Bought a kite. A dual-control stunt delta. Took it out to Sydney Park on Sunday - fun stuff.

I’ve finally gotten around to creating an album’s worth of tracks for the dark ambient noise project I’ve been working on, given it a name, and put it online. I’d love it if you’d take a listen and let me know what you think. The entire album is available for download via AmieStreet

I’ve also made a Facebook musician page if you’re that way inclined.

A dedicated page will eventually pop up at downfall.brokengod.net when I have the time. Right now it’s just a logo/placeholder.

A second album is already in the pipeline - how motivated I am to continue with it and the direction I take it in probably hinges a lot on the feedback I get from this album - so please, be honest with your comments. :)

Ah, holidays. 2 weeks of not having to deal with customers. Good stuff.

To celebrate this event, we went and bought ourselves a PS3. Seemingly unnecessary, we justified a second console with the twin virtues of “it’s a cheap BluRay player” and “Metal Gear Solid 4” - the latter of which is a convincing argument all by itself even if it has been delayed *again*.

It came with Virtua Tennis 3 which is a steaming pile of turd, but we also picked up Folklore and Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, both of which are awesome. The former is a quirky adventure in a Netherworld populated by odd little faery Folk, while the latter is a very competent Tomb Raider clone with some excellent ‘Cover and Fire’ shooting action thrown in, along with a rocking good storyline.

Speaking of which - the move toward solid story lines in games beyond “go kill the bad guys, quick!” is really making me a happy camper. Story lines are really getting involved, with intricate cutscenes drawing you into the game. Love it.

We also hired and completed Call of Duty 4 which again had an excellent story and was great fun to play through.

I’ve also been writing a good deal of music - more on that later.

What is wrong with you lot? Why are you so fucking stupid? Well, maybe not you specifically, but your fellow humans, oh my.

I am, as you may know, a picture framer. I frame pictures. It is, almost exclusively, all that I do. My business name features the words “picture frame” in it.

However, I just had a customer come in - and I assure you, this is not an isolated event - to pick something up. Like about 70% of these morons, she doesn’t have her job docket, so I ask her her name. Plug it into the computer, nothing comes up [because, again like 70% of these dumb asses, she can never decide whether to give her first or last name, and so seems to alternate between the two] so I ask her what she was having done - y’know, maybe I remember doing it, and I’ll be able to find it amongst the 200 or so jobs in our store room currently.

“A picture frame,” she tells me.

That narrows it down, oh not at all, really, so I look at her expectantly, causing her to clarify.

“A gold one,” she reveals.

oh, for fucks sake.

I actually had to ask her *what she was having framed* before she would reveal this piece of information.

It seems TISM are right - You really are only five yards from a fuckwit.

So, rhythm games. I have to say, when it comes to this genre, I have never been a fan. DDR, Amplitude, In The Groove, and about a bazillion clones and homages - they just never struck me as “fun” and since “fun” is why I play games, they never really got much time in any of the various game machines I’ve owned.

This all changed a couple weeks back, when a demo of Guitar Hero III was released on XBoxLive. For some reason, I decided to give it a chance, and it really really grew on me. I’m now the proud owner of the retail version of the game, complete with a wireless Gibson Les Paul-alike controller. I should actually have two of these controllers, but that is a story for later.

Playing with the not-quite-a-guitar-but-almost controller makes the game even more fun. And while I am being forced, in Career Mode, to play some songs I would rather not [Stevie Ray Vaughn's 'Pride & Joy'? As an encore? REALLY??] there are also some tracks I love, including Dead Kennedys‘ Holiday in Cambodia and Black Sabbath’s Paranoid. Better still, I’m being exposed to good music I’d never heard before, including heard-of-but-never-heard Die Toten Hosen’s Hier Kommt Alex.

The difficulty ramping of the game is well done. Playing on Easy mode [I'm a wimp, shuddup] I found that it started as a complete doddle, but a few hours in, it’s gotten to the point where it’s obviously more difficult, but I’ve gotten better at about the same speed, so there’s a good feeling of “hey! look at me rock!” as I play more complicated note progressions and chords.

Now, if only I had that other controller, Chelle and I could be playing Co-op Career mode.

Anyone who misses TISM might be interested to hear that Humphrey B. Flaubert is fronting a new band with Jock Cheese and Eugene de la Hot Croix Bun, called “Root!”

Think TISM, but with a … country music slant. They seem to be gigging around Melbourne exclusively right now, but have an album out next month [entitled "Root Supposed He Was Out of the Question"], and will hopefully start touring around Sydney some day. In the meantime, you can hear a couple songs at their MySpace page.

So, on the 25th of September, I dutifully rocked up at my local Game and bought Halo 3. The ‘limited edition’ steel case version, because She thinks they look better on the shelf.

I’m not sure what is so ‘limited edition’ about it - I didn’t have a pre-order, and the sales clerk looked a little befuddled when I suggested that asking if they had any left might be a stupid question.

Now, I haven’t had a lot of time to invest in Halo 3 yet , but what I have seen - a small amount of the solo campaign, and a couple hours of online Slayer - is quite enjoyable. I quite definitely intend to put in the effort required to complete the campaign, and I know from the ‘beta test’ that I’ll probably log a good lot of hours in online play, even if I do suck at it.

What I am having trouble fathoming is the Halo 3 hype-machine. Why is this game getting 100% reviews from most of the mainstream press? It’s a good game - a great one, even. But it’s not exactly ground-breaking. It is visually attractive, but certainly not as stunning as Gears of War or Bioshock. To call the gameplay ‘derivative’ would be an understatement. And while I haven’t seen enough of the story to give an accurate appraisal, I will certainly be surprised if it is a better story than Bioshock. I’m personally expecting something of about the calibre of Gears of War as far as Halo 3’s story is concerned.

I can’t help but feel that a lot of the reviewers awarded their 100% ratings before the game was even out of the packaging, mistaking ‘how badly I want to play this game’ for ‘how good this game actually is.’

Then we come to the ‘amazing’ ‘ground breaking’ ‘new’ features in Halo 3. Theatre, and Forge. Both excellently implemented, and both wonderfully suited to a game like Halo 3. But I am reading people in awe that the recording is done as a data file format, rather than a straight live camera video, like it’s a new idea. As if it isn’t the Way Things Have Been Done for god-knows-how-long, because a 5 mb data file of an entire match has significant performance and storage advantages over a 5gb video file of same.

I’m not bagging out Halo 3 here - it’s an excellent game, and I’m excited to find the time to play it properly. But no more excited than I am to find the time to play Stranglehold, nor than I was to play Gears of War; and not as much as I was to play Bioshock.

So why is this game selling hardware? Why are people swallowing everything the MS/Bungie hype-machine spews at them and having nerdgasms spontaneously as they respew the same hype back to eagerly awaiting others? Why is ‘Xbox 360 Exclusive “Halo 3â€? Registers Biggest Day in US Entertainment History with $170 Million in Sales’ an actual, real sentence?

It’s a good game, and I’m going to enjoy it, but the majority of the press I’m reading about it is just making me think BFW.

I’m glad the game is selling well - it deserves to. But there are plenty of other games that deserve to sell as well, if not better.

Update: I’ve now put a decent number of hours into Halo 3’s single player campaign, and everything I have said thus far holds true. Additionally, I am noticing something… When did reviewers decide it was a-okay to give 100% reviews to a game which stalls for 1 to 5 seconds while ‘loading’ part of a level? I’m not talking about a loading screen while I transition between areas, I’m talking “game freezes in place while I’m mid-step and ‘loading…’ appears in the bottom left corner” kinda thing. It’s doesn’t happen every time - sometimes the ‘loading…’ thing comes up and it is as seamless as I have come to expect from current games. But more often than not, it at least lags for a second, sometimes longer. It’s not game-breaking, but in a world-without-hype, it’d certainly rate a mention in a review, and at least a 1% rating loss.

100% awesome.

More ambience: Earthquake Weather. And no, I didn’t just stick a microphone out the window while it was raining. The only samples in this are that of some stones falling down a cliff at the beginning of a landslide, and some drum samples - all heavily effected, of course. Everything else is synthetic.

It’s still noise, but if you prefer something with a bit of rhythm, Rift might be your thing.