What’s with all the films? Many of my posts are mini-reviews for the films I'm watching as part of the 2010 IMDb Top 250 Challenge. Read more here. |
January 1st, 2010 2009 was quite a roller-coster year over in the land of turtles called SiD. The year drifted past and I’m not quite sure what happened to it, even though it was quite eventful. Thus time flies past and blogs become neglected. So, on to a new year, a new decade, same old decline in posting as the years goes by? Let’s see!
So, stealing an idea that Nokkon Wud had at the start of 2009, I am going to attempt the IMDb Top 250 Challenge. This involves watching the Top 250 films as rated by IMDb’s user population in one year. That’s, well, that’s a lot of film, but it’s at least a more original and probably more attainable New Year’s Resolution than say exercising more! The rules I’ve set myself are to watch all of the top 250, including those I’ve seen already. If you want to give it a go but 250 is too much for one year try say the top 100. If you’re not a fan of older movies, try the top 50 lists from each decade.
IMDb’s Top 250 can be found here: http://www.imdb.com/chart/top, though of course it’s always moving so a static list as of January the 1st, 2010 can be found in this Google Doc I put together: (link).
I’ll post mini-reviews of each one as I go, though some other thoughts will often show up in these forum threads:
The IMDb Top 250 Challenge @ Boat Drinks
The IMDb Top 250 Challenge @ OcUK
March 1st, 2009 Spotify has become my main way of listening to music at home, though I’ll leave the discussion of that to another day. I’m also playing ‘The Lost and Damned’ addon to Grand Theft Auto IV at the moment, which has inspired me to check out some of the bands on GTA IV’s many radio stations (continuing the trend of my musical tastes being defined by what game I’m playing!). So over the next few posts I’ll be posting links to Spotify playlists for my favourite stations, with URLs that should jump you straight into Spotify.
The one downside is that a lot of the bands aren’t listed on Spotify so it’s not 100%, wherever I’ve not inserted a URL to a track in the post, it means I couldn’t find it in Spotify. If you can, let me know. Also, any track with a (!) means that the track in Spotify isn’t the original album track, but from something like a compilation album, again if you can find the original track in Spotify, let me know.
Lastly, just a note that the stations and the tracks are in the order they appear in the back of the manual, rather than Wikipedia or any other source.
Click on the logo of the radio station you want to listen to and jump to the relevant post.
Continue reading Grand Theft Auto IV Spotify Playlists
November 19th, 2008 Pros
- It’s responsive.
- Downloading games to the hard disk is a fantastic feature, making the Xbox 360 so much quieter.
- The whole interface reminds me of the various media centre apps out at the moment, with context sensitive backgrounds and information.
- The mini guide that appears when you press in the Xbox guide button is fast and actually useful.
- You can delete 0 gamerscore games, bye bye old arcade demos and Perfect Dark Zero.
Cons
- The majority of the tabs are advertising. Spotlight, Inside Xbox, Games, Movies etc.
- The friends tab is completely unusable if you have more than a handful of friends. It has gone from a list to a side-by-side lineup of everyone’s avatars, which is slow to load and looks awful. I have 99 on my list (which guarantees that there’s someone out there playing the same game as me!) and it looks a mess. Thankfully the mini-guide has an old school friends list.
- The whole marketplace is slow, slower than the old one. Though I’ll put this one down to the NXE only being out for a few hours.
- Old themes are almost useless now as the majority of the dashboard is taken up by a grey background. Remember people, no refunds!
- The Miis – er I mean avatars appear to be a piecemeal attempt to tempt some of the illusive casual Wii playing market. So far I can’t see the point of them. Also the level of customisation is in fact less diverse than the lower fidelity Miis. Why can’t I have a blue shirt? Because it was only developed in green. Go figure.
So I sound quite negative. However installing games to the hard drive is such a great feature, I’m willing to put up with all the cons!
September 25th, 2008 
EA is known for reaching new levels of diabolicalness with their extortionate prices for Rock Band 1 in the UK and releasing Rock Band 1 in other parts of Europe and Australia only now even though Rock Band 2 is out in the USA and was going for a a third by keeping silent about when Rock Band 2 would be reaching UK shores. Now an Xbox 360 TV ad has answered the question we were all asking: when is Rock Band 2 being released in the UK?
Answer: November!
Videogamer.com has the advert online: http://www.videogamer.com/news/25-09-2008-9474.html
August 23rd, 2008 I recently picked up a LG Blu-ray/HD DVD drive for my HTPC (model number LG GGW-H20L), along with Casino Royale and Batman Begins to show it off. Blu-ray is indeed a step up from DVD, though not quite the revelation that was VHS to DVD. There is one movie however, which has been acclaimed as the disc to pick up if you want to really appreciate the jump to high-definition: Blade Runner.
Continue reading Blade Runner: DVD vs Blu-ray Comparison
|
|
