Well, the Xbox 360 has been getting a workout these last few days. I downloaded some game demos. Mainly Quake 4, which looked pretty but seemed to be more of the same. It looks like it's a direct sequal to Quake II. I then downloaded the Star Trek Legacy demo to see what it was like. Sadly the dreadful reviews were correct. I found myself in command of the USS Excelsior Sounds fun? No, not when the ship is amazingly sluggish and unresponsive, and it take forever to try and lock on to the enemy ships which are a mere 4 pixels wide. Also, if you fly your ship into another, it just goes straight through. Perhaps the most laughable thing is if you approach a planet. You realise that it is in fact smaller than your starship, and if you get too close, you bounce off. So much for the 'realistic physics' that they advertised.
The other demo was Test Drive Unlimited. The idea behind this is quite cool, basically it recreates part of a Hawaiian island and you drive around in various expensive cars. The twist is that the other cars on the road aren't all computer controlled, they are other people who are playing the game. So you can challenge them to races or whatever. It supports headsets too but I all heard was complaints in that weird high-pitched voice that all people seem to have that the guy in the grey Mustang doing donuts is in the way, which was me. Nice idea, but not sure if I'll bother with the full game.
And I finally picked up a copy of Gears of War. It's a very intense game, and it has that rare combination of amazing graphics and also amazing gameplay. The storyline is nicely thought out and draws you in. Very impressive game. The way it works is quite different from most FPSs which can be a little disconcerting.
Car boots this morning - the main big one wasn't on but took a look at a couple of others. Didn't find anything good. I did pick up a Unisys PowerPort laptop for £2, which is very old. It's a 386 based machine from 1991 and I only picked it up because it was very heavy and the entire case is made of metal, with a huge screen. Research has shown that it was a very high end machine and cost over £4000 for a model with 2mb RAM.
I was able to fire this one up with a Toshiba power supply and found that it has 6mb so it must have been pricy back in the day. Sadly the hard drive has failed and the backlight is very dim, other than that it's in good nick and it has a very nice keyboard. Interestingly there was a disk in the floppy drive labelled James' Story 'Dead Walk' which had a couple of Word files. One was a short Frankenstein type story, and the other was a 35 page epic which seems heavily inspired by Lord of the Rings. The author of these appears to be named James Rice. Weird. The 35 page story wasn't finished - wonder if he ever did finish it. Also there was a Flash animation of a guy hitting himself in the head with a baseball bat.
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