Stex Toys

I’ve begun my adventure with Alan Wake, the fabled long term development piece which has received much applause since release. It certainly seems to capture the feel of a tense thriller and you spend a lot of the game time on edge waiting for the inevitable attacks.
One problem I have though is that in the daylight scenes there is quite a lot of texture pop going on with the tree lines and distant mountains. It’s something I’ve started noticing more and more in recent titles on the 360. Red Dead Redemption suffers from this also. Is this a sign of the creativity of developers expanding beyond the capabilities of this gens hardware, or just some slightly sloppy coding? Have my recent forays into PC gaming heightened my awareness given the extra power available even to a 2 year old gaming PC?
With the projected life spans of the current console hardware as they are I guess it is something we will start to see more and more. Maybe I should try these titles on the PS3 and see if it’s just as bad there.

My time with Android has been far too brief. I do like Android, a lot. And the hardware I chose was pretty decent, a Samsung Galaxy, however Samesung completely abandoned the hardware once it was in the wild. We never got an update past version 1.5 of the Android OS. 1.6 came and went, then they jumped to 2.0.. still nothing. 2.1 … 2.2 nope and now they have the Galaxy S and lost all interest in looking after those who gave them the money to get where they are. It’s a shame, I have a number of Samsung products but now I have no inclination to buy any more. But I would still be using the Galaxy save for one thing.. I dropped it, as I have a hundred times since I got it, but this time it landed on concrete or more specifically on a small stone on concrete. And that was that, a screen of a thousand pieces. It actually still works, if you don’t mind getting glass fragments in you finger!

So I’m back to my Blackberry Bold, a process which isn’t super straight forward as without a BIS/BES service you have to do a lot of third party apping to get the standard features. But actually, it’s really not that bad! I thought going back to a none touch device with a small screen would be a hard step back. But there is something about the smaller but good resolution screen, and snappiness of the applications that is welcoming. A BlackBerry knows what it can do and does it very well. The hardware keyboard is a welcome addition also, for someone who types a lot on their phone, sending texts, twitters and emails it’s a valuable resource.

Of course I will be going back to Android as soon as I can afford a new phone, the HTC Desire HD is currently in my sights, when it launches. But we’ll have to wait and see how long that takes to achieve.

So not 24 hours after I wrote my last piece about really not being into gaming at the moment and I had the 360 all booted up and Red Dead Redemption spun up for some Multiplayer! OK, so I could hide behind it being multiplayer with my old School friend Woodoggies, with an offer of some gaming I was unlikely to turn down. But that wouldn’t explain me heading back to New Austin the next day for some story progression, let alone the day after. It seems all I needed was a jumpstart to the engines fuelled by some community incentive and I was right back in.

Sure It’s not been a flood of activity since, but I can feel the ‘need’ to play is back in my soul. I’m seeing the busy work week ahead, with some late night engagements as a challenge to my gaming as opposed to a welcome escape.

Plus I’ve had some reinvigoration thanks to my work for the ever excellent Digital Cowboys as i’ve been setting up a new Facebook page for those listeners and fans who use Facebook to use as a single jumping off point for the podcasts, blog articles, and YouTube vids. It may not be giving anythign new at present, but it will hopefully become a one stop shop for thing DC within the walled gardens of Facebook.

So things are moving along once more. With a wedding coming up next month there is sure to be a considerable amount of strain on so called free time, but I am hopeful gaming will be getting it;s usual large chunk of my time as always.