Shure Se210 Sound Isolating Earphones Review - Sweet Silence

I have these earphones almost six months now, so I'm in a good position to do a review.

Now, when I first set out to buy my first high end set of buds I got a bit of a shock. Everything over forty euro seemed to be in-ear and while those usually sound fine I usually find my ears get sore after a long enough period of use which kind of prevents me from enjoying the music.

But I settled on these in the end. It was a cool ninety euro for these bad boys so I had my fingers crossed that they would be worth it.

The Agony of Choice: The first thing you'll notice opening the box is the selection of different ear inserts. Instead of the different sizes of the same shape that you get with cheaper buds here you actually get a selection of different type. The default inserts are foam, like ear-plugs. I didn't like them too much and they didn't feel comfortable in my ear, so I decided to experiment. Eventually I settled on the type called "triple flange" which felt comfortable in my ear without having to be pressed in too far.

Sound Isolation: The inserts are seriously good at cancelling noise, in my old job there would be frequent shouting matches and while I might take the buds out if I felt like enjoying the drama I always had the option of completely ignoring them. Nothing interrupts your music, so at the very least the sound isolating part of the name is very true. This also means you don't need to turn your music up too high to drown out ambient sound so can be good news for your ears and you don't need to worry about bothering the guy sitting beside you with whatever crap you are listening to.

Quality, isn't that all that counts: These are the cheapest pair you'll get in the Shure range but they are also by far the nicest sounding buds I have ever owned. Classical music is rendered clearly and vibrantly so I can't really fault the treble. While I can't say it has blown my earlier set out of the water I have a feeling that these guys are limited more by the quality of my mp3s than anything else.

The bass is okay. I would say that it might be the one area I found disappointing because it does lack some power for example Rob Dougan tracks or similar Techno music. It doesn't ruin the songs but it is outshone by even the most basic of speakers here.

So, should I buy them? If you're looking for a pair of buds that will block out all sounds (I use mine as earbuds when sleeping sometimes, they really work) and sound great I can recommend these.

If you are looking for pure sound enjoyment I do feel there must be better out there for maybe fifty euro more. This is a nice purchase that I in no way regret but I will probably buy slightly higher end for my next purchase.

Spelunky - Game Review

It all started when I had that giant spider right where I wanted him. He had chased me down a tiny tunnel but I had managed to climb up a ladder to safety.

I could hear him bounce around, making that terrifying noise. I felt utter joy as I primed my bombs and threw the down the tunnel. Two explosions later the monster was dead. I then heard somebody scream "Terrorist!".

Turned out the tunnel had been situated directly over one of those subterranean shops and the shopkeeper was not happy. He had dashed out of the shop with his shotgun to hunt down the source of the explosions so I, not being one to pass up an opportunity used another bomb to create an entrance to the now empty store and helped myself to his wares.

Little did I know, I was now a wanted man. My poster was hanging in every store and every doorway had a shotgun armed shopkeeper waiting for me. I actually did pretty well, evading them for a time. The items I had helped myself to certainly helped, especially a pair of climbing mitts.

Well, there was one particular tunnel, that lead to a doorway. My plan was just to fall through and enter the door before the shopkeeper could blow me away.

Well, I stuck to the wall half way down and was brutally murdered by the shopkeeper. Kids, crime doesn't pay.



Spelunky is a truly amazing game. It's a random experience every time so you might spend one game barely surviving and eventually dieing on level three to some inconveniently placed death spikes.

Other times you'll have adventures like the one I described above. What makes it so good is the variety of items and character behaviours in the game. This is excellent game design and it really works. You'll find yourself developing ways of approaching threats and navigating the cave networks. Does the way open before you look too dangerous? Well, you can use bombs to make your own pathway.

And the bombs, to me, are the real star of the show. They can kill anything in one go, including you and you really respect them. Priming a bomb is no joke in this game. In fact, everything is no joke. You get a certain amount of hits and once they're gone your game is over.

This is some of the best fun I've had in a long time and I recommend everybody give it a go. It takes some time to get into but it is immensely satisfying when things work out and what's more it is legitimately satisfying. You have one chance to make things work, quick save and checkpoint culture has destroyed these sorts of experiences in gaming. I want to see more like this, a lot more.

The game can be downloaded here.

As unique as it is, I will not try to give it a rating. Just play it.

The Text Adventure

I've never played much in the way of Text adventures, in a way I suppose they were before my time. I came into gaming at the high point of graphical adventure games, or the beginning of their descent depending on how you look at it.

There does seem to be a fairly active online community for them, people brought up on Multi-User dungeons, Zork and that hitch hikers guide to the Galaxy game. One thing that surprises me is that lack of user tools however.

First a bit of education, there are two major ways of developing a text adventure. The first is Inform 7 an english based programming language and TADS3 a Java like language. One thing these both lack however is an online interpreter, which makes them all but completely useless to the casual gamer like myself.

Behold, prometheus, a work in progress by yours truly. It's only had two days of work so far but it's been interesting so far. I can certainly see the potential of the medium but there's a reason I've never really got into one before.

Learning all of those stupid commands, typing north north north etc. Boring. And the amazing things about Inform 7 (The only one I've tried) is that it doesn't have any system for conversation trees. What the hell?

So Prometheus will be a text based system for making text-based adventure games, not an interactive novel.

Play Ruse, quick!

A short post to alert the world to the fact that RUSE, a new WW2 strategy game has a free beta currently on steam. I'd write more but my flu has rubbed me of all stamina.

What will have to suffice is that RUSE is probably the first time that actual strategic level gameplay has worked, and it's set in WW2.

So think supreme commader, as it should have been with the same feel as company of heroes. It's damn good, go try it now.

The Game I'm Looking For

It's easy to deride the gaming industry as it stands but the question is what does PC gaming need to be great again? What has it lost that once made it so great.

One word comes to mind, Bullfrog. Dungeon Keeper, Populous, Theme Hospital, each a completely unique idea perfectly executed. Peter Molyneux of course is still around but we no longer get games of that caliber. I wonder if it's because of the fact that authorship of games has disappeared. They are now the products of corporations, not the vision of one man.

Before, a small team could create a game that could compete on a world wide market. Now, with graphics paramount this has disappeared almost entirely. One man operations like Gratuitous Space Battles are frankly shallow. On the opposite side we have ASCII based games like Dwarf fortress which have depth but no graphics to speak of at all.

It's amazing to me that something has not happened to bring back authorship. But the fact is that tools like XNA do make it all easier but there is a huge difference between making some pixel art and building 3D model and traversing 3D space in code is no trivial task. Before a writer or developer could mock up a game with a chance of being successful in a few days (at least a simple one.) Now it would take much longer, we see people trying to sell their 3D pong remakes that it took them months to create. Creativity has given way to necessity.

I hope that we will see soon that the power returns to the author, Prometheus needs to come down a second time and put things right again.

Game Review - League of Legends

I haven't played many releases lately, I have to admit. In fact I'm beginning to realize that I have settled into a new market category lately, I am now a casual gamer. But have mainstream games given me a choice? Their constant rehashing of the same ideas frankly makes me sick, Dragon Ages bored me to tears, the latest Call of Duty about as interesting as glaze drying on terracotta. No, anybody of above average intelligence has no place in the modern gaming world.

So, you have two choices. Make your own game (I am trying to do this but it's hard.) Or maybe just taking the whole thing less seriously, don't look at games as an investment, look at them as just a bit of fun. And the best fun of course, is that which is to be had for free, this brings me to a recently release DOTA clone; League of Legends.

For those not familiar with the concepts of DOTA (Defense of the Ancients, an immensely popular mod for Warcraft 3), you essentially pick a hero from over 40 candidates and enter a team based battle to overcome the other side. Through the course of a single game you go from level 1 to 18, unlocking abilities and purchasing items as you go. It is a damn good recipe for a game which provides a good variety of experiences within the thirty to forty minutes it takes to play a game. Let's break it down.



Community: This is a multilayer only game and DOTA, if famous for anything, is famous for it's awful community of highly strung thirteen year olds. My impressions of the community so far, it's okay. If you "feed", that is die too often thereby giving the other side a huge advantage in experience, you will probably get given out to but that's understandable to some extent. Trash talkers do exist but I've found once I became competent at the game people were friendlier.

All in all, don't expect too much help while you are learning the game. Luckily there are excellent guides on the games forums that will help you along just fine. Once you aren't dying every two minutes the community is relaxed enough in general. The best part is that unlike certain other games (Looking at you Demigod) you can always find a game and it's really easy to pair up with a friend in a matched game. It's all as easy as it should be and then some.

Graphics: We live in an age of 4850s, GTXs and whatever else you happen to have strapped to your motherboard and Leage of Legends won't be using the majority of the available power. The design is great however and every hero looks unique and is fun to watch. Hero abilities are well realized and everything is distinct on the screen so visual confusion (in what can be a very visually confusing game) is kept to a minimum.

Interface: The interface is sublime, from the air based application that handles finding a game and managing your heroes, allowing you to have it in the background while waiting for a game to the amount of information neatly available on your screen at any one time. This game sets a standard for things to come with its ease of use.

Gameplay: Gameplay ranges from frenetic to relaxed. Comebacks happen all the time and every kill you get is extremely satisfying. Each hero plays fairly uniquely, even if they aren't all equally viable. It's a genuinely fun game to pick up and play but the depth is there too that keeps you interested.



Summing up now because I've run out of time. League of Legends is a great little game that you don't need to pay a penny for. So if you are like me and just want to have a bit of fun without getting annoyed at the horrid state of modern gaming give it a try. I'm in there as Vonkrieger.

85/100

Game Review - Brutal Legend

Tim Schafer, there's a name. It brings to mind the original Monkey Island games and Grim Fandango, some of my all time favorite games. His more recent offering psycho naughts was also pretty good from a design point of view but ultimately suffered from being a pretty standard platformer.

I heard he was making a new game and I was interested, not so much excited. Psychonaughts was fun but left me cold ultimately and this game was being marketed as some kind of action game. The advertising made it seem like a god of war style brawler. Well, let's forget all that now, because the truth has since been revealed. And the truth my friends, is very metal.

You see, Brutal legend is an RTS, always was meant to be an RTS and the single player game is merely an extremely well developed tutorial, reminiscent of the single player levels in games such as Command and Conquer where you are introduced to a single unit at a time. Of course here it is all interspersed with chase levels and as many side quests as you care to do.

Let's break it down.



Graphics: A lot has been said about the graphics in this and they are nice. The whole Metal theme is carried through well and there are some really nice details. I didn't find myself blown away by the graphics in this game however and they do feel generic in places. They are functional for the most part with a nice set piece thrown in various places like splotches of color on an otherwise bland canvas.

Some areas such as starting area "Bladehenge" feel like something out of a PlayStation game and seem like they were thrown together in a day while other areas such as the interior of the battle forge and Mount Rockmore are inspired scenery where it's obvious a lot of work has gone in.

Gameplay: The opening of this game has you fighting and driving as if it's the primary game play. Two things about this, it's not the primary game play and it's a damn good thing it's not. Combat is fun but clunky and the driving feels like something out of micro machines. Neither of these are bad but on their own they are boring and offer little variation.

These areas last just long enough to remain fun and to lead us into some of the RTS elements. You can order troops to mill about, guard areas etc. Since this game is mainly an online multiplayer RTS, let's talk about the RTS controls.

They're okay. When it comes to micromanagement you can't beat a mouse but you have enough control over your units to manage a decent war effort. You can also jump into battle any time you like and start splitting heads, ripping out a few solos that can cause explosions, summon extra units and block off your enemy. It's an involving game online and though I've only been playing it two days I'm enjoying it, it just takes some getting used to.

Sound: Voice acting is amazing on every level, Jack Black puts in a truly excellently played, funny and memorable performance. He is backed up by the likes of Tim Curry voicing the main bad guy and other solid actors along with various cameos from metal legends.

Other sound effects are passable but it's the voice-work that puts the Sound here over the crowd.

Multiplayer: Balance is everything in multiplayer, and while this game has a nice flow to it every enemy army I encountered so far was of the same army. This army also happens to have quite a powerful strategy that seems like it may be over powered.

Suggesting a game can be perfectly balanced at release is probably a bit unrealistic and for the most part every unit seems to fit into their respective army well. The thing that will make or break the multiplayer will be the continued support of the game through patches and down loadable content. I have my fingers crossed that Double Fine will give this game the continued attention it deserves to blossom into a really solid online RTS.



Summing up time. Well, once I got this game home I sat down and played through it in five hours. I wasn't really challenged at any point but it was consistently fun and there was always something new to play with, not to mention the great story that it had gluing it together. It was no Grim Fandango story wise but it was damn good.

So, you could argue that I've already got my moneys worth but that doesn't necessarily make this a great game. I'm going to keep playing the online portion and try to get into it more, in the mean-time I can say this is worth the price of admission for the single player campaign alone and the online segment is definitely fun enough to keep me coming back for another go.

80/100

Follow-Up: I've brought this game back to the shop. After really trying to get into the online part of the game it just feels to shallow to keep going. At first having so many units to double team with and use seems deep but given the fact that you can only be in one place at once most options become wasteful distractions that cause you to lose. Additionally, I found the game laggy and given the fact that the direct control of your avatar is so pivotal to your success, lag in the wrong moment can cost you a game.

There is little incentive to play on anyway as each game is retreading the same ground over and over, only with different units. Cover has no effect, for example, so it all comes down to who has the more units etc.

Well, ultimately it feels that tactics and strategy don't factor much in this game, though they are there in essence. I had hopes for this but in the end I feel it just doesn't hold water. Judged as an RTS Brutal Legend is not a good game.