Guitar Hero World Tour

Being fans of Guitar Hero 3 for X-Box 360 we decided to buy Guitar Hero World Tour.

We bought the full kit which includes:

• A much better looking guitar: check out that beautifully vanished plastic base!

• A rocking USB microphone:

• And perhaps most exciting: the drum kit:

Star Power!

If you've played Guitar Hero before you'll be familiar with Star Power.

It's basically a power up which doubles the amount of points you earn while playing.

Tilting your guitar up activates star power (acting like a tool is optional).

Also once activated, electricity shoots off your character and for a moment everything tastes blue.

 

Star Power on the drums?

So it doesn't take a genius to work out if tilting one's axe activates star power for a guitarist then tilting the drum kit must activate it for a drummer!

Unfortunately I couldn't seem to activate star power on our defective drum kit. In fact there must have been something really wrong with our drum kit because I was completely crap at it, lol.

At least that's what I thought until my diva wife pushed me off and jumped on! ;-)

In all seriousness though, we had the kids on the weekend and all four of us played in a band together. It was great family fun. Chloe played lead guitar, Alex played bass, I played the drums (mainly cause neither of the kids wanted to, lol) and Jules showed us she's a closet rapper on the mic! Her rendition of "No Sleep Til Brooklyn" would have made the Beasty Boy's proud! lol ;-)

Prezzies!

Another thing that's been consuming our time over Xmas has been this prezzy that I bought Jules. It's called Khet (formerly known as Deflexion).

It's a board game played by 2 people. Each player has a laser on their end of the board and most of the pieces have mirrors on them. You move or rotate your pieces to manipulate how the laser beams bounce around the playing field. When a piece is struck by a laser and it doesn't have a mirror or it's mirror is facing away from the laser then that piece is removed from the board. The end-goal of the game is to blast a hole through your opponents pharaoh (the symbolic equivalent of a king in chess).

Sadly the lasers in the game are a little weak - it only slightly tingles when you put your tongue on them! So I raided all the remote controls around the house and wired the lasers directly into a huge 128 array of AA batteries!

It says on the box not to stare directly into the lasers so I made sure to only stare at the reflection of them, you know, to see if there would be any new side effects yet. In short, the good news is we were able to sell our toaster this week, lol. ;-)

 

More spore

Well, I've had a bit more time to play around with the Spore Creature Creator and as promised I've uploaded some pics of my creature dudes. Meet my babies!

It's pretty cool what you can do with limbs. You can attach just about any part to the end of any limb. For example with this next creature I attached a couple arms to it's head, made them tiny, and replaced the hands with eyes.

 

Same principle with this next guy, except the top of his back-bone has 5 limbs coming off it, each with it's own head.

The editor is so easy to use and it's pretty amazing how quickly you can knock these things up even without any artistic ability - but it's so much fun you end up spending ages tweaking your creature to get it just right. I love this next one - he's just so freaky-deeky!

And what can I say, as soon as I realised I could, I couldn't resist but create Jar Jar! lol

...Don't tell him but when I get the full game I plan to populate a planet with his species, lower them into a full sense of security and then blam! I genocise them with my doom ray! Muhahahaaaaa.

EA Released Creature Editor for Spore

Today Electronic Arts have given us a taste of what's to come in their highly anticipated, evolution-themed game "Spore" by releasing the creature editor application for the game.

The creature editor is revolutionary. What would previously take professional 3D artists dozens of man hours to design, model, texture and animate a 3D creature, anyone can now do in mere minutes using this creature editor for Spore.

You start out by shaping the back-bone of your creature which determines it's body shape. Then you simply drag and drop limbs and features onto your creature. You can get really creative - your creature might have 3 legs, four arms and 2 mouths and you can attach any body part just about anywhere. Finally you choose what markings and colours you want for your creature and your done. Then based on your creatures body-layout, centre of gravity, etc, the game will automatically work out how to animate your creature all for you. It's really amazing.

Here's a creature I based on one of our cats.

And here's a photo of... him relieving himself??? Well as long as he covers it up when he's done, lol.

I'll create and share some more imaginative creatures on my blog when I'm feeling more creative (and when it's not 2am in the morning) to show you how flexible the editor application really is. I'd also love to see what creatures other people come up with! If you're interested you can download the editor and try it out yourself - it's easy to use and great fun!

Shiny, glowy toys just around the corner

Well, I'm a toy-boy and there are a couple goodies I've been watching closely for over a year, salivating for their arrival, and now they're just around the corner!

The Apple iPhone

My wife tells me I that actually have a mobile phone that I never use - I tell her it's just for emergencies...the type of emergencies that I can plan for a day or so ahead so I have time to charge my phone first.

But if I had an iPhone we would be inseparable. I would regularly have meaningful conversations through her, caress her body gently and take her out to cafes (so long as they are a wifi hotspot).

Seriously it's so freaking sweet because it's essentially a multi-touch, large screen, wifi, video iPod with a phone built in plus apps like games, instant messaging, web-browsing, email, etc! After months of rumors, there are now lots of reports agreeing on a 3G iPhone being released in Oz late June 2008. Woot!

Spore

Spore is a game by Will Wright at Maxis (the lead designer behind the highly popular "Sim City" and "The Sims" games). It's another simulation game this time based on life itself and evolution. You start out with a single cell organism in the tidal pool and strive for survival by avoiding larger organisms and consuming smaller ones. You gain points this way and when you have enough you open the 'creature editor' and can customize your organism by adding/removing limbs, eyes, mouths, etc, essentially evolving your creature. Eventually you move out of the tidal pool and onto land, evolving your creature at milestones such as starting a tribe, using tools, building a civilization, warring with other civilizations until you rule that planet and eventually master space-travel technology to seek out other planets to colonize. I really love the idea and my words don't do the game justice...so here's a preview!

It's due out on PC in September, though game programmers are programmers all the same and aren't immune from bad ETAs so I wouldn't be surprised if it's later. As if this couldn't get any cooler though, to help Apple show off how easy it is to write applications for the iPhone, EA ported the tidal pool phase of Spore to the Apple iPhone! I don't know if they plan to release Spore for the iPhone but either way it's good times ahead. I can't wait. :)