“Adam denies us of any excuse for not being beautiful”

Yeah, I’ve been super busy lately etc. etc. etc. Addicted Geek has become something which has simply fallen on the wayside. It seems such a shame not to update for a whole month so that’s why I’m typing this ;)

Ah well, I still update my tumblog frequently.

Hello World!

Every time I start writing on this blog it ends up in my draft folder, and then by the time I get back to it half the things that I have written seems irrelevant, so therefore this time I am going to force myself to publish this post.

So, things I have been getting up to. Job applications have been going badly. In the sense that I haven’t really been doing many of them. I’m in my last year of uni and therefore the pressure of actually getting a job is somewhat higher. It’s always something looming in the background and something which is constantly on my frikking mind. Work hasn’t been good either. Things keep on interrupting me whenever I want to do something productive, like an exercise set. I have two problem sets in due very soon and I haven’t even gotten round to doing the readings. This is mostly due to the fault of the frikking Literature Society which simply takes too much of my time.

But enough about me. Let’s talk some GAMES. I completed World of Goo the other day, and it is one of the most interesting games I have played for a long long time. Even a friend of mine (who is usually pretty cynical about these things) had a go at 2am in the morning and ended up staying up all night playing the first two chaptes. There’s something completly original, completly intuitive and completly loveable about it that makes it so special. The perfect difficulty curve, the fact that it is completly impossible to be frustrated and the fact that it stays new and fresh throughout all its chapters is something that isn’t particularly common in gaming. Team Fortress 2 is actually (finally) starting to bore me a little now - even though I know everyone now in the servers I play on, I tend to not stick around for more than 45 minutes every night, which is a long way away from the 3 hour marathons back in the day. It’s still really funny, but I guess there’s only so many times you can build that turrent in that position in Dustbowl before it starts getting repetitive. Still, it’s taking more time than Far Cry 2 is. After the initial originality of the fact that OMG YOU ACTUALLY CARRY THE MAP WITH YOU it ended up really boring me. It’s still the same old same old as as per Crysis and the original Far Cry. Is this because games have become more and more similar or because my expectations have become ever more and more higher? Talking about expectations, Fallout 3 tommorow (goddamn I hate you americans), and Left 4 Dead soon - November is going to be a good month.

[Read more →]

Paul Pape, one of my buddies over at the US has a new product in store! He asked me to write about them here, but it’s probably better if I directly get him to tell you about them. (Also note: I am lazy)

Hello again from across the pond.  It’s Paul Pape, the guy who made the Chocolate Miis.  I just thought you would want to know about the newest product I have, a first in a series of CelebriMiis called Hallow-Mii-nies.

It’s a limited edition collector’s set of three horror movie figures, Freddy Kruger from Nightmare on Elm Street, Jason Vorhees from Friday the 13th and Michael Myers from Halloween.  I will only be making 100 of these, then retire the set.  If there seems to be interest in them, I will continue the CelebriMiis collections with superheroes, Star Trek, etc.

So Muxtape announced just a few days ago that the consequence of being (essentially) shut down by the RIAA is that they will not be able to offer what it had before - a brilliant service for people to share online .MP3 mixtapes and discover music, instead it will be offering a service to indie (in the truer sense of the word) bands to share music. This was a huge pity as Muxtape was one of my favourite online discoveries this year, and thus to continue in its spirit I am using a new program called Opentape to create new mixtapes, every month, sharing with you music that I am currently listening to (creating a new one every month, retaining the old ones, until my bandwidth bills stop allowing me to). I’ll try to create a new one every month (if I remember), and then post it under ‘Mixtapes’ in the right menu bar. I probably won’t post every month here when I do a new one, but I might spare a link on my tumblog, ilikeyou.

Oh yeah, and this month’s can be found here.

I bought Introversion’s latest offering, Multiwinia today via Steam. Admittedly, I wasn’t really planning on/looking forward to playing this game that much when it was released. In my opinion, Uplink was the peak of Introversion’s gaming ability - both Darwinia and DEFCON were fun to start of with, but after a few hours very quickly lost their shine, and ultimately appeared to be games of very little depth after the originally factor fades.

Still, after a few plays of the Multiwinia demo (which perked my interest), I thought I’d give it a go and see what happens.

I’ve played for about 3 hours now, and it’s still fun!

[Read more →]

I’m going to go through quite a few things in this post - this site, music, films, games, comics, books, y’know, everything.

To start off with, the state of affairs with this website. I really summed it up in an email to Chimp just now, so I’m just going to copy and paste that because I am lazy:

On Thu, Sep 4, 2008 at 4:17 PM, Simon simon@thisfirmIworkedatfor10weeks> wrote:

I think I now know the main problem with Addicted Geek - I’ve been trying to make it too like the stuff I am used to writing online - news, reviews, previews, or just forum posts. It’s either that or super-personal blog posts online where I write on my super-private blog that no-one knows about, as it would cause me a lot of embarrassment if anyone did. The problem is that if I tried the former I end up being competitive with sites like RPS, and sadly, being someone who does not write full time, it’s just silly. The less said about the latter the better.

I’ve always had this pipe dream that I would write all these fabulous reviews, and review everything that came out, that we would have this amazing score system and everyone would come to Addicted Geek to compare games/music/movies (not just content with PC Games, of course, which takes four full time professional writers just to maintain RPS, let alone make any money out of).

That’s not to say that I’ve had strokes of genius (OK, one stroke of genius) which gave the site around 1 million hits (in total) :D

I’m not sure why it never struck me that Addicted Geek should be one of those places where I should update with my own feelings about something, in a completely informal style - like Pendatact, or 1Blog, or all those other millions of blogs people go on not to read reviews or previews or to check up on the latest news, but to read opinion. And frankly, I have a lot of opinion. It’s not to say I haven’t written opinion before, but I guess this blog should be mostly that rather than reviews, one sentence ‘OMG Pyro update’ pieces or ‘this blog is not dead yet, honest!’ false promises.

So yeah, as Chimp so keenly puts it ‘no more Addicted Meek’, although this really depends on how wholehartedly I start updating Addicted Geek again.

And moving on, the State of Affairs with music taste. I really like where I am right now.

[Read more →]

Hi All,

A couple of things happened in the past few months which turned my life upside down, and this coupled with a relatively intensive summer internship means that I haven’t had that much time or energy for this site (although admittedly I’ve had time to play 10+ hours of TF2 every week…)

Still, this site is not dead! I am planning on reviving it very soon in the near future (still tweaking code when I can be arsed), so stay tuned! I am updating my tumblog every so often (about 2 times on average a day, although there can be a week of drought) at ilikeyou.addictedgeek.com, so check that out!

Gonna get Chimp to post something substantial soon also. He doesn’t know that yet, but once he reads this he will.

I play TF2 far too much.

Nuff said.

Also, sorry I haven’t been posting on here lately. Some stuff happened which turned my life upside down. However, I do try to update my tumblr more often, so go check that out if you’re bored.

I don’t care what Si thinks, Valve are better at this than bloody Pixar now.

Edit edit: oh god the update looks amazing.

Sweet. I need to fix my PC ASAP probably.

This clever little internet app lets me never, ever, ever, ever /ever/ need to carry a USB stick ever again, essentially an online storage space, but with really clever syncing, restoring, delta and undeleting features. It’s definetly really useful if you have multiple computers as it even syncs save files.

Dropbox

Addicted Geek loves to procrastinate, and of course the internets provides the best tools to do so. The latest tool to do so is a wonderful website called workFRIENDLY, which turns any website into a Microsoft lookalike, allowing you to surf and procrastinate without your boss suspecting a thing. There’s even a boss key at the top left corner which allows for even more work avoidance. Frankly, awesome.

workFRIENDLY (via Download Squad)

Last.fm are completly redesigning their site (as a current subscriber I get behind-the-scenes footage):

Which is great and all that (there are a few cool extra features), but I have one major problem with it - it kinda looks (and feels) too much like facebook.

[Read more →]

… Lolspeak is a language.

I’m not sure if this is old or not, but it’s amusing nonetheless.

I mean, every time I log in to flickr, it greets me in a different language each time (Hola, Shalom, Ciao, Ni Hao etc.), which is a pretty cool feature. I’m just amused that the impact of 4chan has reached this far.