Doon's Reviews

I have been told that I am good at reviews. Sure it's only from one person but it is high praise from a writer. The problem with writing a daily blog is that I don't have a lot of time each day to devote to it. Only on a few rare occasions have I spent more than an hour writing a post here and it's usually much less. For that reason my reviews tend to be short and are often more about why or how I choose to see a particular thing rather than about the thing itself. So I decided I would attempt to write some longer and more formal reviews. The only problem was I didn't have anywhere to put them. I suppose I could a have posted them to IMDb or Amazon but they would end up lost in the crowd there. Perhaps I could have offered my work to an existing site, I know CHUD post freelance articles sometimes, but that would be a bit too much pressure for me at the moment. I decided what I really wanted was a place of my own, so there wouldn't be any pressure and also 100% of the (very little) ad revenue would mine. So I present to you:

http://www.doonsreviews.com

The reviews on there are ones which I wrote a while ago when I first thought about this project (except Green Hornet which I started then but finished this afternoon). Now that the website is finished I can start writing some more. This is actually one of the reasons I started going to the cinema more often and there are five new releases coming in the next two months which I'm interested in. That's why I decided now was the time to get this finished. I'll still be writing my usual quick reaction reviews here as always but now you can expect a longer more detailed one at some point later on the website. There are various methods of subscribing so you can hear about new reviews on the right hand side of the site.

Google+

Yesterday I acquired an invite to the Google+ beta and I've been exploring what it can do. It seems for the most part to be very similar to Facebook but with a fancier user interface as well as a lack of farms. It also makes organizing your friends and contacts in to sub-groups much easier than Facebook does. Also of course it integrates with all the other Google products so I could simply import my Gmail contacts in to my friend circles and it is quick and easy to share my Picasa photos with those contacts. It's pretty cool but as it is still invite only it's quite empty, at least of people I know anyway. You can follow me here if you so desire and if you ask nicely I could probably send you one of my invites.

Project Revival

Regular readers might remember me talking about a new project earlier in the year which I was starting to hype a lot even though I had never explained what it was. I was looking at the calendar earlier and thinking about upcoming events when I realized that there is a lot of stuff on the way that would compliment that project quite nicely. I have therefore picked it up again and have been working on it this evening. It is now my primary side project. There is always more work left to do than you think there is, however it is coming along quite well now. I think I should be able to get it out later this week. Back to coding now, more information when it's ready.

An Uneventful Monday

Not much going on today. I did some work, I attempted to fixed some PCs and I played some games. Absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. No special news, videos or pictures on the Internet, no new games to write about. So that leaves me writing about how little is going on. Perhaps something interesting will happen tomorrow.

First Impressions: Deus Ex

The Steam summer sale is all over now and I've got some great bargains. Also of course I don't have enough time to play them all, they will keep me going for a long time. Especially when you consider I've not played everything I picked up in the last sale yet! One in particular on that list is Deus Ex. I bought a pack containing that game and its sequel in a previous sale. It might not even have been the last one!

Deus Ex is quite an old game now, it was first released in 2000. However it is considered to be a classic and yet it is one I have never played until now. A modern prequel to the games (Deus Ex: Human Revolution) is due out in August, so I decided if I was going to get around to playing these games then now would be the time.

As you would expect from a game which is over ten years old now the graphics look extremely dated. Still it runs smoothly, the controls respond well and most importantly the story and setting are engaging. Which is of course one of the reasons it is considered to be a classic and gives you the power to look past the dated graphics. The cyberpunk setting also helps as that style is a particular favorite of mine. The game is a RPG/FPS hybrid and its biggest draw seems to be the many different ways the game allows you to complete the missions. From dialogue to stealth to frontal assault. I've only played the first couple of missions so far and I can already see how many different options were available. Most games today are seriously linear in comparison. I wonder with all the other things I have on at the moment if there will be time to complete it before the new game arrives. I look forward to trying.

Hobbitses

Lets take a break from the heavily gaming related week. It's the end of the Steam sale tomorrow anyway. Instead today I'll mention there's a new Hobbit production video from Peter Jackson available. It's on his Facebook page here: http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=10150314562706807&oid=141884481557

It is interesting to see that Andy Serkis is now also a second unit director. I wonder how that came about as according to IMDB it's not something he has done a lot of before. A lot of the video is about location scouting and so it has lots of helicopter shots of New Zealand which is always nice. Looking forward to this more and more as all the little bits of information trickle out.

Old or New?

If you've been reading this blog for a while or you've ever looked at my Stream/Raptr profile then you'll know I have and play a lot of computer games. I already had a bit of a backlog and now with another Steam sale event that has got larger. Still with all those lovely new worlds to explore and interesting puzzles to solve there are many times when I think about playing games I've played before instead. I guess it's a kind of nostalgia with the knowledge that it's going to be good based on previous experience. I was reading an online comic earlier based in the land of Tamriel and it really got me itching to play Morrowind or Oblivion again. In the end I resisted the temptation to reinstall those games. I really do have plenty of other things on which to use my time and I have played though both those games twice before. They are not short games either. On top of that The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim will be out in November so I don't really have to wait that long to return to Tamriel for a new adventure anyway. I do still have an urge for some traditional fantasy roleplay though. I have a couple of un-played options waiting which might fit the bill, either Divinity II or Gothic or perhaps I should go back and finish Jade Empire although that's not traditional fantasy. We shall have to wait and see.