Orderoftheflame

So I’ve given the Dragon Age II demo a spin now, and I’m pretty pleased by it. Some of the voice acting and character models seem a bit bland, but I only found them minor annoyances. What I can grasp of the changes to combat seem quite good, though I’m pretty ambivalent to change in that area, I liked DA:O as it was. The story has me intrigued, though the demo gives little clues to the full extent of it, there was one interesting appearance of a character from the first game that asks a considerable number of questions…

I’m not going to be an idiot and hold out for it to be bigger and better than the first game, I’m just going to enjoy the ride. To be honest, if I get a tenth as much enjoyment from it as the first game, it’ll be money well spent. Can’t wait.

So when I actually think about it, a lot of my favourite tracks are cover versions of songs written by other artists. I don’t think it’s just the fact that they’re covers that interests me, but the fact that for some reason sometimes taking a song that already exists and developing it in a new style seems to work really well.

I thought I’d talk about some of my favourites over a few posts, but a disclaimer first. While I love my music, I have little to no musical knowledge or talent, so don’t expect detailed analysis or anything, just my brief feelings on them.

Cover by The Jimi Hendrix Experience On Electric Ladyland

All Along the Watchtower

Original by Bob Dylan On John Wesley Harding

Jimi Hendrix’s version of All Along the Watchtower has been one of my favourite pieces of music for a long time. As you’d expect it’s full of his signature sound, and quite a departure from the Bob Dylan’s original version of it.

Both Jimi and Bob’s versions of it are superb, but I feel that Hendrix’s ability to deliver it with a lot more power behind it really pushes it up there.

Cover by Foo Fighters On The Colour and the Shape (Bonus)

Baker Street

Original by Gerry Rafferty On City to City

I didn’t really listen to either version closely until Gerry Rafferty’s recent death, but it’s song that everyone should recognise when they hear it, even if they don’t know who wrote it or even what it’s called.

The Foo Fighters version swaps the famous saxophone riff onto the guitar, and adds a much heavier sound across the whole track. This combined with Dave Ghrol’s great talent applied to the lyrics make it well worth listening to if you can find a copy.

I’ve been getting through some books again. I love reading, but often struggle to find the time. Since starting my job, I’ve been making the time for myself and in an attempt to get back to at least one blog post a week I thought I’d share what I’ve been reading the past few months.

Mogworld – Yahtzee Croshaw

This would be the first book by Ben Croshaw of Zero Punctuation fame. I enjoyed it mostly to be honest, even if the story wasn’t as strong as I had hoped.
Yahtzee as you’d expect knows how to deliver a funny one liner perfectly, but while the story started strongly, it quickly became predictable in what was going too happen. On top of this some of the characters got pretty repetitive as the book went on.

Still despite this, there’s lots of great references to things that you’d expect the target audience to be in touch with, and certainly has moments that had me in stitches. Worth a read if you come across a copy and you enjoy his other work.

Carrying the Fire – Michael Collins

Despite being less well known than he deserves, Mike Collins is most famous for being the Command Module Pilot for the Apollo 11 moonshot. I have to admit that I find him by far one of the more interesting astronauts based on documentaries and interviews I’ve seen with him, so when I saw this in a bookshop I couldn’t resist picking it up.

The book covers Collins’ life before he joined NASA right up until after the Apollo 11 launch in great detail and manages a great mix between the humorous human side of himself and the great technical details and knowledge he provides to the book that made it especially enjoyable to read for me. This actually pops into the top few books I’ve read actually, a superb insight into a fascinating life.

In the Shadow of the Moon – Francis French and Colin Burgess

Another book following space exploration in the 60s (it’s an interest of mine if you hadn’t noticed..), differing from the previous book this is an in depth account of both American and Russian space programs up until the first moon landing written by space historians Francis French and Colin Burgess.

The book contains lots small interviews from many different astronauts involved in the two programs, giving a great range of opinion and detail on all of the flights leading up until the first moon landing. My only criticism if I had one would be that it ends abruptly with the moon landing, and doesn’t even cover the first steps on the moon. Despite this it’s another great read that I thoroughly enjoyed, and would recommend to  anyone interested in the subject.

Epic sadface post. The White Stripes split yesterday.

The White Stripes would like to announce that today, February 2nd, 2011, their band has officially ended and will make no further new recordings or perform live.

The reason is not due to artistic differences or lack of wanting to continue, nor any health issues as both Meg and Jack are feeling fine and in good health.

It is for a myriad of reasons, but mostly to preserve what is beautiful and special about the band and have it stay that way.

http://www.whitestripes.com/

As a big fan of the great one-man-two-man band, you could say I’m pretty gutted by this.

So, apparently it’s a lot easier to create a WordPress theme than I thought. An evening and a half, and we’re well on our way.

While some of the styling and layout is way off what I want, as far as I can tell… functionally, it’s complete and fully usable. So I may as well leave it on. At least it’ll nag me to finish it off.

So, something else significant that I did forget to mention… I’m starting on creating my own theme for the site. Aesthetically, I’m not planning on changing much compared to how it looks at the moment (because I like how it looks at the moment!). This is mainly to give me a bit more control over some things that have nagged at me a while.

It’ll probably be a long way coming, so don’t hold your breath.

Crap, crap, crap. Another month passed and it almost went without so much as a single entry (not including the post that I wrote last year). I’ve had a ton of things I’ve actually wanted to post, but never found the time to actually get on and write it.

Firstly, I’m now starting to settle into my job, which is a good thing as far as my new car fund goes, give it the best part of a year and hopefully I’ll finally be able to get rid of the old bucket I’m currently commuting in!

Photography wise, I’ve not found a great deal of time to indulge in it, but thanks to some great birthday and Christmas gifts, I’ve got the macro set-up I’ve been looking at getting now. I’ve only taken a few practice shots so far and it’s quite a departure from what I’ve done before, but I can definitely see me having fun with it when I finally get round to it.

Another aspect I’ve not really had much time to dedicate myself too either it feels is gaming. My retro collection is still growing, in particular I’ve managed to pick up a handful of SNES titles I’ve wanted copies of; In particular Donkey Kong Country, A Link to the Past and Super Metroid. It’s still relatively small, but it’s got to the point where I’ve finally needed to put some shelves up for them, until now all my retro games have been spread across anywhere they fit, I’m sure there’s still some I’ve still yet to re-locate lost away somewhere.

The only big game I’ve really given the time to recently is Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood. I’ll admit, when it launched I fobbed it off a bit as a side step to the second game and thought I’d just wait for Assassin’s Creed 3. How wrong was I? Even though there’s not a great deal more content, and the inclusion of just a single city is pretty disappointing, it definitely drives the story forward and really expands some of the characters. Very glad I decided to pick it up.

The only other significant event that my mind is allowing me to remember is that I’m booked to go on holiday. Any one care to guess where I could be off to?

Happy New year to all!

2010 was a strange year for games (for me), and almost feels like it’s been had backward. There were still a lot of great titles, but I feel that the best of these were out at the start of the year rather than the end, leaving all the anti-climatic half-arsed blockbusters to the period of the calendar that’s usually jam-packed with the titles that I’d usually be writing about here.
Most of the games here, I was done and finished with before summer was over, leaving little to be desired from the end of the year.

Fortunately one genre that has remained consistently good is indie games, and even right up to the end of the year I was finding new gems of lasting enjoyment among them, making picking my favourites a real challenge this time around.

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It seems like the VGA awards are becoming considerably better than E3 for the big announcements. Elder Scrolls 5, Uncharted 3, Arkham City and Mass Effect 3 teasers on the same day?

All day one buys for me. Embeded trailers after the hop.

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Although I’m not sure if a third reboot is needed so soon, I’m looking forward to this immensely.

For the record, the best in the series so far is still tied between Legend and TR2. Long time ago now, but I suspect TR2 would have been the first PS1 game I ever bought!