When Collector's Editions Aren't

As an unabashed BioWare fan, I was always going to purchase Dragon Age: Origins. When I saw that there was a Collector's Edition on offer, coming in a nice tin case with a cloth map, I immediately decided to sign myself up by pre-ordering a copy. I could quite easily complain about the common debacle of release dates - why did Australia supposedly have to wait until the 5th to get it until EB decided to break it and sell it early? Or the fact that Australians pay far too much for video games - why does it cost $100-$110 dollars compared to $50 in the US when the current exchange rate is $1AUD to 90c US? Both of those are perfectly legitimate questions that I'd love to get a reasonable answer for, but that's not why I'm unhappy right now.

My complaint is that I paid $20 extra for a so called "Collector's edition". A collector's edition that was supposed to come with a tin case and a cloth map. Instead, I received a game in a standard plastic case, wrapped in a cheap cardboard cover. One of the game's two "Game Discs" even came in a clear plastic sleeve as opposed to any sort of container. My bonuses for ordering the collectors edition are:
a) Four in-game items
b) One piece of DLC (that I could purchase separately if I so desired)
c) A bonus disc containing "making of" material.

This is hardly what I'd call a "collector's" edition, nor does it even live up to the claims of what the collector's edition is supposed to contain based on a simple web search. Not delivering the tin case and the cloth map borders of false advertising, and not including a jewel case (or something similar) to keep the two game discs together is very poor form. I cannot voice my disappointment strongly enough at this extremely poor delivery. I consider it highly unlikely that I'll order any more collector's editions if this is the dubious quality of the material that is going to be included in them.

I'll be forwarding this complaint to EA - it's practically misleading to call this a "collector's edition" when it's little more than the game plus downloadable content.

Digital Illusions and Sensible Software: Beginnings

For those of you interested in the early years of the greatest games companies of the Amiga era, check out the following youtube videos.
The first, dating from 1994, takes a look at a young Digital Illusions, and features interviews with Andreas Axelsson, Olof Gustafsson and Joakim Wejdemar. It's fantastic seeing DI when they were a small outfit- worlds apart from today's DICE. Just remember to turn on close captions/subtitles by clicking on the arrow at the bottom right of the video (just under "YouTube" - make sure you start playing the video first).

The second video features an interesting interview with Jon Hare, co-founder of Sensible Software. Sensible created many brilliant games for the C64 and Amiga, including Parallax, Sensible Soccer, SEUCK and Cannon Fodder. The interview is quite well done, and reveals how Sensible was founded by two guys on UK Govt. weekly grant of £40!

Ah the memories...

Battlefield 1943: failed to connect to EA online - solution!

If you too have been experiencing the error message failed to connect to EA online" in Battlefield 1943, don't fear- there is a solution! After many days of frustration at not being able to connect to 'EA online' to play Battlefield 1943 on my Xbox 360, I can now join online games with 100% success rate. How did I do it? Well, thanks to EA's customer support, and various internet posts, I have somehow stumbled upon the magic formula. Firstly, go to ea.com and create an account. Next, link your Xbox gamertag to the EA account (by adding a persona). This should have been simple, but somehow I entered an infinite loop of adding my persona, receiving an email from EA, clicking to confirm, and then entering my persona again. Repeat ad infinitum. Emailing EA solved the problem, with a friendly customer service representative manually linking my gamertag to my EA account. OK, still with me? If this hasn't solved your problem, then the next and final step is to download the Fight Night 4 demo. Yes, that's right, you need to download a demo for a totally unrelated game just so you can play Battlefield 1943. No point in arguing, as it's the only way I managed to solve my connection problem. Download the demo, skip the training, and then try and connect to EA via the game interface. Once you have accepted all the relevant disclaimers and managed to get online, exit the game and load up Battlefield 1943. Surprise, surprise, it now works! Good 'ol EA. You know, I never had this trouble playing COD4 online...

If this has been of assistance to you, please leave a comment. Oh, and feel free to click on one of my sponsor's messages... the GTI is gonna need new tyres real soon! ;)

PS. I should mention that during this process I also tried the 'change your Xbox 360 clock to 2005' trick as suggested by EA- it didn't make any difference for me at all.

Monkey Island is back! ("Look behind you! A three-headed monkey!")

I've only just heard the fantastic news that Monkey Island is about to return to our computer and console screens! Monkey Island 1 and 2 were two of my favourite games of all time, and I spent countless hours playing them on my old Amiga. If I remember correctly, I played Monkey Island using dual floppy disk drives, progressing to a hard drive in time for Monkey Island 2. Both games struck the right balance between story line and puzzles, and contained the best humour I have experienced in any game (then or now).

There are plenty of websites that detail the new Monkey Island games, but by way of a quick summary...

The Secret of Monkey Island Special Edition is an updated version of the original game, which will be available soon on PC and Xbox Live Arcade. Lucasarts look to have done a great job in maintaining the feel of the original through the new version's updated graphics and speech. At any time you can toggle between the original and new version, which I think is a fantastic idea. I am definitely looking forward to playing the updated version as soon as it's released, and reviving some old memories (and no-doubt frustrations too!). Oh, and take some time to watch the video on Lucasarts site - it's very interesting.

Tales of Monkey Island by Telltale Games is due for release in early July, and is a new story told in 5 parts. I'd normally be apprehensive about any new Monkey Island game staying true to the spirit of original, but apparently Telltale has lots of former Lucasarts employees, and they have remained close to Lucasarts and Monkey Island creator Ron Gilbert. In fact, Ron Gilbert has an interesting write up on his blog. It's great to see a new Monkey Island game, and fingers crossed it will live up to the original two.

I was going to close by saying "they sure don't make 'em like they used to", but I guess that's not true anymore... :)

Saints Row 2: Best Character Designer Ever

Hi all, MrPigeon here again. I've recently started playing Saints Row 2, a recent and heavily GTA-inspired game for the XBox360 and PC. It's getting a lot of good press for adding some of the much-needed "fun" that was lacking in GTA4.. things such as the rampages and wacky side missions - which were eschewed in favour of 'realism' in the latest GTA - are all present and accounted for in SR2. But one of its biggest features is its character creator.. at the start of the game, you get to design your player character with one of the most comprehensive tools out there. If you can think of a face, chances are, you can do a pretty good job of it.

I decided that I may as well take advantage of this freedom to be able to design myself, since people who look as hideous as I do generally don't feature too often in video game entertainment. Call me crazy, but I think I did a pretty good likeness - it's rather spooky seeing myself in all these cutscenes!

Now I'd caught the character creation bug, I decided to try my hand at creating certain other people I know, starting with the owner of this wonderful blog, Ferris himself.


Chuffed with my skills, I then decided to try my hand at Dave, one of Ferris's work lackeys.. but I was not quite as successful this time around..


.. and I don't think I got our other friend Crabby right at all..

Sniper teams at Barack Obama's inauguration?

Deviating from my usual themes of cars and games (with the odd recipe thrown in), I thought I'd share something interesting I came across yesterday.  Gizmodo featured an article about an amazing 1,474 megapixel panoramic image taken during Barack Obama's inauguration.  It is seriously impressive, allowing the user to zoom into the image to reveal greater detail - similar to Google Earth in a way. After firstly zooming in on Obama, the second thing I did was to - quite naturally - go looking for military snipers.  And I found some!  Zooming in on one of the buildings near the centre of the image revealed a group of interesting guys...

The most interesting thing is that the US appears to have outsourced the protection job to the British SAS.  Don't believe me?  Here is a photo of the British SAS taken during the famous Iranian embassy siege in the 80s.  Eerily similar eh?

Of course, once I 'discovered' the sniper team I went searching the internet to see if anybody else had found them.  The answer was yes, and not just this sniper team but other potential candidates too. Oh well, so much for a FerrisGTI exclusive...