Another Year Over, And What A Good One It’s Been…

2007 was a big year for myself, and also a big year for Where Is The Station. First up, I should probably explain that I’ve been busy with work and with my new gaming blog, so I know I’ve been neglecting this place, and I know I said I’d go back to Linux and personal stuff, and I know I’m still getting hundreds of hits per day even though I should have bad “blog karma”. So I guess I should thank all the readers of Where Is The Station first up.

And now the answer to the question you all had in the back of your minds, what made 2007 so special for the mysterious Geekboy?

Well, where do I start!? I spent the year learning to DJ, and I’m actually pretty good at it now. I switched from PC to Mac, I built my own guitar, the popularity of this site exploded, and I started my new project, Team Teabag. I finished University and emerged, blinking, into the adult world of work, where I now make websites for a living. Also, I finally set up home with The Mrs.

You could say that 2007 was a pretty good year for me!

But what of 2008? How on earth could I top all of this?

Well, for a start, I need a new car. My 1995 Nissan NX is broken, and borrowing cars and bumming lifts with The Mrs. will only keep me entertained for so long. I don’t know what I’m going to get yet, but I’ll let everyone know whatever it is I finally get my hands on.

Also, I need to play my guitar more. It’s so easy to come home from work and plonk myself down in front of the computer or Xbox, and I don’t really play my guitar enough at all. Now I’m happy with my DJing skills, I think it’s about time my new guitar got the attention it deserves. I’d also like to try learning to play the piano again, as it’s something I’ve always wanted to do but never really had the motivation to. Still, the guitar should be top priority musically this year.

Finally, it’s about time I started writing about Linux again!

Anyways, happy new year to everyone who’s managed to read this far, and I hope 2008 brings you everything you want out of life. I’m going to go back to suffering from the dreaded man-flu now, if you don’t mind.

:P

The First Week Of “Team Teabag” Laid Bare

Another day, another shameless plug for our other project, Team Teabag.

We’ve been busy in the last week or so setting things up, researching stories, and writing lots of top quality gaming and geek-related posts for the kind of people who we hope will read TTB to enjoy. Here are some highlights:

• We discovered this excellent programmable Tachikoma robot from Ghost In The Shell (pictured above). There’s even a video!
• We learnt to play “The Metal” by Tenacious D, as made famous by the excellent Guitar Hero.
• On the same subject, we discovered the “Haloisation” of Guitar Hero III, and we liked it. A lot.  We also played some Boom Boom Rocket with the guitar controller, and it was also awesome, and now we hear that they’ve gone and made it even better. Also, did you know that you can play Guitar Hero on a Commodore 64?
• We looked at some cheesy Star Trek monsters, and we pointed and laughed.
• I personally chipped in with an updated top ten Xbox 360 chart, for all those doting mothers out there.
• We opened our very own shop, full of Team Teabag branded merchandise.
• Also on the subject of shopping, we looked at some bargainous plush Xbox 360 toys on ebay.
• We found out how to customize our Rock Band instruments with some wicked skins.
• Finally, we also discovered how to share music between iPods with a new gadget known as the miShare.

And there we have it… We also did absolutely loads of other interesting stuff, so be sure to drop by and check us out.

Normal service will resume here shortly, I’ve been so busy setting up Team Teabag that I haven’t had time to do anything with Linux, but I do have a few stories in the pipeline which should hopefully be emerging soon. You know how it goes, two years of doing this and I’m glad to have another site to fiddle with for a while!

Introducing Our New Project: Team Teabag!

Yep, that’s right. Your favourite blogtards here at Where Is The Station have set up shop at our new address, teamteabag.com. It’s a whole new blog with a focus on gaming and general geekiness, with a proper dot com and all our own hosting and everything. Also, that should hopefully mean a return to a more traditional, Linux-centric Where Is The Station. That, or this place will just die a slow and painful death. I hope not.

All our existing fans need to bear in mind that they’ll need to register for an account to be able to comment. Trust me – it’s going to be a lot better and awesomer that way. While you’re at it, it’d also be a good idea to sign up for a Gravatar.

So, update your bookmarks, and come and join the madness over at Team Teabag. Go team!

Video: Guitar Hero Xplorer – Will It Blend?

Oh, yes… Shame they didn’t blend a wireless Les Paul controller. Still, I guess they fall apart all on their own anyway.

I particularly enjoyed the little Hendrix tribute at the end… Log live Blendtec!

OwningXylophone’s WAIP: Portal, Halo 3, Guitar Hero 3 & PGR 4 Edition

It has been many, many moons since I last updated all you lovely folks out there in the real world with what has been keeping me entertained, so without further ado…

Portal

Unlike fellow blogger SmellyGeekBoy I have been playing the PC version of Valve’s excellent FPP (first person puzzler), Portal, as it came bundled with my new graphics card.  The game uses the Half-Life 2 engine, and is basically a puzzle game from the first person perspective.  Armed only with the Aperture Science Handheld Portal device, you have to complete a series of ever more difficult and taxing challenges.  The game itself is rather short, it can easily be beaten in 3-4 hours, but despite that is easily one of the best games I have played all year, and it is also helped massively by the humor injected into the game by the computer, who sort of narrates and misleads you as you play.  Everybody needs to play this game, ‘Portal’ alone is making me want ‘The Orange Box’ on my 360!

The cake is a lie!

 

Halo 3

Well, months after it’s release and I’m still plugging away at the online mode in Halo 3, having now got every single player achievement.  Aside from the games of team slayer with Mr.’s Wand, Geekboy, Jam and Evoroth, I have also been playing a lot of lone wolves, currently standing at skill 25.  I have finally been making progress on the online achievements too, after legitimately getting ‘Steppin’ Razor’, ‘Mongoose Mowdown’ and ‘Maybe Next Time Buddy’ in the last couple of days…  Just ‘Overkill’, ‘Killing Frenzy’ and ‘Two for One’ to go and that katana is mine!

Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock

Yep, I succumbed to the urge to import Guitar Hero 3, as it’s region free and not due to UK shores until 23.11.07…  I’ll start with the disappointment, the wireless Les Paul. Because somebody thought we needed a removable neck on the guitar I have found myself having to use a rubber band over the back of the guitar in order to keep the neck in firmly, and as Mr Geekboy will vouch for, it doesn’t work too well…  It only seems to effect the connection for the red button, but as it’s probably the most used button, that kinda sucks!  On to the good news, lots and lots of tracks by the original artists and some real pearls too, Sabotage, Paint it Black, One, Welcome to the Jungle.  Although the game itself does seem much harder than GH2, even the level 1 songs on medium have some pretty hardcore solos in.  Also included is a new battle mode, which can be good fun unless you playing against some GH god online.  Other than that, really it’s just GH2 with some spangly new graphics and new songs.  A definite for any GH fan!

Project Gotham Racing 4

And finally, I have been playing the copy of Project Gotham 4 that I won in ‘Aceybongo’s Gamerscore Challenge’.  The game is good, but I think it lacks something compared to PGR3, but I can’t quite put my finger on what…  Gone is the Gotham 3 style single player game, where you chose what you wanted to do from a giant list of events, in it’s place is a calender, which you go through and can only do certain challenges on certain (in-game) dates.  The graphics are stunning (especially how well the lighting works), and with there now being almost every type of weather you can imagine included in the game you can race your mates round Las Vegas, in a Delorian in a thunderstorm (just be careful not to hit 88 miles an hour, or you may end up helping Michael J. Fox in the future!).

Mr. T, William Shatner and Verne Troyer Now Promoting WoW

Mr. T. (I pity the Fool.), William Shatner (that guy from Star Trek, and as of late, some Kellogg’s ads) and Verne Troyer (Mini-me.) have all signed up to do a series of Ads promoting Blizzard’s fantastic MMO – World of Warcraft.

As of now, you can watch Shatner’s and the big T’s ads over on the WoW site, or alternatively, you can check them out below.

For the time being, the Verne Troyer ad is not available on the WoW site or on YouTube. The most I get from these ads myself though is that Mohawks and big gold chains are back in this season.

Video: Cadbury’s Gorilla Remix Edition

Everyone (in the UK, at least) loves this Cadbury’s gorilla advert. But what you probably didn’t know is that, as with most things, there’s a dedicated community of re-mixers and talented video editors working hard on re-imagining it as we speak. Here I present some of their better efforts.

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First up, a bit o’ classic rock… Smoke On The Water style.

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Tommy used to work on the docks, union’s been on strike, he’s down on his luck it’s tough…

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I think first prize must go to this one. It’s incredible and should be seen by everyone.

Why Achievements Are Awesome

Mummy Will Be So Proud!

Aaah… Achievements. Something my good friend and fellow blogger OwningXylophone knows a lot about, as he recently got more of them than anyone else in a competition he was taking part in, and ended up winning an assload of stuff. Achievements can be good because they can win you prizes, you see.

But they have the Xbox 360 community divided. Some are classed as “achievement whores”, social outcasts who spend every waking moment grinding away on the most ridiculous of tasks, only to be rewarded with an achievement and a slight gamerscore increase for their trouble. Others shun this way of life, playing as many games as possible from beginning to end while their “completion percentage” whittles away to nothing.

I’m firmly in the middle, although I have to admit that just lately I’ve been swaying more towards the “whore” way of life. Here’s why.

You see, all modern games have a story of some sort. You progress through it, passing various milestones along the way, until you reach the end. It is at this point when, on other systems without the achievement scheme, you put the box back on the shelf and move on to the next game. But not on the 360, oh no. Not if you’re a big dirty whore.

There are so many “ancilliary” things to do in modern games that the vast majority of people miss out on all the fun that could be had because they’re too busy concentrating on the story. Whether it be driving at 88mph in a thunderstorm in a DeLorean (PGR4), completing a level in a stupidly short amount of time (Sonic The Hedgehog, Zuma), or even launching a garden gnome into space (The Orange Box), game developers are now using achievements to encourage gamers to notice all the silly little things that kept them sane throughtout their game’s development cycle.

So, why am I completing Half-Life 2: Episode 2 with garden gnome in hand? Why am I taking part in some of the more ridiculously long rallies in DiRT even though I finished the career long ago? And why, oh why did I set up a race with my aforementioned fellow blogger in PGR4 today just to do synchronised endos on motorbikes? Because the people who made the games thought that these things would be fun for me to do. And if they want me to keep playing my games long after I traditionally would have given up, squeezing every last drop of fun and value out of them, then I’ll keep on achievement whoring until I can whore no more.

XBox 360 to get DivX Support – Confirmed!

Every pirates dream is coming true…

According to an article on x360a.com, Kevin Hell (CEO of DivX Inc.) has confirmed that they are working with MS to bring DivX support to the XBox 360. The project is not as advanced as the PS3’s, but that’s due to MS’s much tighter requirements and restrictions on software.

So we are not expecting this to be in the fall update, but it is nice to know that support is coming, meaning mo more transcoding programs to get DivX file to stream from your PC. I wonder if this means the Zune will get DivX support too?

Unreal Tournament 3 On X360 Delayed Until 2008

Pew pew pew!

Not too long ago, a certain person over at Epic was quoted in an interview about UT3 saying “So our job, when we finish the PS3 version, and we’ve taken a little break, is to sit down with Microsoft and to figure out how we can do Mods on their system.” He was then asked when the 360 version might be ready and responded, “We won’t even start working on it until early next year.”

That wonderful chap being Mark Rein  from Epic. He has today confirmed that developement on the Xbox 360 version of Unreal Tournament 3 has been postponed until the New Year.

Joystiq sent an email to Mr. Rein to get more inside into the UT3 development drama after finding out that the Official Xbox 360 Magazine had already played the game on the 360 in light of the fact that Rein said the game was only starting development in 2008. Rein clarified his remarks and responded with the following:

“What I probably should have said was ‘start working on it again.’ We had the game up and running on all three platforms up until last spring. In fact Official Xbox Magazine came out and played the game for a great cover story they did on it. We stopped working on the 360 version so we could concentrate our efforts on shipping the various PC and PS3 versions. Once we get those out of the way, and take some time to enjoy the holidays with our friends and families, we’ll start working on the 360 version again.”

So at least something of the game has been developed, but we are still going to have to wait for it to continue development until next year. Hopefully it’ll still hit its projected release date.