I Voted Saxon!

And he we go for another year of crazy hijinks from the wonderful crew in that little town of Eureka, where disaster almost hits the world because of them every second week. And I wish I could live there, brains or not.

We return and we get a cheap cop out in the way of flashbacks – while most are actually from the episode, the Tess breaking up with Jack certainly DIDNT happen last time we were watching the show. It ended on an upbeat note – Jack with the option of moving to Australia, not knowing if we were going to lose our favorite Everyman or not to love.

You can tell some time has passed, though. Alison’s baby is suffering from SORAS, and Kevin is turning into another walt – let’s hope they never do a long slow show like lost, then they’ll be in trouble. I have to say, it’s good to have Kevin back. Here we have an autistic kid with a single mother expecting another. Like this wouldn’t effect him. Sure, they might of not being able to get the actor to return, but the only mention of kevin last year was a comment by Alison to the fact that this whole pregnancy thing isn’t new to her. Anyways.

Instead of “zim DOOOOM of the week”, we get a good old Blast to the past and our main characters travel back in time. Jack naturally gets himself into trouble, and Fargo is the comic foil. I have to say, LOVE the terminator parody. It’s all pretty standard fare here – a race against the clock to get back to the future before their time window closes. We get a sweet kiss/moment with Alison and Jack this early in the piece, so of course my alarm bells are ringing instantly.

The catch? When they get back, things are slightly changed. Tess never left, Zane is still a troublemaker and has nothing to do with Jo, Kevin is no longer autistic and some new love interest for Henry is now married to him. Oh yeah, and one of Einstein’s buddies accidentally gets sent forward.

I have to say when the time line was changed I was thinking “please bring Nathan back…”, but no dice (is he still on true blood? Im way behind…) I hope they keep this timeline as the new status quo. Im guessing we’ll get weeks of awkward Zane/Jo moments but it’s great this kind of show can mix it up so much. Looking forward to weeks ahead…

It’s been talked and played to death by now, but why it’s still fresh in my head and my main Internet connection is giving me grief tonight, I thought I’d make a quick post with some of my thoughts about the game.

Gameplay – for once, Rockstar got it RIGHT. They’ve opened up the difficulty settings massively. There’s easy/normal/hard modes, also checkpoints. So even if you do stuff up, you don’t have to start from the beginning again. Also, fail enough times and you can skip certain parts. One of the biggest problems with GTA4 was if you get stuck at a point and cant progress, you’re screwed. Harcore gamers got very uppity about that point in this game, but if you want to be a sucker you can certainly keep retrying to the late hours of the morning as long as you like, AND you don’t get any achievements associated with that level. If they incorporate these types of things into the next GTA, it’s going to be so so much better.

STORY – (And a big SPOILER point here) the ending should have been when John first meets up with his wife and son again is when the game should have ended. I don’t mind that the game has a sadish ending, it’s just the game builds and builds and becomes more trickier – and then you go home to herd cattle and shoot crows again. Its like a car that accidentally went into first gear, the whiplash is shocking. And when you finally do get to “get your revenge” as Jack, it’s all over too quickly. You stop at a couple of strangers locations and end the game with a duel. Wouldn’t of been much better to make that part DLC content? Think about it. The opening bits with Jack and John could of been a reintroduction to the game and Rockstar could have invented some more story to go behind Jacks part. Introduce some storyline current to the 1914 timeline and some new random characters, don’t make it too easy for Jack to find the guy at the end, even if he is retired.

Other than that, great game. Haven’t messed around much with the online stuff yet, and I certainly will once my bloody network works again!

Apart from the ipad being a handy little mini computer I have close by whenever i’m home, i’ve discovered im consuming a lot more content.

I’m not a hermit, but I HATE shopping. If I can I try to avoid it as much as possible. 9/10 when I walk into a game store, or DVD/CD place (on the rare occasion, like a bluray purchase), i’ve already pretty much decided what I’ve come to buy anyways.

One of the best apps onthe ipad is vinio. It’s basically the ibookstore for magazines. Sadly at the moment It’s only got a smallish choice of magazines available, but the music section isn’t TOO bad. There’s Rolling Stone (on the odd occasion they publish something that ISN’T crap) but my number one selection, NME. I love their radio station, and even though I don’t know half of the bands they talk about, It’s good to read and they have a chart list. For AGES I’ve been searching for a decent charts list which wasn’t anything to do with GAGA or any of that terrible ilk. There’s some crap, but at least it’s getting me downloading new music again. I know I need to go back to the past and listen to some old music that passed me by the first time around, but there’s so much good stuff coming out today it feels almost criminal to ignore it.

This, tied with the newspaper app (pressreader), why would you EVER need to go into a newsagency again? I buy my lotto tickets straight from the website, get the Herald Sun from my ipad in the morning and go to bed reading a magazine or a book from Kindle if I’m in the mood..

I’m not saying that Apple is the reinventors, cause that’s BS. A lot of this stuff has been around for a while already. I think my new toy makes it easier though to combine it all into one. Before this I could read a book on a kindle, but I wanted to say, watch a video, I’d need to grab my PSP. Oh, there’s an interesting link I’m reading about – better get my eeepc…..

I’m excited, but also in a way I’m worried for the small companies much like the independent music stores were once the mp3s took over music.

As it goes, I want to review a lot more music on here as well. As the charts change week after week, so does the nano in the car. Tomorrow I have either The Drums, Pendulum or Kate Nash. I’ll keep you posted…