Reviewing demos on this site has it’s advantages. Foremost is the fact that I get to play games that I otherwise probably wouldn’t spend my time on. Bone: The Great Cow Race is definitely one of those.

It is an adventure game, the second in a series of relatively short episode games. adventuregamers.com says the full game takes about 4-6 hours. As you can see from the screenshot below, the graphics are pretty unique, and you honestly feel like you’re part of a kids story. But it’s just too fun to care.

The writers seem to have a really great sense of humour, and I found myself really enjoying the time I spent on this demo. Compared to Desperados 2, there just couldn’t be more of a difference.

Take some of the conversation choices. Bone (the white thing/bone) had just been told he had a big nose. The one I have selected in the screenshot is: “And you have an ugly…hat!”

Maybe you had to be there.

Nevertheless, this game is great. At US$12.99 or NZ$19.72 it is extremely well priced. As far as I can tell, you don’t have to have anything shipped to you, you just activate the demo. If I had kids, I might pay that much to keep them busy for the evening. Alass, I have no kids, so I might not be able to justify buying this game. However I can give it an excellent and highly unexpected 9/10.

Posted in Xbox 360 | | 1 Comment »

That’s right, after 17 months of loyal service to wireless broadband provider Woosh, we’re moving on.

They’re not as bad as everyone makes out. Sure, their latency is really poor, but this is to be expected with a completely different type of network. Their service is good, and they’re fighting hard to be competitive in the market.

Unfortunately their future is extremely limited. With the unbundling of the local loop, ADSL should become cheaper and better, while Woosh will continue to require millions of dollars to improve their network.

So I picked up my ADSL equipment cheap off trademe (I should be able to recoup the cost by selling my woosh gear) and signed up initially with xnet. I’d heard some negative things about these guys, but they were the only place where I could switch to a plan at the same price I was paying at woosh, without using their tolls. I have no contract, so if it doesn’t work out, I can always switch.

So far so good.

I spent about five hours trying to make everything work yesterday. Man I’m glad I don’t have a job as a support guy at a helpdesk. It’s just that the possible problems can be so diverse. The guy I spoke to at xnet was good, but how could he possibly know the specific settings required to get my Dynalink RTA210 talking to my D-Link DI-624?

Eventually I got a call from Dynalink. A quick word on that, they have an odd automated message, it tells you that no one is available and that you should leave a message and they’ll get back to you. “Yeah right” I thought, so I just hung up. Hours later I left a message and sure enough, five minutes later they called me. They must just not want to answer the phone.

Anyway the guy at Dynalink knew their products, he took me through a few scenarios, and within five minutes had figured out the obscure problem. The DHCP of the ADSL Router (RTA210) was not enabled:

RTA210 Control Panel > LAN > DHCP Function

This needed to be enabled and in the primary DNS IP Address field, the IP of the DI-624 (192.168.0.1) needed to be entered.

With this done, and the DI-624 set to Dynamic IP Address and with the DNS of my ISP set, all was ready to go. Almost.

As often happens, in the preceding four or five hours, I’d changed a field on the RTA210, and this was now my bain. I sat on the phone for another half hour with a different guy from xnet, until I remembered what I’d done. Back to the ADSL router, turn off what I’d turned on and it was sweet. Hence the ability to write this post.

Wondering why the technical details? I’m quietly hoping that this post might help someone with the same or similar setup as myself. The inability to get ADSL set up has almost sent me into a spiral of depression in the past, and I hope this post can go some way to avoid this for someone else.

If you have any questions about problems you’re having, feel free to ask them as comments, and I’ll do my best to provide an answer.

Posted in Life's happenings, Tech | | No Comments »

This month I’m over my bandwidth limit, so am restricted from some of the joys of the internet. Therefore, it’s only now (at work) that I’m taking some interest in E3.

Welcome to my morning:

9am: Coffee and cabel.

There were a few interesting videos and pics here. Saw a couple of Wii games and some pics of the PS3. Looks like a Cylon to me.

9:45: Gamespot

Didn’t really know where to start so went and ran some errands.

12:15: Deserted gamespot and headed over to my beloved Penny. Sadly my love was lost, and the page could not be displayed.

So back to gamespot, I knew there were three games I was particularly interested in, Battlefield 2142, Unreal 2007 and Quake Wars.

Battlefield 2142

There’s a great interview with the Producer of the game. The interviewer wasn’t exactly wonderful, but there was a lot of interesting information.

It looks like a very good game, very much in the franchise mould, but one I can imagine laying my hands on.

Interestingly, he said that release was scheduled for fall. For those of us not in the states, that means Autumn (Northern Hemisphere). The news on this game had been that it was releasing Q4. According to reliable sources, fall is between September 23rd and December 21st. So there we go.

Unreal 2007

Similarly, gamespot had two vids, one official trailer and one interview. Again, the interview was cool, and left me feeling pretty positive about the game. However the official trailer didn’t overly excite me. The scenery was good, but the game play didn’t look as innovative as BF 2142 had.

Quake Wars

Finally, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. It had the same combination of a new trailer and interview.

Both the interview and trailer were cool. The vehicles and storyline of Quake Wars look like winners over the previous two. I also like the emphasis that is being placed on completing objectives. This opinion hasn’t always been shared by my lanning comrades who are more into running around killing each other. I’m not sure what this says about me.

They’re also saying “fall” as a release date, so despite gamespot putting the game in Q3, this may not occur. Especially as by the dates above, this would only give them seven days of Q3 and Fall to release the game.

So what am I going to buy

…..I wish I knew. I like the look of all of the games, 2142 and Quake Wars especially, but I’ve been looking forward to UT 2007 too long to not play it. I have a very strong history with the BF and I feel that Quake Wars is going to bring something new to the genre. I guess I might have to save NZ$300 and just get them all.

Posted in Current Events, Gaming, Tech, UT 2007 | | No Comments »

Am I the only one who has ever wanted a clear answer to the question of whether there is an NZ DC++ Hub for only New Zealanders?

Well there is. It’s called Direct Connect NZ. It’s address in DC++ is hub.dcnz.net.nz, but you first need to go through a process of registering on their site.

Get in there and support the project.

Posted in Tech | | 3 Comments »