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.
BT has received the green light to begin its rollout of super-fast broadband.
Ofcom has delivered its long-awaited ruling which offers BT more flexibility in the way it delivers fibre networks.
BT made clear it only wanted to make the move if regulator Ofcom allowed a fair return on that investment.
The regulator said that its ruling was a “pivotal” one for the development of broadband which it said would “be crucial” to the economy.
Three phases
“Our message today is clear: there are no regulatory barriers in the way of investment in super-fast broadband,” said Ofcom chief executive Ed Richards.
“We want to promote investment to support the widespread adoption of superfast broadband but we want to balance that with the need for competition,” said Mr Richards.
He said that the plans outlined in this “first phase” would provide the current conditions for investment in fibre.
Phase Two would look at how to reach the areas not covered by this market-led approach, and phase three would consider the evolution to even faster technologies.
Moves have already begun to upgrade the UK’s existing broadband networks to fibre.
Virgin Media has committed to upgrading its cable network to 50Mbps (megabits per second) – which will cover around half the population of the UK – by the middle of this year.
BT has pledged to complete the installation of fibre-optic cables to some of its street-side cabinets, offering speeds of between 40 and 60Mbps, by 2012.
This will offer higher speeds to around 40% of the country.
However, the regulator has “a central role to play in enabling both investment and competition”, it said.
That includes allowing BT to set its own prices on how to sell access to its network to secure a fair return on their investment.
It may lead to consumers paying a premium for super-fast broadband.
Ofcom also said it would also “minimise unnecessary inefficiencies” in the design and build of new networks, which will mean, for example, that BT will be able to reduce the amount of engineers needed to manage an upgrade to fibre.
To date it has had to send separate engineers from its wholesale and Openreach divisions to manage the electronics and ducting respectively in its exchanges. Now it will be allowed to use one.
Mr Richards said that the wholesale pricing would be considerably more flexible than current wholesale products and that its hands-off approach reflected that it was dealing with a new BT.
“This is not the BT of old milking a copper network put in years ago. This is a risky investment for it,” he said.
BT chief executive Ian Livingston welcomed the move, saying it “set expectations for the whole UK industry as the market evolves into a fibre-based world”.
“Today’s announcement gives us the green light to push ahead with our £1.5bn superfast broadband investment plans to reach at least 40 percent of UK households by 2012,” Mr Livingston said in a statement.
It has been estimated that to offer fibre to the whole country would cost £5bn. If the technology used is fibre to the home that cost rises to £29bn.
The focus of Ofcom’s announcement is on making for a flexible wholesale model rather than opting, as some had predicted, for an environment where other operators laid their own fibre alongside BT’s.
There was, said Mr Richards, “a lack of appetite” among the companies it consulted with for a fibre version of local loop unbundling.
This is largely due to the economic climate, he said.
Local loop unbundling, in which operators are able to install their own equipment in BT’s telephone exchanges, is largely credited with kickstarting the current broadband market and for making it as competitive as it is.
‘Limited options’
The fibre landscape will be different, thinks Ian Fogg, an analyst with research firm Forrester.
“What we have seen is a game, unlike football, of three halves. Dial-up was the first half, broadband was the second and this is the third. Ironically, in terms of competition, it will have more in common with what was happening in 2000 than what we see now,” he said.
He is concerned that the type of superfast broadband on offer from BT – fibre to the street cabinet rather than fibre to the home – is being overhyped.
“It has a theoretical maximum of around 50Mbps (megabits per second) but speed will vary based on how far people live from a street cabinet and how many ADSL lines are in a street as the two can interfere with each other,” said Mr Fogg.
“Even in urban areas there will be areas where speeds are no better than ADSL speeds,” he added.
BT has pledged to offer Fibre to the Home technology on new-build sites. So far one estate, at Ebbsfleet in Kent, has a handful of houses using the technology.
Andrew Ferguson, editor of ThinkBroadband.com, thinks Ofcom’s report was necessary: “The options for Ofcom were limited since if it refused BT, then the only next generation like network approaching national coverage would be Virgin Media who currently offer no form of wholesale access.”
Mr Richards did not rule out the possibility of regulating Virgin Media if it became the dominant super-fast broadband player.
out to be quite an expensive hobby.
