We all scream for ice cream...:twisted:

My current distraction from doing work at the moment. And posting on Gamespot, of course.

*WARNING*

The previous link contains strong language. If you're easily offended then you must unplug the internet and stay hidden from all forms of human contact, you soft git.

Which leads me neatly onto AirGuitarist87's rant number 929. All this is stuff that has happened over the weekend.

• Your name is not "Johnathon" and you can't pronounce it properly. I don't mind if you admit to be calling from India but please don't treat me like an idiot.

• If you're asking a stranger where your friend is, don't use their bloody nickname.

• My face is not a scratching post, but my cat thinks otherwise.

• She also only seems to want to eat what I'm eating.

• There are more porn websites than people in the world. If you're surprised that Googling your name brings some up, then you really shouldn't be here.

• How can a DS charger just disappear into thin air?

• Considering I've written nearly a quarter of my project, and still have 3 months til it's due, I'm a bit insulted by the appearance of a letter talking about extensions.

I went bowling today with my girlfriend and our itemed friends, so...a double date, I guess. Well, to say we went bowling would be more of a stretch than an olympic gymnast, we went to an area where bowling could arise. We forgot it was half term, and all the lanes were taken by screeching primary schoolers and stroppy take-themselves-too-seriously teens.

I bought my girlfriend some candy floss. I've never really had one before so I gave it a try. How I spent a quid on this I don't know. The damn stuff would disolve into thin bloody air before you even get to taste it. I even tried to get a big piece and chew it really fast, but that just ended up with a mouthful of crunchy sugar.

Half term is here, like I said before. I don't get one because I'm in uni, but the kids hang around the town centre which I have to walk through to get to campus. It's a wonderful array of collective personas, each one as silly as the last. We have:-

• Faux Skaters - Skaters I'm fine with, it's a decent hobby. But let's just get one thing clear - standing around holding a skateboard for hours on end doesn't make you a skater. It makes you a shelf. There's a group of around 10-13 skaters near the traffic lights and for the life of me, I can't recall the last time I saw any of them use one.

• 8 year old gangstas - Your walk is so exaggerate, your shoulders are at risk of scraping on the floor. Undoubtedly weaker than me, but I still wouldn't want to fight them. I mean, do you hit an 8 year old?

• Faceless fillers - Clothes bought at Topman and Topshop, nothing extravagant. Serves no other purpose than to clutter the pavements and shopping centres. Specialty is dropping anchor in the middle of a crowded area, usually in groups.

• Chavs - Everyone knows them, everyone hates them. They've taken to wearing scarves like cowboy bandanas recently. In a group at least one will be on a bike, and two will be carrying a menacing bottle of Fanta.

• Creepy Lolitas - 13 year old girls who smoke to make them look older and try to chat up older lads. The creepy part is that it works very well on the Chavs.

• Caffein virgins - My personal favourite. These lot have just experienced their first Grande Cappucino and are buzzed to high heavens. Once in a blue moon will freak out when they get the shakes and the chaotic beauty is an absolute treat to behold.

So today I got up at the asscrack of dawn in order to see a tutor bright and early about handing out questionnaires in his lecture. This is after it took him a week and a half to reply to my email. I get in and he said I could, next week. Great. He couldn't have just emailed me.

In other news I have boughted FEAR 2 (although I can't play it until midnight) and found a shop that sells Mountain Dew. So I'm a happy bunny. I'll be waking up from a sugar induced coma within the next few days...hopefully.

I can't stop listening to It's the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) by R.E.M.

I dunno why, I just can't stop. It's so awesome.

Yup, another demo review. I'll keep this one short and sweet.

I have to be honest in saying I've not really been anticipating much from Resident Evil 5. I felt the plan to put the setting of Chris Redfield in Africa was a clever but devious method of free advertising with all the politically correct nutjobs screaming "racism" from the rooftops. The early pictures and gameplay footage just brought two things to mind - first, it's going to play exactly like Resident Evil 4 and, second, the African setting is an excuse to render the enviroment in dirty light brown sepia.

I'm half right. The control scheme is almost identical to Resident Evil 4, with the exception of now you can strafe left and right. However this doesn't work when running, for whatever reason. You hold X (or A) in order to run, and once you start the right analogue stick becomes redundant and you turn with the strafe analogue. This is very confusing and I was still getting muddled even after playing it for a good while. The inventory menu has done away with the traditional Resident Evil blocks and has more of a limited slot inventory that opens up in real-time play ala Dead Space. Fair enough, but this makes using a green herb very messy, especially mid-battle, as Equip is the first choice.

I felt that this demo was incredibly poorly laid out. There are just two levels to choose from and for the best part, there's no real difference. In both you're chased by a large crowd of multi-ethnic Africans along with one unstoppable big guy who weilds an infuriating one-hit-kill overcompansating phallis, straight out of a Sigmund Freud text book. There is a slight return to it's survival horror roots in the form of there being next to no ammo anywhere. This was ok in the first 3 games because the zombies were slow moving and dim-witted, incapable of moving between areas, however this doesn't work at all due to the smarter, faster, tougher "infected" you have to deal with here. You can unload 4-5 bullets into one person before they'll go down...with 8 more infected just behind him. This forces you to run away in a lot of situations, daring the labrynth of the shanty towns, with claustrophobic alleys and climbable rooftops, which in all honesty do not work with the clumsy control scheme.

My initial impressions of Resident Evil 5 are dissapointing. This is still a demo, from E3 no less, and I hope they've ironed out a lot of the annoyances (why can't a STARS turned mercenary for justice aim AND walk?) but this is certainly a step back from what we've come to expect from Resident Evil 4. In all fairness, I think 4 and 5 are completely new games in their own rights, and nothing will top the remake of Resident Evil on the GameCube. Not a "ZOMG pre-order now!" purchase, but certainly a "oh, it's on sale...I'll pick it up" treat to yourself.

Literally "To Ring Holy" or something (I'm using Babelfish), this is German power metaller Edguy's latest album.

It would be more accurate to describe Edguy as a hard rock/power metal fusion, especially with their newer stuff, but this comes with both it's upsides and downsides. The downside is that doing both will undoubtedly annoy the living hell out of the purists and nostalgic elitists who will cry that "they're not as good as they used to be". The upside is that they can pull off both competently.

The move to hard rock was a strange move, but not a bad one. Their last album, Rocket Ride, was a solid hard rock album but not what you'd expect from Edguy. Compared to their last outings there was next to no solos, were slower and the lyrics had moved to a more lewd theme. This time round, they've ironed out all the creases and almost perfectly fused power metal and hard rock in a magnificent array of prostitute shaggin, sword waving delight.

I say "almost perfect" because there are still some exceptions. Dragonfly's chorus feels incredibly awkward, almost like it was forced into the song.

You wanna fly so you drag on flies
Drag on dragonflies
From a suffocating room on a dragonfly
You're riding high when you nasalize
What you pulverize
Make your day and dream away on a dragonflyDragonfly

However, this is the only song on the album I really have a problem with. Thorn Without A Rose is a great ballad and Aren't You A Little Pervert Too? shows off Edguy's versatility and trademark humour with a spaghetti country-esque homage to Tobias's penis (like a lot of songs).

Tinnitus Sanctus isn't Edguy's best album, but it definitely sits comfortably within their top 3 albums (next to Hellfire Club and Mandrake). Incredibly epic songs like Pride of Creation and 9-2-9 simply carry it by themselves and certainly make it one of the more accessible albums for anyone new to the band.

8/10

Up yours. You may have milk in a bag, but we have pudding in a bucket. :P

The new FEAR 2: Project Origin demo is out now, for 360 and PC (PS3 via some bullhonkey subscription service). It took me quite a while on my slow British connection, but the demo itself is a little over 1GB for the PC.

So, all fired up, what's the first thing that needs to be done? Well, unless you're an FPS hungry octopus or an accomplished piano player hopped up on Red Bull, you're going to have to sort out the key binding. I'm not sure who it was who chose C to be crouch and Ctrl to be Slo-Mo, but they evidently had very little thinking time to choose these settings. It took me a little under 5 mins to sort it all out, not including the mouse sensitivity which is phenomenally high even by my standards, but I usually end up modifying controls on PC games anyway.

Right, onto the game itself. You start out, as you normally do in FEAR, picking your sorry behind up off the floor and surveying your new surroundings. The first thing that has to be mentioned is that the graphics are a true return to form. Unlike the recent outings of Crysis where it looks wonderful statically and once you start moving it become the world's prettiest PowerPoint slideshow, Project Origin has truly optimised whatever hardware you have almost effortlessly. Whilst most shooters opt for a silver/brown tint, Project Origin has almost ironically tried to break from this trend by smearing everything in dark blood red. Whilst this is sort of a disappointment in itself, it does actually fit the theme of the game surprisingly well.

Moving onto some actual action, we have the introduction of the mandatory Call of Duty finer aim/zoom function we have in all FPS's now. Not that that's a bad thing, it makes targeting easier, but again the default controls map this function to Shift...for some reason. The enemies go down in rather spectacular fashions, akin to the early footage of Killzone 2, and this is emphasised by the revamped Slo-Mo which now almost puts you in a temporary state of euphoria, with enemies and gunfire lighting up like a strong dose of magic mushrooms. The AI, from what I can see, is adequate but nothing special. Whilst they do run for cover and move in packs, the enemies will still eventually throw caution to the wind and attempt to kill you ye olde Halo 3 style - running and gunning, spraying and praying. However, you don't see much of them in the actual demo.

Most of the demo consists of what FEAR is great for - messing with your head via the small girl in The Ring (or Ringu, for the purists) if she bullied and stole the red coat from the girl in Shindler's List. Unlike in the first FEAR, where the game moves between mind-bending and gung-ho bullet storms with as much subtlety as Frankie Boyle, the line between the two is less clear in Project Origin. Some points call for you to take on these invisible baddies, which in all honesty I couldn't tell if I killed or not as they didn't leave a corpse, and the merges between the two is almost poetic.

FEAR has always been held in high respect by me for making you feel truly helpless. Unlike in, say, Silent Hill where it's understandable because you are really just an average-joe forced into a violent and unpredictable world, FEAR exacerbates that feeling by putting you in the shoes of a super-soldier armed to the teeth with the latest in firearm technology. Knowing that even with all your fancy pants gadgetry and Reflex Slo-Mo bullet time malarkey, you're still utterly powerless to the omnipotent is-it-or-isn't-it-evil that stalks you at every turn.

That isn't to say it isn't without it's flaws, though. My main gripe is that the HUD sits in the centre of the screen. The outer rings of you health/ammo are a good 4 inches away from the edge of the screen (I'm running at 1680x1050) and whilst it isn't game breaking or truly in the way of anything, it's still annoying. Like when watching a movie at the cinemas and the inevitable 8ft rugby player sits just on the corner of your peripheral vision. The demo itself is criminally short. I won't spoil it for potential testers, but the demo ends on an incredibly awesome high. That is to say, it's done it's job. It leaves you at such a point you're just getting into the swing of things and have started kicking ass and chewing bubble gum.

I know I shouldn't make rash decisions based off a demo, but this has been the first game in a long time to actually live up to my expectations. I have to hold myself back in fear of disappointment, but this is certainly a must-buy game for me.

There's one line in anime that I hate. Whenever I hear it I cringe and just know there's going to be a "oooh even though this isn't technically what I think it is, it's still wrong" moment.

Even though we're not related by blood...Random Anime Girl

Oh, Christ! I can't go on! This is bananas!

I don't see what the whole obscession is in Japan with cousins. I read somewhere that cousins dating is seen as an almost comedy in itself, like purposely mis-matched couples in sit-coms. But I mean, come on! It's in almost every romantic comedy anime going. Harems are now boiled down to:

The real love interest - Will have the second biggest boobs out of all of them and is either bashfully quiet and sweet or violently in denial.

The lust/secondary love interest - Will have the biggest boobs and be the biggest flirt. More often than not is also quite a-female-dog.

The emo - Has problems which the protagonist solves by not being a complete asshat towards her.

The tomboy - Has the smallest boobs and thus the shortest temper.

The child - Shoehorned in for all the sick lolicons. More than likely good at housework. Having a twin or identical best friend is optional, but recommended.

The distant cousin - Is either not related by blood, or is a second-removed or...something. Either way, will inevitably say the above line and make a really awkward scenario mid-late through the series. In rare cases can be replaced by a step-sister.

The housewife - This one is entirely optional. Is always dead cheery and good at cooking, most likely has a bust rivalling the secondary love interest.

However, this doesn't stop me from watching harems, as a lot are dead funny. Love Hina will always be the standard, in my opinion though. :P