Aside from Twitter virtually taking over any spare free time I have, I’ve also been buying a few toys. The most recent is a Blu-Ray player to replace my old HD-DVD player. The ‘Panny’ BD35 as it is known has received rave reviews online for it’s superb picture processing abilities and such a machine at a shade under £200 was too hard to ignore. You can find my review in the erm, reviews section!

1.21 Gigawatts!

We all know what a clumsy oaf our iPhone 3G’s are when it comes to battery life. It is common and quite upsetting to see that battery meter on the top right of our screens rapidly deplete as we merely browse the web or just use GPS with google maps just for a few minutes. It is something we sadly have to live with for the most part.

After ending up lost in the middle of Gloucestershire with a couple of colleagues because my 3G ran out of juice, one thing was pretty much clear. Those battery packs that I have seen people rabbiting on about, that extend the runtime of the 3G could actually be rather useful. I’ve had mobile phones in the past that could go on for days until they expended all their juice but the iPhone 3G is slightly different – I pretty much depend on it for almost everything I do. No mobile gadget has ever had such an impact on me…

With all that babble out of the way, my first review of 2009 arrives. It’s very short, with hardly any detail – I give you the APC UPB10!

Awww it’s so ickle and cute!

It’s also been a while since I wrote a hardware review so here comes one based on what seems to be the present rated netbook on the market. The Samsung NC10 Netbook. This little bugger is to be the replacement for my Dell XPS 1530, which is soon to be given a new home!

You can find the review surprisingly in the reviews section!

Tuesday April 29th March 2008

It is quite rare for me to claim that a certain title is the best I have ever played. That award goes to a single game from 2002 – Mafia. Through the years I’ve seen titles come and go, in which I have claimed to be superb and whilst they have been just that, the replayability wasn’t there – Condemned and Bioshock for instance.

The Grand Theft Auto series since GTA: Vice City has always had a place in my heart. It’s sucessor San Andreas was equally as good featuring a huge land mass, in which you could do virtually anything you wanted to. It quickly became my favourite game of the series. Well move over San Andreas, GTA IV just became my favourite GTA but also  my second favourite game of all time. Since it’s release Grand Theft Auto IV has ranked up some of the highest review marks I have seen since Gears of War on the 360. Although I do think the marking for IV was a little over the top in quite a few areas it is without doubt an outstanding accomplishment from Rockstar.

Liberty City, is based on New York City of course, in which we see Niko Bellic (a war veteran from Bosnia) arriving in search of the American Dream. Does he find it though? Buggered if I could find out since I encountered a nasty broken mission bug, which saw me not receiving a key phone call from some lawyers so I ended up restarting the game. Suffice to say it’s been a rather long Bank Holiday weekend making up for all that lost time but I have had a blast, which didn’t please my girlfriend…

Is the title any good? Well short of actually reviewing it I will state that "Yes it is outstanding, in many, many ways but that doesn’t mean it has no faults". It’s graphics are very controversial right now and I say this because the game is using a blur filter that makes commenting on the graphics rather hard. In some places the game looks incredible, whilst in other areas it looks completely poor as distant objects are blurred and dithered to an extent. The game features a lighting system that I rate as the best I have ever seen. I kid you not  – driving through Liberty City is an experience to behold mainly because the lighting is so perfect that everything looks just right and I won’t mention the dynamic shadows moving in relation to the sun…

Rockstar have created a living, breathing city in ways that cannot really be described. Even my mother who was watching me play earlier today stated that the city looked so real as I casually drove past all the neon-lit buildings amongst hundreds of yellow cabs.

I am still going through the game and I’m just 30% through it but I can see heaps of things to do afterwards and with the extra downloadable content arriving later in the year I just hope that extends the gameplay a bit more. Who knows? All I know is that I am hooked!

See what the NY Times had to say about GTA IV
Rockstar’s Dan Houser speaks about GTA IV
Think I’m excited? Check Oz gal Kitteh out!

Does it impress?

Oh yes! After almost blowing £1,100 on a better specification XPS laptop, which was sadly from the older XPS range I ended up being talked in to buying the M1530, the bigger brother of one of the best laptops from 2007, the M1330. Despite having a 2-3 week delivery delay on their laptops they managed to get it to be extremely fast. I ordered the thing online on the 3rd January, and it arrived on the 7th of January.

I have spent the past few days jotting down notes and have come up with my first review of 2008! Top dogs!

I have a partially finished Assassin’s Creed review, and was hugely looking forward to writing about Mass Effect, which in my opinion is now the best game on the 360. For weeks now, I’ve been trying to find the time to write but have always been side tracked, so bugger it.. I will however, continue writing various hardware reviews after the new year when I go crazy on spending!

Yes I know that one isn’t real!

Well up goes a review that I have struggled to even complete. It is a good couple of days late mainly because my life has been taken over by a combination of Team Fortress 2, Work (no change there then), a nagging girlfriend who wants to go shopping, and a France Booze Cruise in two weeks time. All of this isn’t helped by the fact that there are a whopping three birthday parties I have to attend, a wedding (hate these) and two PC’s I have to set-up for two clients all in October! Happy days eh?

Anyway, you can read how I feel about this spiffy new device in the reviews section or just click Here. Want a more detailed review? Well me good mate PR has been blithering on about his one, so you can find his review on his blog.

*£(*)%^!!!! er Medic!

Quick heads up! I’ve put up a rather rushed review of the new 360 Messenger Kit that I received this morning. A lot of people seem to be waiting for theirs right now so here’s the low down on what I think of it. Now where’s me band aid….

Would you kindly bend over…

It’s been a hectic weekend! I wasted money, and then some. Oh, there’s a Bioshock review that has been added to the reviews section. Not the best I might add, but I had to let loose my opinions on such a heavily rated game, especially after seeing it’s rating on Metacritic.com.

After finishing work on Friday, I was in a spending mood. I had about £350 saved up to blow on either clothes, pc/console bits, a low end DSLR Camera or a new MP3 player. The past week saw the release of the next generation of MP3/Video devices from the likes of Creative, Apple, Cowon, Microsoft, Archos and a few other manufacturers. I was already looking for a replacement for my Vision:M despite it being regarded as the best MP3 player on the market. I’ve had the thing for ages now and would like something a bit thinner – an excuse I recently used for buying a new mobile phone, the Sony Ericsson w880i.

I hate iPods. They’re crap, overrated and pale in comparison to the competition out there. The Nano is in a market of its own and I rather like it but the normal iPod is pooh in my opinion. So I’m sad to say that on Friday night I pre-ordered the iPod Touch for around £245 inc the £20 coupon thanks to PR (Order cancelled – the Ipod Touch is a waste of money with the current early screen issues that it has – Darren) It’s storage capacity isn’t that good and as I’ve stated the new Creative Zen even has more features but for once I’d like to see what an Apple product is like. I’ll probably end up hating the thing so look out for a review once it arrives. PR too has ordered one and will no doubt be reviewing when it arrives at the end of September!

As a result of ordering an expensive player that does less than my old one, I ended up installing iTunes – a piece of software I REALLY hate. Inside 3 minutes of running the thing, I found out that I couldn’t access the iTunes store to buy some music because my account wasn’t recognised. Apple Support ended up sorting that out and in an hour I was up and running only to find it had stolen all my file associations. I’m rather surprised on the whole as it’s a lot more stable than before and has more audio content but sod all movies to download. I’m also sorry to say that I’ve ended up buying about 8 tracks from it too!

Oh, on Friday night myself and Deena, who are fast becoming Pizza the Hut addicts ordered a Cheesy Bites Vegetarian Hot One from PIzza Hut. We had been advised by many friends that it was horrible but we went ahead anyway. A kind word of advice for those who are in this situation – IT SUCKS. We couldn’t even finish the thing because it was that gross and it seemed to go cold extremely fast, which doesn’t help. Stick to Deep Pan or the Italian!