Gadgetoid

Christmas puts everyone into a spending frenzy, it’s most probably the first time this year that I have actually purchased a game (sans Xbox Live Arcade and World of Warcraft, which don’t count!)

I dived down to the stores far too close to Christmas, and stood in a queue of… well… just me (Got to love the obscure locations of Game stores), to grab a copy of Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts having read far too many reviews purporting it to be some sort of holy grail of gaming.

After a couple of days being hopelessly addicted to just a small fraction of the game, vehicle construction, I’m inclined to agree.

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It’s been a year of slow but sure growth for us here at Gadgetoid. We’ve been joined by John and, briefly, Ken Bool who have contributed a great deal to our games console coverage. John has single handedly churned out a wealth of Xbox 360 reviews for us and attained a very small fan following.

We’ve fought to deliver new content and explore new avenues, including an absurd number of case reviews and a look at some great DAB radios.

Our Podcast is now in iTunes, although it currently stands at a single episode we’re eager to produce more and strive to be considerably less boring. We have also experimented with video recording of both Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 in-game footage, this might result in a video Podcast sometime in 2009.

January 2009 will see us catching up with an overwhelming amount of coverage that we were eager to publish in December but just couldn’t find the time. Many more case reviews are on the way, and we’ll be looking at SONY’s all-in-one computers, more professional audio equipment from Korg, Behringer and Line6, plenty more console games and all manner of other things.

So! Happy Christmas! Have a great time off, if you’re having one, and have a great Christmas. We hope you’ll be reading Gadgetoid through 2009 and we’ll be making every effort to bring you interesting coverage of everything from professional audio gear to computer games and stay true to our name.

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Whilst admiring the comparative flexibility of the Proporta Gadget Bag in preparation for my review, I came up with the idea of an even more flexible, potentially ground-breaking, yet surprisingly simple bag.

The idea is to have a single fold-in-half bag, available in an array of sizes and styles, which is lined with the sticky half of velcro inside and on both sides. You could then purchase an array of custom-fit or generic sized pouches for every single one of your gadgets and affix them inside the bag.

“Flexi” bags could come in all sorts of styles, shapes, sizes and could include plastic hard-casing, external pockets and different styles of strap. They could also zip up, clamp shut or provide locking mechanisms for extra security. The one thing they would never need is internal pouches. If you want to upgrade your bag you simply keep all of your velcro gadget pouches and affix them inside the new bag.

The same goes if you need a smaller bag for a short trip, or a larger bag for a hefty laptop. Just buy the bag, affix all your gadget pouches and away you go.

If you buy a new gadget, simply buy a new pouch! If you want to remove a gadget pouch from the bag and pop it in your pocket… well, you can!

I can’t find anything like this online, I would jump at reviewing one if such a thing exists. Thus I’ve created this post and the attached but somewhat rough image/concept to document my “invention” and put it out there so that, hopefully, an experienced maker of bags and pouches can develop it to fruition.

There’s an opportunity in here for everyone if the flexi-bag could become an open standard. All you need to do is affix velcro to the back of a pouch to make it compatible, cheap and simple!

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Yes, I know it’s old, but I can’t believe this product exists… I love a cold pillow as much as the next man but how does someone find the capitol to turn such an inane preference into a product?

Oh, wait… you can’t answer. No comments system!

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This is, perhaps, the most chuffed I’ve been after opening a for-review package. Proporta.com bundled a tea-bag with their shipment of an i900 case for review here at Gadgetoid UK and, apparently, they do the same for all of their customers. How incredibly random is that!

Samsung i900 case and screen protector review coming soon, watch this space!

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Diabolically bad choice of voice and character for the prince aside, I’ve actually found the new Prince of Persia to be a rather enchanting and slightly different game. Free from the frustrating inconvenience of ever having to die and witness a “Game Over” screen, it seems that they’ve finally gone the whole nine yards with the death cheating mechanics unlike Sands of Time. This means you can get on with enjoying the beautiful scenery and the prince’s monkey-like dash across it completely uninterrupted.

When you plunge to your death or a battle turns sour your new-found, female companion will leap to your aid, using her magic to pull you from the brink of death and plonk you to safety.

This pseudo invulnerability isn’t the only daring addition to the series, a new graphics style has been introduced that can be closely approximated as cell-shaded but is a little bit more than that. The artists have sought to re-create the charm and style of concept art drawings in a 3d world and, despite the characters looking jarring and strange at first, you will quickly find yourself getting used to the style and, perhaps, even liking it.

Finally, the battle system has been completely overhauled, forcing you to face only a single enemy at a time until it is defeated. The benefit of this is that battles are far more fluid and beautiful than ever before, but I can’t help wanting something a little more epic.

The new Prince of Persia is proclaimed to be the first in a trilogy. I can only hope that the sequels retain the frustration-free gameplay mechanic but it would be nice to see the one-on-one combat elaborated somewhat to reflect the fluid battles against multiple enemies that I enjoyed in Sands of Time.

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Maybe I’m missing out on something special by lazily galavanting through Dead Space on easy difficulty. But should difficulty really affect the atmospheric creation of fear that fundamentally?

I don’t think so. And as every surprise thus far has already been revealed to me on easy difficulty, switching it up to medium or hard is pretty much out of the question. This means I can’t really confirm my suspicion that Dead Space is just, well, not that scary.

I know, at least, that the higher difficulty levels will surely leave you in some hairy moments where you don’t quite have enough ammo or health, and have to run for your life or simply die. I’m not sure this really creates fear. Frustration, perhaps?

There are plenty of atmospheric, unexpected and marginally disturbing moments in Dead Space, don’t for a minute think that they’re not at least making a cursory attempt at amping up the fear. But I’m not getting the pulse racing, shuddering, raw and genuine fear that coursed through me throughout games such as Resident Evil and Silent Hill. Alas, it seems to me that Dead Space has catered for the modern market and become too much of an action game than a horror.

But on the other hand I’ve heard that it IS scary from several independent sources who joked against playing alone with the lights off. Well, I assume they joked, because that’s what I’ve been doing when playing it.

Ben Croshaw of Zero Punctuation puts it best, your character is no ordinary man with whom you can empathize, but an ad-hoc soldier adorned by a suit of armor which can be upgraded throughout the game making you nigh on invulnerable. If that wasn’t enough you have an arsenal of improvised but extremely deadly weaponry to boot.

Suffice to say, on easy difficulty the story of Dead Space can be coasted through and enjoyed, and enemies are nothing but a minor inconvenience.

I decided to play Dead Space on my return to normality because I wanted a game to scare the pants off me. All I got was a sci-fi shooter with elements of horror. A damned fine game, but definitely not what I wanted.

We’ll see how it fares in the full review. Watch this space… or at least the one on the front page.

Update

Okay. Maybe it’s scaring me a little bit now, but the game feels like it’s drawing to a close so it might be a bit late. Oh wait… it has 12 chapters! So I’m barely half way through. Okay, now I’m scared.

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Gadget coverage will resume shortly now I’m back in the UK recovering from mosquito bites and the harsh summer sun in Mauritius. It’s a beautiful country, for sure, but I’m not a heat person and definitely, definitely not a mosquito person… there’s an apt quote from Aliens to describe my hatred for the little buggers.

I’ve got a lot of coverage to catch up on. PRs, if you’re still waiting for a review it should come soon. Don’t hesitate to bug me if it doesn’t!

On that note, I must get back to checking my email, requesting lovely, gadgety goodness and scratching like bloody hellfire!

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I’ll always be a PC user at heart, despite my almost total migration to Macs, that’s why the temptation of the Vaio LV has kicked in and usurped my plans to wall mount a 24″ iMac in the bedroom in lieu of a SlingCatcher and 26 or 32″ LCD television.

My trip to the Microsoft Christmas Showcase has brought Vista, it’s superb Media Center and Vaio computers to the front of my mind. Microsoft were busy pushing their Media Center imbued Vista, demonstrating it on the delightful, round and quirky little Vaio HTPCs which are cute, but don’t quite cut it for me.

The Vaio VGC-LV1S, on the other hand, is a different story. It has a bigger brother in the form of the Vaio RT series, but it’s far too chunky, ugly and lacking in crucial features that the LV series boasts for my liking.

The trouble with Macs is that Apple make good laptops, and good absurdly-high-end-desktop-computers but the iMac and Mac mini, whilst beautiful OSX machines, are incredibly compromised and either difficult or impossible to upgrade.

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I’m sure most people are already well aware of Apple’s obscene RAM pricing, I have a tendency to rant about it from time to time. If you’re looking to buy a shiny new iMac then avoid the temptation to click that £94 upgrade to 4GB and bear with me a moment.

£94 for 4GB is about double what it’s worth, this isn’t too bad in itself but you have to be wary that you are, in fact, swapping from 2GB to 4Gb meaning that you’re actually paying that extra £94 for only 2GB extra.

That’s £47 per 1GB stick of RAM.

Multiply that by 4 and you have a whopping £188 cost for the pleasure of having 4GB of RAM installed in your iMac from the word go. That’s an insane price for something that costs only £45.81 elsewhere.

4.1 times more expensive, if you must know!

Not only that! But upgrading AFTER you purchase leaves you with two 1gb sticks of DDR2 RAM which you can shove into another computer or sell on EBay.

So, what’s it gonna’ be? 4GB RAM for £94 or 4GB + 2GB RAM for £46?

I thought so.

My ongoing crusade against Apple will probably never amount to anything remotely resembling success, but I have a strong objection to both their upgrade prices and spare/upgrade parts prices. A 250GB hard drive upgrade for the MacBook Pro, for example, costs about £70 for Apple and will cost you a further £60ish for installation unless you’re brave enough to attempt it yourself.

Yes. I recently investigated the cost of upgrading the paltry 120GB hard drive in my MacBook to 320GB. Now a 320GB, 7200RPM hard drive can be had for about £60-£70 and they wanted to sell me a 250GB one, with a spindle speed of 5200RPM no doubt, for the same price. Factor in installation and we’re talking over £130 for either option. Hint: a 1TB external hard drive can be had for about £90.

Why these disgusting prices when the Macs have already gained notoriety as premium products simply by their base purchase price alone? I find it hard to believe that Apple do anything more than buy off the shelf hard drives in bulk and re-sell them to their customers at absurdly inflated prices. There’s no need to shaft your customers over once they’ve bought into Mac, Apple. Stop it.

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