North Korea Rocket Launch – Satellite or Nuke?

Today, South Korean sources reported that North Korea launched a rocket of some sorts in North Korea (at 10:30PM EST). U.S officials have confirmed this and President Obama had warned North Korea that any launch, satellite or other, would not help North Korea at the 6 Party Talks.

Pyongyang states that the rocket was simply a satellite, but Seoul disagrees. Western nations are fearing that North Korea has launched an intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM.

Only time shall tell if the North Korean’s are lying.

Spore Releasing Tomorrow… Videos for you :P

With the upcoming game SPORE releasing in the United States for people that haven’t pirated it, it could be a very exciting day as people race to discover the secret of the Spore universe.. So I bring you a collection of videos (not the galactic center obviously )

Spore: A Review

My rio-something or another creature from the Tribal Stage

EDIT: I added pictures at the bottom.

EDIT EDIT: According to ‘Jim’ from the comments, I can confirm that SPORE was released in Aussieland on the 4th

Before anyone reads this, I advise anyone from EA Games/Maxis to leave this site now. I cannot be held responsible for the contents of this review, and therefore none of the following information can be used against me in the court of law.

Ok, now that the pooper snoopers have left let’s get to the review.

For those who are uninformed, SPORE is an artificial life simulator game similar to that of The Sims, also developed by EA. But the major difference between the two is that SPORE is focused on 5 different stages of evolution of your creatures life (I say creature because if you plan to make a human in this game you should get ready for your eyes to be burned out of your skull) versues the Sims where the goal of the game is to live your characters life.

SPORE releases September 4th in Australia (need confirmation), September 5th in Europe, and September 7th in North America. I highly recommend you buy this game to support the dev team because this game is the best thing to happen to the industry since Pong. It’s $50 and can be found at www.spore.com.

Ok so now the sexy review part . So I got a torrent of Spore released on the kind behalfs of RELOADED, but to confinsate for that I bought the Galactic edition of Spore x2. So I installed it, opened it and chose a planet of which to start my life off on. So I choose the ugliest looking planet with brown land and purple water (obviously) and made my creature look like a cross between a Platypus and a Hiena. So in the first stage, the Cell Stage, you are playing a 2d game where your creature must run around in a point and click adventure game to eat green things or red things and not get killed by the unfairly large enemies (i.e 1280×1024 pixels in size xD). The point of this is to gather ‘DNA Points’ which allow you to add stuff to your cell such as fins, horns, mouths etc, etc. After a certain amount of gobbing your creature decides that getting chased around by some giant circles isn’t smart so it decides to move you to land, where you get chased around by unfairly sized monsters in the Creature stage.

Now, the Creature stage is the weakest link in SPORE in my honest opinion, it is incredibly tedious and it makes you constantly change your creature to get enough DNA points to advance to the Tribal stage. But it’s still moderately fun. And the romance scenes are of the utmost hilarity. All in all it’s well rounded but there isn’t much to say about it. But in the end it’s the last place where you can customize your creature before the Civilized stages. So, after running around for an hour or so I finally advanced to the next stage. Tribal.

Tribal stage is probably the 2nd funnest of all of the Stages, mainly because it gives you the widest variety of stuff to do with the AI while controlling only a few of your creature, versues the Civilization stage where you are forced to control vehicles only (not that that isn’t fun ). So in Tribal stage your people have formed a small village, and they decide to take control over the local area with spears, axes, fire, flutes, horns, and other things.. or a combination of them . So the first thing I did was build myself a small army of spear wielding meglomaniacs and charged Brown Tribe because they were ugly. The result of this battle was the complete annihilation of the buggers, but it made me feel kind of sad because I will never see them later in the game. So I immediately teamed up with Green Tribe by marching into town and having an all county music-thing which I smashed 1, 2, and 3 as ordered by the Greenies until they sent me enough food to basically buy every building (food in the currency in Tribal Stage). But I couldn’t get Orange, Cyan, or Red Tribe’s to dance with me to lala land because they were xenophobic wankers so I immediately shouted something about how much I hate Communists or something and charged them with some axes, fire peeps, and a creepy looking tribal leader until their cities were all rubble. But apparently SPORE didn’t have a liking for violent acts so I started out as a military society in Civ Stage (instead of a Economic or Religious) but we’ll get to that later. So let’s wrap up Tribal stage. You get limited customization about what your people wear (including a nice mustache that I put on their feet) and what buildings you have and the company you keep. All in all it’s a relatively simple Real Time Strategy game that would be perfect for the consoles. Let’s move on.

Civ Stage is the 3rd place in the ranking of stages in SPORE, mainly because the diplomacy isn’t deep enough and while having a variety of weapons and vehicles to use the game is far less complex than Tribal stage. It’s like a cake with no frosting, it is still good but if you have the same type of cake layered with several thousand calories of frosting your going to go for the one that turns your tounge white. Anywho, after giving away all of my money for the good of some crazed sociopath bent on snorting spice all day (Spice is the currency in Civ and Space) I decided to take a religious city so I could convert cities to my religion. And, it is quite humorous to watch a giant hologram preach in gibberish to enemy cities. Or turn a giant dinosaur (the big ones from Civ stage) into your color and watch him dance around. So those are the good parts, add in a bit of SimCity: Societies into each of the 12 cities you can take control of and you have Civilization Stage. A combination of City building, Real time strategy, and economy managment.

Now, before you read this last stage’s review, please note that there are 4 million planets and I’ve been to about 15 of them. Colonized 4, and met 1 other species. That how big this Stage is.

The making of a spaceship

Ok, Space Stage. Easily the best part of the entire game. You start out with your people doing a little dance and blowing up a building and viola! You have a space ship, then you run around your planet shooting animals for 5 minutes to get used to the controls and then your Commando in Chief sends to you to colonize a nice little planet to start making some spice (once again, Spice is a currency) and then destroy every planet in your way until you reach the center of the galaxy. Where there is supposidly a secret ending to the game that explains something about evolution or something. And I’ll be happy when I get their and I shall tell you of what it is (in spoiler quotes, obviously =P). ANYWAY. I’m not very far into Space, but it appears that most of the things you can put on your ship are superficial and have no real impact on what your ship does, but hell, 16 missile launchers on the front of the ship pick up teh alien chickz (: .
So, these are what you can do in Space. You can terraform planets, you can capture aliens for observation, you can attack other colonies, you can trade with aliens, you can get other people’s species and interact with them with an AI slapped on, you can build colonies, you can take on quests, you can manage cities, yuo can collect spice, you can research science, and the most important thing of all… you can learn about life and evolution.

In my honest opinion, each of the Spore stages aren’t that great.. but together, they not only immerse you in a rich enviornment of learning and fun, but make you have a sense of belonging to each of your creations that keeps you coming back for more.

Graphics: 9/10
Sound: 10/10 (the sound is absolutely amazing, especially from the dinosaurs )
Gameplay: N/A. It is hard to rate the gameplay, since each stage is different. But if pressed I’d give it a 9 or 10
Replayability: You won’t always want to redo the first 2 stages, but the later ones will keep you coming back.
Depth: 8/10: Depth is what makes or breaks a story, and in SPORE, you ARE the story. But it is a little lackluster at times, like in Civilization stage where you have to conquer most of the people (while in the real world most countries live in harmony with each other, except the United States obviously).

Space creator

Yeah. This isn't gonna take long at all XD

..and this is where I live

Sporebucks.. very original guys.. very original...

One solar system.. out of several hundred thousand

Mario Kart WII

I was looking foward to reviewing this game ever since I got it from GameFly, which you should check out because it’s nice. Anywho, For people that are under two, Mario Kart is a racing game developed by Nintendo in which you drive around in motorcycles and karts trying to win the race, while slaughtering every A.I and person in sight with little red shells.

I’ve never really been a fan of the series, but it’s a nice game to play with my little cousins on vacation. But this Mario Kart has really been a kickass one. Honestly, it is the first game besides Alone in the Dark and Wii Sports that actually uses the Wii controls well. Well, I admit, it’d be really hard for them to cock it up. But at least your not randomly throwing the controller to try to do something (Zack and Wiki).

Let’s dive into the gameplay. For singleplayer you can do a variety of things, a loose campaign (Grand Prix), Time trials, scoreboards, and online multiplayer. The Grand Prix is fun at a variety of difficulties, and it includes a large variety of older tracks, aswell as new unlockable tracks in the Star Cup, Leaf Cup, and more I haven’t unlocked yet =P. Online multiplayer is weak in the custom options, but it’s surprisingly fun. And the game let’s you play on racetracks you haven’t unlocked yet, which is groovy.

Mario Kart Wii also has a tournament system, it’s own channel, and a nice ranking system. So all in all it’s fairly well rounded game that is a good time waster and is great for playing with younger friends.

360desktop – Compiz for Windows

Yes people, a Compiz-like program that works well is finally available for the PC. Actually, I bet it’s been around for a while but it takes me a long time to start caring since I really only use Linux most of the time. Anywho, 360desktop is just like Compiz, allowing you have almost unlimited desktop real estate. Which is nice, especially for laptops or small monitored desktops.

I found that it worked fairly well on my 128mb mobile graphics card, aswell as my 256mb desktop. So if your in dire need of more desktop space, or you think your computer is tough enough to run Crysis on very high on the same computer twice then 360desktop is for you

360desktop

Missing Desktop Syndrome

Here’s a quick tip that I squeezed out of myself just now. If you ever find your icons plus taskbar missing, hit the old CAD (ctrl alt del) and find explorer.exe on the processes list and kill it, if it’s not there, then simply hit file then run and type “explorer.exe” no quotes and that should fix the problem

NOTE! To Vista users, if an MSI file hangs explorer.exe do the same thing!

Firefox 3’s Easter Eggs

Mainy game and software designers have realized sometime in there lives that jokes are funny, and people like funny things. So they throw in these random lil’ things when they get bored.

Until recently, Firefox has only had the Book of Mozilla, but it appears that Mozilla is branching out with it’s third installment of the worlds best web browser, Firefox.

Firstly, everyone liked the movie I, Robot and if you didn’t go suck a fat one. AANNNYYWAY, type about:robots in your address bar to see a nice little page of goodies

Another easter egg hidden in Firefox is none other than about:config. Type it in for the first time and you’ll get a nice warning message

Also, of course, is the sleeping giant, the Book of Mozilla. Tenth edition