Yootoob

I started my own YouTube channel. I've posted one video so far, a little over 2 months ago, of me winning an online race in Mario Kart 8, via the game's in-built race highlights editor.

I think you need to get millions of views, and to get adverts on your videos, to start making any money. My video has so far got 21 views, and has no adverts. If I can get 25,000 views a day, every day, for the next year or so, I should get into the kind of numbers that will start making me some serious money. Oh yeah.

Fingerless Gloves

I've never understood the appeal of fingerless gloves. They certainly don't look cool and they don't have any practical benefit over fingered gloves. The fingers are the parts of the hand that get cold the most.

As such, I take an instant dislike to anyone who wears them. Someone on my bus wears them. I dislike him. I've never spoken to him but he's crossed the fashion line and there's no going back. He looks like Sylar from 'Heroes' too which only makes him look more evil.

Lorde: "Pure Heroine"

Released: 2013

A girl who takes the same bus as me in the mornings looks a lot like Lorde. I think she does this on purpose to some degree as she has her hair the same, dresses in a similar style and tends to wear purple lipstick.

She's probably about the same age as Lorde too I would guess, at about 18. I don't know if Lorde is an inspirational figure to the young people or just this one. I'm not going to ask her (or speak to her at all) as she's half my age and that would be creepy. She does wear the same Doc Martens boots as me though, not that I'm suggesting that she's going to start copying my look next.

It's a pretty bold move to model your look on someone else. Everywhere she goes, people must say, "Ooh, you look a lot like Lorde." Intentional or not, it must get pretty annoying everyone mentioning/thinking it all the time.

Anyway, Lorde's album is pretty good, it has a strong first half, then sags a bit in the second half but picks up again right at the end.

Rating: 3.5/5

Drinks Are On Me!

I saw the world's most expensive bottle of Champagne once.

It was during a tour at the Piper-Heidsieck Champagne house in Reims. The tour involved riding a cart in some underground tunnels. I don't remember too much, mainly that we were told that the tunnels had been used by the French Resistance during WW2.

The big finish of the tour was a glimpse of the aforementioned bottle. It looked like a normal bottle of Champagne, but one covered in diamonds. It was then followed by pictures of celebrities drinking glasses of Champagne. The only one I remember is Jack Nicholson. This was 1995. I don't know if a more expensive bottle of Champagne has been produced since then.

Putting diamonds on things seemed like a bit of a trend in the 90s. Joe Bloggs (remember them?) produced the world's most expensive pair of jeans back then, which too, were just a normal pair of jeans, but covered in diamonds.

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare

Platform: PS3

I wasn't going to get this game. The previous CoD game, Ghosts, was terrible, and revisiting the older CoD games (as I've done since I got a PS3) has been kind of annoying as they've all been hacked/modded and are flooded with cheats who ruin any kind of enjoyment of playing multiplayer on them.

But then Advanced Warfare came along and got good reviews, reviews which say things like it's refreshed the series, or is the best CoD since whatever, and I thought, why not get in there early before it gets hacked like all the other games, maybe I can get some enjoyment from it?

Set roughly 40 years in the future, AW features all sorts of futuristic enhancements, like special armour that lets you double jump (like in Destiny) and guns that have ammo readouts on them (like in Destiny) and guns that fire energy beams (like in Destiny). Most guns are the same though and don't seem any different from previous CoD games.

The campaign starts off woefully. The first 5 missions are terrible, really boring, and actually quite empty. The game picks up after that though, once the main story and antagonist are revealed. The middle third of the campaign is actually pretty decent and good fun. It's a bit hit-and-miss after that though, with the token death of one of the good guys (who just happens to be the one black character in the game) and a final mission kind of similar to the final mission in Modern Warfare 3.

Multiplayer is always the big draw for CoD games though, and I've played it quite a bit over the past week. Firstly, the maps are pretty decent. The bigger maps of Ghosts have been abandoned meaning you don't spend loads of time wandering about looking for enemies, and they seem a lot less formulaic than on the more recent games.

The exo suit's special abilities (double jumping etc) come more into play in multiplayer, but it's a double edged sword; while they add more verticality and play styles, what it adds most is that lots of players just get on the roofs and shoot down on everyone. I'm calling these people "roof campers", if no-one else has come up with this already, which they probably have. It means you spend your time looking up for enemies, or having to get on the roofs yourself to stop the other team from doing it. Then feeling bad about yourself for being a roof camper.

In addition to all of this, the game handles very similarly to Infinity Ward's recent CoD games (MW3 and Ghosts), which I don't see as a good thing. This means you basically kill someone as soon as you hit them (or get killed when they hit you), and there's very little recoil on many of the guns, especially the assault rifles, and quick-scoping on sniper rifles is rife. Also, there seems to be little penalty for using suppressors on guns as well, which is a personal gripe of mine from CoD games, though some effort has been made to offset this by giving you the option of adding some sort of microphone to your guns which show up suppressed fire (I forget its name). On the subject of guns, there's one assault rifle in particular that is by far the best gun in the game [BAL-27], and pretty much everyone uses it.

The biggest problem with multiplayer is the terrible lag. This could be put down to early teething problems I suppose, but for an established franchise like CoD, it's just not good enough. Pretty much every other game I've played has been affected by it, I would guess. The worst examples are when the game seemingly freezes for a second or two, then it unfreezes, often to find yourself having been killed in the meantime. The killcam also then shows you were indeed frozen as the opposition player kills you. What also happens is that you'll be in a shootout with someone, you get hitmarkers to show you've at least got a few hits on the opposition player before you die, but the killcam shows the other player killed you before you even raised your gun. Before you try to suggest this is my internet connection, I've played Destiny quite a bit online lately on PS3, and Super Smash Bros for 3DS and Mario Kart 8 on Wii U and those games don't really seem to be affected by lag at all. Also, this seems to be affecting other PS3 players too...

Overall, Advanced Warfare is a fairly mediocre game, neither particularly good or bad. The futuristic setting and exo-skeleton armour doesn't really add anything to the mixed bag of a campaign, though its interesting ideas about private militia companies (helped by a charismatic Kevin Spacey) at least add something new. The multiplayer is only slightly better than in Ghosts (which isn't really saying much), mainly due to the exo suit abilities and better maps, but worse than in every other PS3-onwards CoD game, and the lag is unforgiveable. Meh.

Rating: 2.5/5

Destiny

Platform: PS3

I've not blogged much lately. Where have I been? Playing games mostly! For shame.

Destiny, the new game from Bungie, the makers of (most of) the Halo games, has been super-hyped ever since its announcement, whenever that was (I can't be bothered to check) and is set to be one of the biggest selling games of the year.

There's 4 ways to play Destiny: campaign, strike missions, raids and pvp multiplayer. The game is always online, so even when doing the story you need to be connected to Destiny's servers, which can be annoying if you get disconnected for no reason in the middle of a game. You start by choosing one of 3 classes (each with 2 sub-classes, 1 offensive, 1 defensive): Hunter, Titan, Warlock, though you get given no information on any differences between them before you choose. You get 3 save slots though, meaning you can have one of each, though by the time you level each class up, the difference is kind of minimal as you can make choices in each class giving you the exact same stats for each, and all weapons work with each class. You can level up to level 20 by yourself, though to get higher than that you need to get gear from playing multiplayer or buying special armour using credits earned from multiplayer or the strike missions or raids.

The campaign is a bit of an oddball experience. You can do it by yourself, or can team up with 2 other players to do the (by my calculation) 20 missions. These can be PSN friends or people you meet out in the game world and invite (or be invited by). I did it all by myself at first, though have since done some missions with some PSN friends. I didn't notice any real increase in difficulty when having 3 players doing a mission than when I did it myself, so it seems slightly pointless, though a nice touch nonetheless.

The story itself is a bit non-existent. You seem to be awaken (from death?) at the start of the game by a little floaty metal thing known as a "ghost", who the guides you through what you need to do, though it doesn't get involved and start killing baddies or anything. It seems most of Earth has been overrun with baddies and there's one last safe city left, which has a big round thing hovering over it called "The Traveller" which is here to protect us or something. You then go around Earth shooting baddies (there's no stealth, just out-and-out shooting and occasionally punching), then the Moon, then Venus, then Mars. This saves the Earth I think. Though some killjoy known only as "The Watcher" then tells you that the fight has only just begun or something. Isn't that always the way?

The nonsense that is the campaign is saved to some extent by how well the game handles. The controls are exceptional for a shooting game, and the addition of a rather fun double jumping (or jump then float) mechanic and special power (one for each sub-class) give it a bit of much needed variation.

The strike missions are one-off missions that take place in the same game world, designed for 3 players. These are more difficult then story missions, mainly in that the final boss has a ton of health and takes quite a bit of killing. These have matchmaking for the lower level missions (up to level 18), though the ones over level 20 do not, which is a bit puzzling. I've done all of the sub-level 20 strikes, they're a bit boring. They're easy all the way to the final boss, then they just get repetitive as you and your team-mates essentially just shoot loads of bullets at the same big monster.

The raid missions are designed for teams of 6, and are meant to take up to 10 hours to complete. There's no matchmaking for these, and they're all over level 20 only, so it's for you and PSN friends only! I haven't done any of them, I can't really be bothered to spend 10 hours of my time doing one mission for minimal rewards, and I've only got 2 PSN friends who've got Destiny, and they seem to have got bored with it pretty quickly as they've not played the game for a while that I've seen.

Like the campaign, the multiplayer (known as "Crucible" in the game) is a bit of a mixed bag. The weapons and armour from your campaign carry over (and vice versa), meaning you can try out your weapons in the campaign or free roam, though level advantages are disabled. In other words, a level 20 gun does no more damage than a level 5 gun, though in reality, the higher level guns tend to be better anyway (less recoil, better range etc) so you're better off playing the Crucible games when you're a higher level. Also, there's no advantage in having higher level armour.

The big downfall of the multiplayer is a lack of game modes. There's only 4 basic games (with an additional 5th at weekends), and of these 4, one is domination ("Control"), one is free-for-all, and two are team deathmatch (one is 6v6 and the other 3v3). I've never really been a fan of basic team deathmatches, I much prefer objective game modes, so only having one game mode to pique my interest isn't that exciting. The extra weekend game modes tend to be variants of the other 4 game modes and don't really add much.

Overall, Destiny is a bit of a let down. It has many things going for it: the excellent controls, smooth gameplay and more customisation than you normally get in shooters. It's lack of real variation (especially in pvp multiplayer) and nonsense story though means that it's not a game that will have a long life with me or much replayability.

Rating: 3/5