The Eye of Judgement, well what can I say…. I saw what I thought was a bargain, which has turn out to be quite an expensive hobby.
I was in the High Cross in Leicester the other Sunday morning, and popped into PowerPlay while waiting for the Apple store to open. I notice sat on a shelf on it’s own a game called “The Eye of Judgement”. The box didn’t have a price on it, however it came with the Playstation eye in the box too, me and C agreed that we wouldn’t pay anymore than £40 for the game, as the camera was £23 on it’s own. We took it to the counter, and the guy said “it’s not on the system”, let me find a price for you, then I can add it, then you can buy it. We agreed to let him do all this while we popped to the apple store.
Upon our return the poor lad seemed to be having the worse day of his life, apparently he’d been on holiday for a week, and this was his first day back, however while he’d been away, they’d upgraded the EPOS system, and it was running dog slow, and half the products were missing. He asked us kindly if we’d give him another 10 mins to sort the system out and he could finally give us the price.
We wondered of, (can’t remember where as I had a small 6 day hangover from the Tallinn stag do) and returned around 10 mins later, they guy had finally got the game on the system, and it was £30, bargain !, While I was there I picked up a copy of Ghostbusters for the PS3 (blog to come)
The thinking behind the game was as follows…..if the game is crap, it’s only cost us £7, as the camera is £23…however we didn’t really need a camera, as the one we got in “Your In the Movies” on the Xbox360, and this worked just fine of the PS3.
Anyway, we finally got home and unboxed. You get the Playstation Eye, a stand for holding it on, the mat, a pack of the 30 starter cards, and a bonus 8 pack of card.
The game itself rocks !, The best way I can describe it, is the 3D Chess type game you see R2D2 and Chewbacca playing in Star Wars, but using your TV to project the creatures.
Now personally I’ve never used trading cards or got involved in the whole trading card world, and to be honest didn’t think this was one of those types of games (I know, I should have done my research…but it did seem like a bargain)
The game basically plays, but you get 2 mana each turn, each card has a specific mana value, as well as health, and damage points. Each card is either Earth, Water, Wood , Fire or Biolith, you place each card on the map, and get positive and negative reactions based on the placement.
Quick YouTube Vid
Now the game is fun, and defiantly worth the £30 we spent on it, but to be honest, after a couple of hours of playing, we started to get used to the cards, and quite frankly a little board of the same cards. I had a quick google for somewhere to buy them from, and everywhere was sold out…so ebay it was !
Found a guy selling a full set 1×3,2 and 3…so the bidding war started, and ended on Friday night….£46 later, I had all 3 sets ! Woot !…this did however drive the price of the game up a little…well to £76 !
Luckily for me, they ebay guy was lightening fast with the delivery and I had all the cards on Monday. Got home, downloaded the update for the cards….which took over 3 hours, and we were finally ready to play with the new decks…..wrong !…to use the set 2 and 3, I had to buy the DLC (Downloadable Content) to unlock these…Grrrr !…and that was another £11.99 from the Playstation store.
Finally after downloading we were able to play, and it was fun fun fun….well until it started to get dark outside…..wtf you may be asking, what the hell as the light outside got to do with a game your playing inside….well I’ll tell you. As I guess it is with most people, my lighting in my front room is pretty dim, as this is the room I watch all my movie, and play most of my games. Even with the main light on, it’s light enough, but obviously not light enough for the Playstation Eye to pick the details on the cards. So there we were, £88 down, a handful of brand new shiny cards, but not enough light in the room for the eye to recognize them…Booo !
All in all, it is a very fun game, and if you buy it for nothing else but the playstation eye, it’s defiantly worth the £7 for the game..and if you live anywhere near me, I’ve got loads of duplicate cards you can have
Well another week goes by, and I break something else. This week it’s my iPod Touch again.
Over the past couple of days, it’s just been hanging and I’ve had to manually restart it a number of time, however tonight it finally broke…big time !
While syncing my podcasts this evening, it flash on and off a few time, and then all I got was the Apple logo…and this is how it stayed for about half an hour…oops.
So, as I’ve locked up my iPod before, I knew that if it locks up, all I need to do it hold the power and the home button down for about 10 seconds, and this will kill it….I did…and it did !
I fired it back up again, and again, for another 3o mins or so it stayed on the apple logo ! Doh !
Finally I decided, “Recovery mode it is…”, fired it up, kept my finger on the home button, plugged in the cable and waited….and waited, and waited. Previously when I’ve put it in recovery mode, it pops up with the “plug into iTunes please” logo within a matter of seconds, but no, a minute later, still the apple logo !…I was just about to give up on it, and book myself in at the apple store, then the happy “please plug me into iTunes popped up ! Phew !
Plugged into iTunes, and it recognized I’d plugged in my iPod in recovery mode and wanted to wipe it…which was fine as I’d only synced about an hour before.
It got half way through the process, only for me to be met with a Error 1604 !, After doing a little reading it seemed something to do with the downloaded version of the OS..
Anyway, me being me, ignored everything I’d just read on how to fix it, and gave it another try…this time it worked !!!
I had to leave my iPod for nearly an hour to sync everything back up, copy across my apps and music, but we are now all back up and running.
One thing I have noticed with version 3 of the OS, it now remembers where all your icons were when it restores a backup ! Finally !…there’s was nothing worse than restoring a backup, only to spend the next couple of days moving your icons back to the places you like them.
Spent an evening googling, reading forums, restoring the Ipod to defaults, Restored via ITunes, updated to version 2.2.1, but still no joy. Decided I’d have to goto the Mecca in Leicester (Apple store in HighCross), and seek guidance. The guy ran through what I’d already done, and booked me in with a techy, unfortunately I had the option of 5.30 on the day as it was early afternoon, this was no good, so booked in for this afternoon at 1pm.
While we were there, C decided to pick up a Ipod Touch 2G 8Gb (Guess she was sick of me never putting mine down, and thought she’d get in on it).
Went back to the Apple store today, and well you get what you pay for with Apple, appointment was at 1pm, within 5 mins, the tech guy had plugged the ipod in, ran a diagnostic, and replaced it there and then ! I was shocked, I expected to be without it for a couple of weeks, while it was being repaired !
Stunning service, and only hope the service at all other Apple stores is the same
Got home, synced everything back up when I got home, and we’re all good again. The only slight snag, is that I’ve been playing the Mafia Live App for the last week or so, but all my money, and property are gone, I can only assume it works on my serial number. Oh well, could have been worse, I could have been playing for months
out to be quite an expensive hobby.
