» admin

Finally had a chance to play the second chapter (or episode as that’s how they called it in the game). The game started with intro cut scene where chapter 1 left off. Again I won’t go into the details of the story. As mentioned from chapter 1 review, chapter 2 is basically from the demo where you are Sam Monroe(the guy with glasses) PLUS for the first half of this chapter, you are again controlling the highschool kid Howard Wright. It feels like this chapter, as well as the first, are meant to be “tutorials” where you get to learn the basics of the game, a special skill is also introduced called “Sight Jacking”, basically you see the surrounding through another character who is also introduced in this chapter.

Overall, this chapter is still dark and creepy. Unlike Resident Evil or any first/third person shooter, you cannot always go head on with the shibitos, yes I finally found out the name of those “dead” people I’ve been mentioning. This chapter again, makes you sneak up on them and surprise attack them (feels like Metal Gear Solid to me lol).

Later in the game, you are given a gun with unlimited ammo. It is fun but then you lose that sense of “survival” feel but then again there aren’t a swamp of them to take care of. The shibitos are no threat to you when you have a gun, they just run blindly towards you and die before they can even lay one hit on you. On the other hand, if you have a melee weapon, you really have to fight smart like sneaking up on them and perform a heavy attack.

This chapter is a bit longer than the first but definitely a good game play.

I should have chapter 3 review up by tomorrow so stay tuned!

Incoming search terms:

• siren blood curse infinite ammo
• siren blood curse unlimited ammo

Once I have it installed and I started the game right away. First impression, at least on the music, CREEPY. I started the chapter right away, my character was a high school guy for some reason in this maze looking forest somewhere in Japan. From the first cut scene, he was trying to save a girl from being killed by the dead people, or possessed people and ended up running for his own life. Ok I think I should not spoil the whole story.

Onto the game play.

The control is somewhat easy to get used to like any third person shooter. After another short cut scene from the first, I was controlling the high school kid and running for my life right off the bat. I picked up a “sake” (sake is Japanese alcoholic beverage made from rice) bottle, I was exited that I found a weapon and I jumped onto the dead person right away. Bad move, since he had a gun, I was dead after a few shots. The environment was really dark actually, I should have turned up the brightness a bit but I didn’t expect to be this dark. So after dying a few times trying to run away from the dead, I managed to find the escape path by fluke.

Dead nurses from Japanese horror games/movies are still sexy, even if they kill.

The chapter was rather short, I would say 15 minutes or even less if you could manage to find the path right away. Therefore I cannot comment much about this chapter. The next chapter is actually from the demo where you get to use the man with glasses and I expect it to be longer.

Stay tuned!

Incoming search terms:

• siren blood curse nurse

And I thought August doesn’t have any games that will amuse me. I was half right, nothing on the shelf can but there’s one game on Playstation Store can, and that’s Siren: Blood Curse. I love Japanese horror style games so much I don’t think its right to miss this game.

Say tuned for reviews on all 12 episodes. Not all at once! But as I progress on each episode.

And by the way, if you are planning to buy the series, I strongly recommand buying all 12 at once for $39.99 to save some money (each 4 chapter set is $14.99).

Incoming search terms:

• siren tech ps3

A new search engine called Cuil was launched today (July 28th). It is developed and run by the husband-and-wife team of Stanford professor Tom Costello and former Google search architect Anna Patterson. I quickly hopped onto the site to check it out, first thing I noticed is that it is very clean, a bit too clean assuming it just launched and had to start somewhere small first. It claims to be the biggest search engine, while I won’t doubt that will or may happen in the future, it certainly is not the biggest yet.

On the bright side, each search will be accompanied by an image whenever possible which makes the search experience more enjoyable as opposite to just plain text results. Costello also stated that the new search engine crawls and ranks pages differently compare to Google’s flagship search engine and it heavily focuses on the “contextual” of a page. As stated from the About Cuil page “When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.”.

Onto the dark side.

Speed-wise I don’t feel any improvement over searching through Google, some times its often slower than Google (maybe everyone is trying out this new search engine?). Many people have also reported that searches were not accurate. I tried to search for Cuil hoping to find more info about the search engine (yes I know there’s an link called About Cuil on the very first page, but correct me if I’m wrong but shouldn’t its own page get indexed as well? About one in a ten searches results in “We didn’t find any results for ” for the same keyword.

All and all I think there is still a lot of work to be done for Cuil in order to even convince people that it is capable of searching if its claimed to be the “biggest” search engine. Right now it just doesn’t stand a chance. I will definately keep my eyes on this.

I was reading news on The Windsor Star and found out research has shown there is no link between TV, games and nightmares for kids between the age of nine to thirteen. Instead there is a correlation between reading and nightmares but the number of affected children were too small to make it conclusive.

It would be funny if instead of parents saying “Stop watching so much TV” to their kids, they start saying “Stop reading too much!” or “Why don’t you watch more TV than reading a book all day?”.
Just a funny thought.

With high gas prices these days, companies are developing more and more fuel efficient cars. There are plenty out there already, Toyota Prius, Honda Civic and Toyota Camry are only a few. Another company called Loremo (Low resistance mobile) has showed off its production version of the Loremo LS/GT/EV, after almost a year after the prototype version was showed off.

Below are images of the prototype and the production versions:

Personally, I think the prototype looks much better and futuristic (prototype cars always look nice in my opinion ). The front and side resemble the (Honda) Acura NSX, but just a bit and the overall shape looks like the Honda FCX Clarity with a long glass top. The production version, on the other hand, has more like a family sedan than the racier looking
prototype. The four small round taillights at the back resemble the old Corvette. Loremo stated that the body style had to be changed for more passenger room and better fuel economy.

As mentioned, the car comes in three trims and will be launched in 2009:
LS – 2 cylinder diesel engine (20HP), top speed of 100MPH, fuel economy of 120MPG and cost approx $17,200
GT – 3 cylinder diesel engine (36HP), top speed of 125MPH, fuel economy of 80MPG and cost approx $23,580
EV (zero emission version) – 20kw electric engine, top speed of 106MPH, fuel economy of 90MPG, weight only 1,300 pounds and cost approx $47,200

Pricewise, the LS and GT sound resonable, specially the LS trim with 120MPG. Since its only $17,200, again its approximate, you can probably get it “out the door” for around $20,000. You can pretty much benefit from the better fuel economy where as it will take a couple of years to recoup the loss from fuel savings from some of the fuel-efficient cars out there now. As for the EV version, I think its overpriced.

Performance-wise, the GT version won’t be anything GT-like though in my opinion, all three trims seem to be aimed for inner city commute only.

Incoming search terms:

• can you buy loremo AG
• loremo gt production
• loremo ls grapics

ASIMO, a robot that can run, walk as well as conducting a symphony orchestra (the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in May) developed by Honda was and is still a breakthrough in intelligence technologies. Now another japanese robotic company tmsuk has also been developing robots,the most recent being the TMSUK-4 humanoid and was showcased in one of the department stores in Japan.

The demonstration was about an immobile grandmother unable to shop with her granddaughter physically, so she controled the TMSUK-4 with a built in camera so she saw what the robot saw so she could shop with her granddaughter. While this is interesting, I don’t think you can use this for anything shopping. What I mean is, it can be used to shop for groceries, you cannot use it for shopping for clothes or shoes. The purpose of this robot is somewhat limited, at least for now.

I wonder if I would live long enough to see Gundams flying around

nahh….

Facebook has filed a lawsuit against the most popular German social networking
web site that closely resambles Facebook in terms of user interface.

I decided to check out studiVZ and immediately the login screen resembles that of Facebook. I did not bother to sign up to check the look and feel of what after you logged in. I googled one of the images from that site, as you can see it looks almost exactly the same as Facebook.

Facebook has also launched lawsuits against few other Facebook-style web sites. It is no surprise there are so many wannabes trying to copy Facebook because of its success and popularity.

But then again, what about Friendster?

 

 

 

Incoming search terms:

• german style facebook
• german tech web sites