Batman: Arkham City is frankly amazing and makes Batman: Arkham Asylum look like a tutorial level. The game seems to almost assume that you played the first one as it only highlights the new moves and new gadgets. Everything is bigger and I spent the best part of an hour this afternoon just gliding around, using my grapnel, doing AR (augmented reality) missions and generally enjoying being Bats on a routine patrol. The Catwoman missions are fun and she is well hot to look at on screen. I haven’t found a cartoon character this nice to look at since Jessica Rabbit. I’ve downloaded the bumper pack for the game too to give me an extra bunch of skins for Batman (I really only want 1970s Batman based on the work of Neal Adams) as well as playable characters of Robin and Nightwing. Lush!

This is, frankly, ridiculous. I checked my blog this morning and realised that my last actual post was in January 2010, so I haven’t written anything for 18 months now. That is an unacceptably long amount of time. I even said to myself 18 months before that that I should start a journal and what happens? I just don’t bloody bother!

*sigh* So here’s what you missed….

Work

The last journal entry I wrote was in September 2009. At that time I was just about to embark on a new phase of my career as a contractor at Commerzbank looking after data compliance and audit globally. This was to be a temporary posting until they looked to make me permanent after 6 months.

As it turned out at didn’t actually happen. Instead I was poached by BNP Paribas for the same global facing contract role but on more money (yay!) although it adds 30 minutes each way to my previous City commute as they are based in the West End (boo!). I’m now on the IPUG Executive as the Chair of the Data Compliance and Audit Special Interest Group (SIG) and have also given addresses to COSSIOM, the French market data consortium, on data compliance & audits. I’ll certainly be at BNPP until at least April 2012 as the project I am mainly working on will last up to 3 years.

All in all my career has found a new lease of life, I’ve managed to carve a niche out for myself in the industry and I’m happier professionally.

Karate

My karate has also taken off in leaps and bounds. I’m over half-way to black belt and qualified as a karate instructor (Sensei) in January after a 3 month course. Shortly after qualifying I also took over as the Branch Instructor of Sandon dojo in Chelmsford. I took over the class with 12 students on the roll, we’ve had a bunch of new students through recruitment drives & word of mouth and now have just over 30 on the roll with 24-28 students attending every week for the past month which is quite impressive. They are a great bunch and it is a pleasure and a privilege to be their sensei.

On a side note, training an average of three times a week and eating salad for lunch, I’ve lost several stone and gone from a 40″ waist and a 44″ chest to a 36″-37″ waist and 42″ chest. I got some t-shirts on Father’s Day and they were Mediums. I’ve only just put the XL ones in the eBay bag and bought some Large ones so maybe I’m still slimming down. I’m certainly physically fitter and feel much healthier than I have for years. My wife says I look hot too as my stomach is flat. Fantastic!

Geekiness

My digital life has totally changed.

I have pretty much completely moved away from using my Windows based PC across to my MacBook Pro (which I upgraded to at the start of the year from my first Mac, a MacBook Black). The only time I boot up the PC personally is when I want to game on there or the rare occasions I need to do something on there which I cannot do on my MBP for whatever reason. Then at Christmas this year my wife gave me a lovely, lovely iPad. This little device goes pretty much everywhere with me and has supplanted both the MBP and the iPhone for the majority of my digital experience. I use the MBP for big or lengthy tasks and the iPhone for mobile quick and dirty stuff; mostly relegating it to it’s core mobile phone and iPod function which is no bad thing. But the middle ground is firmly taken up by the iPad and quite comfortably too. In fact, I’m writing this post on the Blogsy app and can touch type quite well with the on-screen keyboard.

Gaming

My gaming life has also pretty much completely changed. My primary platform is definitely now iOS and even then I now favour the iPad over the iPhone – I’m currently addicted to Tower Madness HD. Leave my sheep alone, you aliens! I still play on my PC and the Wii, but the iPad is the main place. I’ve also tried playing on the PS3 and even bought Batman: Arkham Asylum for £7 to see if I could switch to consoles with a title I enjoyed on PC and figured a 3rd person game rather than an FPS might be easier to get to grips with. Apart from getting headaches dealing with gaming on a big screen, it is going rather well (weirdly I don’t get headaches with the Wii – hmmm). With Steam now releasing more games for Mac maybe I will switch across from PC there too but I doubt it. Certainly for now I want to get Bioshock Infinity on PC rather than any other platform, so watch this space!

Life

As for life in general, all is great: my wife and I are even more in love, which I didn’t think was possible; the kids are happy and all doing stormingly well at their respective schools, one of which I’m Vice-Chair of governors at; I’ve become an Uncle after my brother and his wife had a daughter; and my friends are all sound and hale and living their lives happily with people that they love.

Now. Let’s see if I can keep this blog up to date. Again.

When I upgraded my Gaming PC to Core i5 loveliness, I got two new games with it. Batman: Arkham Asylum, which is without a doubt not only the best Batman game of all time but also the best superhero game of all time; and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which is – to be frank – bloody hard.

Much has been said about CoD:MW2 in the press regarding the gratuitous violence and a notorious level which sees an undercover US soldier forced to gun down many innocent civilians in a Russian airport. I played the level and actually saw it as pointless as a game level despite being essential to the plot by fomenting hatred of the warmongering US. You are forced to shoot people otherwise the terrorists smell a rat and kill you, if you shoot the terrorists they kill you and at the end of the level they kill you anyway. A cut-scene would have worked just as well although it wouldn’t have sickened me as much and make me wonder for a second or two if our forces actually every need to do this type of thing.

What hasn’t been commented on is how hard as heck it is. I’m on the third or forth level, which is set in Brazil, and I never get very far without being killed by some scumbag’s bullet. The damage model is pretty hard so you only have to take two or three hits before the screen goes black and the game reloads. Whilst I can get to cover, I get pinned down and immediately surrounded. I’m all for realism but this is taking it a bit far. Yes, I know that I’d be a bit pants in a fire-fight, but I don’t want to pay money for what is, after all, entertainment and have this demonstrated to me.

For Christmas, I was kindly given more computer games for my new system. Something my old rig could never ever, ever, ever, ever play was Crysis so I was kindly given Crysis: Maximum Edition which gives you the original game plus the expansion and multiplayer in one little box set. I have to say it’s impressive. As well as looking gorgeous, the enemy AI seeks to flank me and surround me as well as searching for me under cover. Realistic but not so hard that it makes me want to weep.

Thanks to lovely, lovely Steam I have just downloaded and played demos of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars and Bioshock.

ET:QW looks simply gorgeous on my new card and I can only imagine how much better it would be under DX10. It took me a little while to get into it though and is very much a Quake co-operative death match type of game rather than a facelift of the much loved (well, by me, anyway) Wolfenstein – Enemy Territory. Don’t get me wrong. It isn’t that I hate it, it just isn’t totally what I expected.

Bioshock was another surprise. I was expecting a poop-’em-up in much the same vein as F.E.A.R was and started the game expecting to be scared out of my mind. What I got instead was an introduction on the scale of TV’s Lost and a totally absorbing and purely gorgeous experience. The little touches in this game such as context sensitive help and minimalist HUD coupled with the effects when you activate the Incendiary plasmid, which is reminiscent of the nuclear power in TV’s Heroes, all combine to make this a truly wonderful experience. And that was just on the demo! Cannot wait to get the full game.

Just finished playing Half-Life 2 – The Lost Coast and I was impressed.
For those of you who may have been living in a cupboard somewhere sinister (or not), HL2 – The Lost Coast is what those in the know call a tech demo. Basically, it shows how gorgeous HDR or High Dynamic Range lighting looks. There are literally loads of websites out there that explain this in greater depth, but suffice it to say that people, rocks, water and buildings all look much more realistic with it running. I thought HDR looked great in Far Cry, but in HL2TLC it looks absolutely superb. The monastry at the end looks really nice with the light streaming through the window and the transition pieces where you move from very dark to very light work very well as you are dazzled by the changes in lighting. Even being in a dark corridor and turning on your torch makes you wince slightly which I can see being used by various developers to great effect.
Well done, Valve, please incorporate this in your future games. *big grin*

Just played the demo of F.E.A.R (First Encounter Assault Recon) and I have to be honest and say that I shat my pants. Pure and simple. The whole atmosphere is incredibly dark and the sound effects and music – especially the music – really keep you on the edge of your seat. It doesn’t help in many respects that my new über sound card, the Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatal1ty Edition, really does give me eXtreme FIdelity surround sound through my headphones i.e. What was that? It was behind me – aaargh! etc etc.
First moment of genuine poo in pants moment was about 90 seconds in and happened last night. I went into the sub-basement of the complex I am suppossed to be penetrating and an air vent next to me shut when I looked at it and the music went da-da-la! in a horror movie stylee. That was it, but it was enough. I moved forward, rats ran at my feet and a little girl giggled somewhere. I went cold, my head stubble went on end, hit ESC, saved the game and called it a night. Yes, I am an adult but even I don’t like having nightmares – especially as the wife tends to find me standing next to the bedroom window when I have one in a real nice Blair Witch moment for her.
There were a few more scary moment in-game such as more giggles, voices in my head, the sound of my in-game breathing and heart rate, all designed to bring on a real feeling of terror. The final one just before the demo ends really was the pièce de résistance, reminding me of the whole freaky house of horror dream sequence in Max Payne 2, I am running between two doors with the little girl giggling and telling me I am gonna die or something. Truely scary.
It doesn’t help that the little girl in the game reminds me waaaaay too much of the little girl in The Ring – a film which I realised that I didn’t want to watch soon after the girl with the weird face in the wardrobe and which I turned off as soon as the heroine started watching the video in the log cabin. *shudder*
Maybe I shouldn’t buy this, because I never got that far past the inital outbreak in Doom 3. I was too scared.

What can be funnier than laughing at a drunk trying to walk down the street? Well, lots actually, but this Swiss site seems to think it is hilarious – and to be honest, it is.

Click here to play – instructions are found by clicking on the billboard which is put out at the start (you’ll see it!). Enjoy!

Finally, not five minutes ago, I completed HL2. Not bad for someone who has been playing it since release at the same time as holding down a job and being a daddy.

I have to say that it is without a doubt one of the best games I have ever played, but maybe it just feels like that right now because the wonderful Source engine makes such great use of my Athlon 64 3800 processor and my GeForce 6800GT card.

Either way I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it! And what an ending!

High Points: Controlling the Ant Lions with the bug bomb.
Low Points: Motion sickness in the Water Hazard level.

PS – If you haven’t got it – GET IT!