» 2008 » July

I haven’t heard anything new about Fatal Frame 4 until recently when an E3 trailer was introduced on GameTrailers.com. Forn those who don’t know Fatal Frame, its a Japanese style survival horror game. Unlike Resident Evil, it does not try and scare players with blood and gore. Instead it uses dark atmosphere, freaky noise and ghosts (your enemies) to make players sweat (I used to have cold sweat when I played FF1 through 3). And by the way, the game is best played at night with no lights for maximum horror feeling. Players are not presented with guns but an old camera called the Camera Obscura to “capture” or “damage” the ghosts. There are different types of films and the camera is upgradable with points collected from taking pictures of ghosts, taking clear pictures yield more points!

Back to the topic, the question why the fourth installment comes out only for Wii troubles me.The series has always been with the Playstation and XBox, why abandon them now? My gut feeling tells me it will be out for the two consoles soon after, it just doesn’t make sense to not port the game over. I can imagine the fun factor in playing the game on a Wii but not everyone has a Wii and some people prefer to play the game using normal controllers.

And by the way, I think Fatal Frame 2 was the best out of the 3.

If you have any updates, please feel free to post them here.

 

It might be too late for most of the gamers out there to read this, I bet everyone bought a copy of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots by now. But I still want to give my “two cent” after completing the game twice.

Notice I completed the game twice?

That’s an immediate PLUS for the game in terms of replay value. When you start a new game, after going through a few cut scenes you get your weapons and Drebin points that you collected from your previous game. For those who do not have the game yet, Drebin points are points for upgrading/buying weapons and Drebin is one of the characters in the game. Since you get to use whatever you have collected from before, the game play can be different the second time you play. I was using the silenced sniper rifle from the start instead of using the AK. That brought down the alert occurances by a lot and yes I am not good at being stealthy

Having the weapons also makes the game less challenging, at least on the normal difficulty level. I will soon try out the big boss difficulty, my friend told me he couldn’t even get past the scene where you have to meet up with your robot sidekick MK 2.

I played the first MGS on the original Playstation and did not find it too enjoyable and so I skipped MGS 2 and 3. It was a good game, but its just not my style at that time. Guess I have grown to appreciate MGS series finally, I’m pretty sure its not just the graphics that makes it so enjoyable. The story is amazing as well, the movie-like cut scenes are nicely done but some are too long which you will find yourself skipping 90% of them during replay. I think the length of all cut scenes combined (including the ending) is longer than the actual game play which is one of the biggest complains I got from my friends.

As for the actual game play, its mostly third person but you can quickly switch to first person during gun fights. It works pretty much just like any first/third person shooter, you can run, crouch and crawl on the floor. But, you can now hug onto walls, floors etc, and your suit will change textures and blend in with whatever you are hugging onto to increase your stealthiness. And that’s not all, most of the game is played as Snake (the character you control) alone, but there are stages where the game play is different. One example is near the end of the game, you get to control a metal gear, the game play is similar to Mech Warriors (ahh the old times ). Its another PLUS for offering different types of game play. Another new and FUN feature to the game is you can take photos (after obtaining the camera of course) of the 4 bosses called BNB (beauty and the beast) and you can save them to your hd.

This are from my personal collection:

I’m sure I have not covered all about this game but I hope you find this interesting helpful. I will definately play the game again for the third time but on a harder difficulty and try out the online game as well. There are games that you can wait until they are half the price, but I think this game is worth the $59.99(+tax). If you haven’t got a copy and you are into this type of game, please get a copy now!

Let me know what you think of the game too.

Incoming search terms:

• metal gear solid snowfield map

I have been playing a virtual game called Second Life for almost two years and about once in two months a new joiner will post in forums asking “How come no one is buying my item” or “Why am I not making money”. The truth is, there is a lot more invovled than just creating an item or provide a service. You cannot just expect anyone to “walk in” and buy whatever you have to offer, most consumers in Second Life are smart, they shop for the best and paid for the least amount.

So you have created an item or think of what service to provide, GREAT! But that’s not all, next steps will be to market your item/service either by posting in forums or purchase classified ads within the game. The latter will cost you so you might want to stick to posting your new items/service in forums for now. There are two main forums, one within Second Life website and one at SLExchange. SLExchange also provides item hosting for you to put up your items for sale for free(takes a very small commission for every sale). As people around the virual world knows more about you, you will be able to create a “brand” for yourself.

As you can see, there are much more to do to be successful, I’ve only mentioned a small bits of it. But my final words are – “Build for passion and not for the sake of getting rich quick”. Earning money is a good thing, I mean who doesn’t want more money? But if you don’t invest time and even money, you will not make money.

Maybe I am missing something but I don’t get why someone would want to watch HD content on a labtop, even equipped with a 17 inch wide screen monitor. What or how much HD content will you actually notice? It is like buying a 24 inch LCD screen with 1080p capability (just an example, I doubt there is any 24 inch LCD with 1080p). I have a 40 inch Sony Bravia W3000 with 1080p capability. I honestly cannot find any difference when running Call of Duty 4 in 720p and in 1080p.

Based on the article, there are two models offered, one from Sony ($2,599CAD) and the other from Toshiba ($2,679CAD). With that price, you can get a very good 46 inch Sony LCD with 1080p AND 120hz refresh rate (only new models are 120hz, anything else are 60hz).

I still believe the purpose of a labtop is to provide mobile access and perform tasks you

normally perform with a desktop. It was built based on the idea of mobility. But high end labtop, like the two mentioned in the previous paragraph, has either Blue-ray or HD-DVD drive. I understand being able to watch movies on the go is almost a must if you travel alot, I don’t think I can live without my PSP if I am on a 15+ hour flight on the plane. But do you actually notice the quality difference between HD and non HD movies on a 17 inch monitor? I have never seen on a 17 inch but I’m pretty sure I won’t.

Just a thought.

Source from: thestar.com

There is always a market for customization, from customizing the leather color for high end luxuary cars to a customized avatar in the virtual world of Second Life because everyone wants to be unique. A Canadian company has introduced custom-made ear buds that plug the person’s ears completely as to block out any external noise.

Such customization comes with a cost of $199CAD (since its a Canadian company, I assume it charges CAD) which is roughly ten times more expensive than tradiation ear buds (my JVC ear buds cost me around $15CAD after tax). This company has been utilizing the same technology for producing hearing protection for industry workers and now they are applying this for everyday use.

The technique for creating custom-made ear buds is really simple as well, it involves filling a membrane fitted in each ear with silicone that forms into exact shape of the person’s ears. Within minutes the person can have his/her own custom-made ear buds.

In the future, I hope there will be flexible ear buds as oppose to just customizable ones where a person does not have to have his/her ears filled with silicone, not that it can damage that person’s ears but rather to save both the customer’s and company’s time. I think it will elimiate the need of that fitting step and potentially cut the cost of the ear buds. My idea of flexible ear buds would be ones that can enlarge or contract based on a person’s ear size. Not sure hot it will work, if I did I would have proposed to the company. But I am pretty sure this idea is being looked at.

Source from: thestar.com

Opera releases first public version of Opera Mobile 9.5 beta. First impression was it looks like a real broswer compare to the previous Opera browswer with its improved user interface. Its not just a simple facelift but it also contains new features such as panning and zooming to a particular section of a webpage, saving and/or mmsing contents (images, or the pages themselves) with a click.

Hopefully Opera will fix the few issues such as limited Flash support, no multilingual support, text wrapping etc.

Download it here

Original source from: pcworld.com

I first heard of Adobe Flex from a friend through MSN chat. He told me it is one of many RIA technologies out there like Microsoft Silverlight, AJAX and JavaFX. Then it was during a team meeting my co workers started talking about Web 2.0, avatars and RIA. Since then, the words Adobe Flex have been stuck in my head so I have decided to take a look myself.

Adobe provides a getting started guide with Flex 3, the current version of Flex which you can take a look here. It covers from building a basic application to a more advanced application. And by the way, you need to get a copy of the SDK (software development kit) in order to compile the xml-based MXML source code into SWF file (basically Flex creates Flash content just like any other Flash contents you see on the net).

I won’t go too technical just like my other blogs as this is intended to be a overview. But I will write about the pros and cons.

Pros: