Man Fat

I still get that the excited childhood feeling that any real gamer gets when they obtain a new joy box (game) and in my opinion the cover art is an integral part of the experience. It is very important for a number of very good reasons of witch, I think, giving the game a visual identity is the most important. Yes, most people will also picture strong characters instead of cover art when prompted for games like Mario or Sonic but the covers tend to re enforce this by standing the Hero in some action pose with their name plastered over head. The cover art that I am talking about are the ones that try to sum up the game in one glorious picture. This does not mean that all cover art should use the same formula as different subtleties and ideas can look very different but yield the same satisfying results. Examples in questions:

Hear are 3 game covers arts from the golden ages of, the NES, or Nintendo Entertainment System for you youngens. They have all taken a different tack on the style of the cover but all convey very well what the game is about. Mega Man is like a can of white paint, it does exactly what is says on the tin. By looking at the game art you know you are going to be playing a boy with a big gun for an arm that he shoots at robots in an effort to get to the old man boss. Simple formula.

Final Fantasy has a completely different spin. It does not really tell you anything about the game you are about to embark on but it looks interesting and poses questions that you want to fined the answers out to. Questions like What is that floating castle, what is that floating eyeball thing and why do I need an 84 page handbook?










Finally Castle Vania 3 Dracula’s Curse (the best one). This cover has loads of stuff going on that just makes the cover look super exciting as your eye has allot of action to look at.

So now nearly 20 years since the release of the NES the formula for game art must have changed, right? Well hear are 3 more games taken from the machine of the minuet, the xbox 360. All three games have again taken a very different tack on there game art but all have very strong covers. Sonic the hedgehog could not be clearer. By the cover you can see that you are going to be playing a big blue running hedgehog, but if you did not know that already you need to get out a bit more.

Left 4 Dead poses more questions than it answers. Questions like, where is his thumb and how come he never married. But this is a very striking cover in its own right and again makes you want to play the game to fined out more.

Finally, Grand Theft Auto. A busy cover with lots of images of different exciting things. It does not make it clear what you will be doing in the game but again, you know it will be bad ass!

So in summery, I personally think that Game’s Cover Art is very important in defining the identity of the game. It can be made up in many different ways but they should all invoke that excited feeling when viewed… or maybe that’s just me…

This post was part of Gamer Banter, a monthly video game discussion coordinated by Terry at Game Couch. If you’re interested in being part of this, please email him for details.

Man Fat: How Important Is A Game’s Cover Art?

__________

If you hate chavs, but love watching stupid people hurt themselves then you will love this…

The Stupid Chav Monkey award 2010.

Hello folks and welcome to the first “Stupid Chav Monkey Awards”. This is where you get to see the worst side of society (chavs) doing their typical chavvy activites with sometimes hilarious and painful results. The awards today are all based around one particular children’s toy. Lets see if you can guess what that toy is from these three crafty clues:

1. This piece of playground equipment is aimed at the 3 – 7 year old market and brings happiness to children all around the world.

2. It offers an exciting ride experience that makes you feel dizzy.

3. Most children refer to it as the big spinny disk or roundabout.

Yes, well done you guessed it. For those of you who didn’t it is infact “the Roundabout”. This is normally a piece of play park equipment that you can sit on and when pushed, spins you round at a pleasing pace bringing on a dizzy sensetion. Normally this is one of the safest places within a play park… until you let stupid people get on them. Step in the stupid chav monkeys. What could stupid chavs do with this harmless merriment? Well we have 6 contenders below all applying for the honour of being crowned the 1st ever (and maybe last depending on the feedback and law suites) Stupidest Chave Monkey 2010 Roundabout award. How do we know who is the winner? Well once you have watched all the contenders below simply leave a comment at the bottom of the post with who you think should win and maybe a little bit on why. Once all the votes have been counted I will…. do something with them… maybe. Anyway lets jump straight into the fun

Contestant number 1 likes shopping for bright shorts and working out his neck muscles:

Contestant number 2 loves smiling at cameras and takes any oppertunity to show off his break dancing skills, as shown towards the end of his clip:

Contestant number 3 is interested in novilty headwear and says he tryes to live life on the edge.

Contestant number 4 is actually a tag team of two young fillies. These girls do everything together and both dream of one day being able to fly.

Contestant number 5 likes fags (thats a cigaret for you yanks) and comes all the way from some other country.

And finally, contestant number 6 enjoys nothing more than showing off his superman impression.

Aghhhh ha ha ha… HA HA HA HA HA… its funny because it looked like it really hurt.. ha ha ha… aghhhhh.. If you think you have a winner please leave a comment and if you want others to share this sinless joy please >.

What do you get if you cross a car mad 3 year old with a remote controlled truck and a board dad with his mobile phone camera. You guessed it, an epic driving video. When I say epic, I mean short and sweat. The full story behind the video is that I have a car mad 3 year old who loves You Tube. He is always wanting to watch RC car videos and crashing his RC Truck into things. So I we were both bored one day and looking for something to do and we decided to make our own RC video and post it onto you tube. So we shot this short film on my HTC Desire SIM-Free Android Smartphone, edited it using windows movie maker then created a new you tube channel to showcase his driving skill (Jonahtrucks). It was a really fun activity for us to do and think we will be doing more in the future. It literally only took an hour to edit the video, record the high budget sound overlay and post it onto you tube. A well worth activity in my opinion. Thinking of strapping my phone to the car next to get some real action shots (not down the stairs though).

I have been played World of Warcraft for about 3 years now (on and off) and have become pretty bored of all their rules. Games really annoy me when they put up invisible boundaries and wont let you go where you want to. I know wow has a reputation of being quite an expansive game with very few barriers but the few it had, really annoyed me and the fact that if you were found by blizzard to be trying to get round their bits of shoddy environment coding your account would be sanctioned annoyed me even more! So I set about trying to explore the bits of Azorath that Blizzard did not want people to get a closer look at. Yes I know you can do this on a private server but that defeats the point in my opinion. So after a good hour or two of trying, I managed to fined an easy way for anyone to go, well, pretty much anywhere, on any live server. So I decided to share this with whoever is interested. I will be going beyond the grey main wall (the bit where the worgens are from in the upcoming cataclysm expansion), Visiting the bits of flight path candy and doing some other pretty cool stuff. So I decided to open this feature with a little video showing off the lengths (and heights) I am going to in my personal quest to explore as much of wow as I can before my account gets banned. So please enjoy and if you have any comments please feel free to leave them. I will be doing a video eventually on how you can also do….. this:

Ok, so i have watched allot of videos and read allot of content on the science behind how HHO fuel cells work, but i still cant beleive that passing electricity through water creates a flamable gas. I keep thinking that i cant be that easy or the world would have been using this technology for ages, surely. So i have decided to test the theory before i waste any more time on this project. I have been out and purchased some 302 grade stainless steel wire (I will list where I sourced all my materials from and costs in a future post) and raked through my garage to fined something suitable to wrap it round.  I then bit some notches in the edge of the plastic with some pliers and used them to secure the wire as I wrapped it round.  Once in place i put it in a food blenders mesuring jug and filled it with water and a bit of baking soda.  At this stage i was not taking any measurements or even trying to be neat as you can see in the picture below.  I hooked the finished theory test model upto my car batery using some jump leads and low and behold, bubbles of gas started to appear on the wire.  These bubbles were to small to light but i could see for myself that gas was being produced.  This has given me the evidence i need to go on and start to make my first sealed HHO Fuel cell.  Once i have this finished i will let you know how i got on and i will be doing a video and explaining things in more detail in future posts, but for now, its all pretty simple stuff.

What a wonderful age we live in. Science has had its excited little hands over just about everything in the modern home and is running out of items to tinker with. Science has recently taken a look at that house hold essential Toilet tissue and has spawned its take on what you should wipe with. The Glow In the Dark Toilet Paper might seam a little unnecessary and that’s because, it is. We could not think of an occasion where you would need glow in the dark Toilet Tissue in the bathroom. We know people might stumble to the loo in the dark, but then to perform in the dark is a completely different skill set. We could however see uses for the Glow in the dark toilet paper in other areas of the home. It could make an interesting drawing paper for children that could then be displayed on the fridge. Not got children or not to keen on the thought of sticking toilet paper to your walls/fridge, then this could make the perfect bedroom tissue paper. Just in case you feel the urge to, sneeze, in the middle of the night and need something to catch it in then this could be the perfect fined in the dark solution. Anyway, if you feel like pimping your bathroom with some glow in the dark paper then head on over to Firebox to get yourself a roll ordered.

I finally managed to complete the 60 waves of enemies on Zoikz level 3 setting. So i thought I would share this moment with the world. Well, when I say world I mean the 40 people a day that visit my blog, thanks mum. Anyway, started the level by only using machine guns, then started placing turrets and moved onto missles. I threw in a couple of goop guns to help with the mid levels and did use the UltraZoikZapper Cheat code to help with one particually nasty wave but the rest was pretty simple. The music that I put over the video (I know it sounds ropey and all the levels are wrong it was recorded through a music desk at a gig) is from a band called The Ides. They played at a venue I recently went to and I liked them so much I asked if they would let me use their tracks to overlay some up coming videos. They were real nice and said yes. To see where they are playing or listen to some more of their music visit http://www.myspace.com/theidesofficial or just click the link.

Fuel of tomorrow today! I must have read that slogan 100 times while reading through the literature on HHO fuel cells. I fist stumbled across this brilliant technology off a spam email. Finally they have brought me something interesting. I did not buy the $189 e-book that it directed me to, but I did go on to look for free info and plans. Basically HHO fuel cells are bottles of salty water with stainless steal electrodes in them. When current is passed through the water it makes HHO gas, or Browns as some people call it. This is a clean burning very combustible fuel that has no pollution values as the only bi-product is the water it took to make the gas. Sound to good to be true? That is what I thought. So I have taken it upon myself to manufacture one of these wonder cells and give it a bloody good testing. This will probably take me months to get round to or just end up as yet another 1/2 finished project as it gets to difficult for me to do, but hopefully I will be generating endless amounts of Hydrogen in the next couple of weeks. So I decided to start with a theory test. For now take a look at this ropey video showing you how to make a quick and small HHO Fuel cell (the one I am aiming to build is a little bigger, but the science is the same):

What would you get if you took some very talented and skilled people and gave them way to much free time… and a baby? Iron Baby, Durrrr. What do you mean you have no idea what iron baby is! Its obviously a baby version of iron man. Yup, what a cool idea. How much cooler would it be if someone actually went and created it. They only frikin have. I could not believe my eyes when I first watched this clip as the finish is so polished and the production value is very high. Probably the toughest baby you will see this week:

A Quick video to show the UltraZoikZapper in action. As stated in the previous article, the game is Zoikz from Miniclip.com.

You can really Newk the crap out of those little ships with the Ultra Zoik Zapper and I evne used it to helmp me finally beat level 3. It covers most of the map even when placed towards an edge and its the best code that i have been able to unlock. So, go Zap those Zoikz!
CHEAT CODE: 283625312