

echochrome

played a demo this. excellent concept. it's all about perspectival tricks. you control a 3D structure, and a little man at one point - he needs to get to the exit, but there is no logical way to reach it - you have to rotate the camera to 'link' sections and bridges up, so 'what you see' is the correct path, not what actually is. it's hard to describe, but i really enjoy it.

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arg! so what is next-gen? what is the big difference between last gen and this gen? it has to be 'online' for me. it's amazing how connected the PS3 and 360 (and to a lesser extent, the wii) are to the internet, and what benefits these bring about. when i first switched on my PS3 i could access BBC programs and watch them through my TV, on demand by streaming. i haven't watched TV for ages... but now i can cherry pick programs at times that suit me. the games too, like noby noby boy and little big planet, rely a lot on online, for their innovations. i think the 'game community' will change (is changing) how we play.

for the more conventional games that i played.. you can be cynical and say that they aren't very new; just prettier. but the extra power affords new experiences, and new levels to those experiences. bayonetta probably wouldn't be possible on the PS2, without major slow down and reduction of details and effects, and a game like bayonetta is all about the details and the superfluity, even if the visuals are somewhat lacking.

in lost planet 2, you can go inside the beasts for an extra degree of depth. i have no interest in that particular game, but this is the same kind of innovation we saw in the late PS2 greats, such as SotC, where you could climb all over the bosses. so scale, and size and depth will be more important this gen i think. another level of depth is much better music in games, or at least different kinds of stuff. it's subtle that bayonetta contains female vocals singing while you fight, but you don't see that in games so much. noby noby boy has some beautiful folky lullabies as well.

this is all a good start, but i hope for a lot more.. and it's very telling that the smaller, cheaper-to-develop games are a lot more original and innovative.

and your impressions?? ;-)

(and just so you guys know, i designed a whole game concept once, which was something really close to bayonetta, before i even heard of the game. it's like i'm playing the game i envisioned, but obviously not as unique as my idea! ;P)