The wheel deal...*lol*

About six months ago, I picked up a Microcon MC2 Steering wheel from Argos, because - as you may have noticed - I am a fan of motorsport, and that extends to the videogame world as well. So, y'know, after having half a year to get used to the nuances of my favourite gaming accessory, I've decided to give a bit of a product review on how its turned out.

Now, there are quite a few people on sites like F1 Fanatic and The hardcore motorsport gaming sites insist that the only gaming wheels anyone should ever use are the likes of the £295 Logitech G27 and should only play a "proper racing simulator" like Rfactor.

Those are the same people who don't get that games like F1 2010 have to appear to a wider audience than the hardcore simulation crowd, and in fact have to work to appeal to the widest fanbase of F1 to recoup the money spent on the game in the first place.

I play games because I want to enjoy them. And that's precisely what I've been doing with the MC2. So, Thinking about it recently, I've subjected the MC2 to what I'm calling the "Five Game Test."

In order to see how best the wheel works, I've needed to use it on a variety of games. This being me, I have a pretty decent selection of racing games, so the ones I've chosen are:

Race Driver: GRID

F1 2010

Need For Speed: Shift

Sega Rally Online Arcade

Forza Motorsport 3.

Firstly though, a bit about the wheel itself. "But Ben," I hear you say "It's a steering wheel. It goes round and a car turns. what more do I need to know?"

Well, it's never quite that simple. The Minicon wheel, as the name suggests, is built to be smaller and a bit more portable than a wheel the size of a logitech - which is generally 1:1 scale with an actual car steering wheel. it works very well for this reason: the wheel fits very easilly on your lap, and comfortably as well. The base of the MC2 has a pair of fold out struts that can wrap either side of your legs, but to be honest I've never had any use of them - they push your knees together very tightly if your sitting on a chair, and the moulded base means you don't really need them to prevent the wheel slipping. The pedals that come with have an accelerator and a brake, but no clutch as there isn't a gear handle. It also has three suction cups on the base for if you want it to stick to a table.

Now, the wheel is wired, and has about 2 metres of cable, but it wouldn't be ideal for someone who has their lounge and xbox set up for Kinect usage as you'd probably have to sit on the floor in front of the TV. The pedals have about 4 feet of cable, so have a decent amount of space for taller people - unless your planning on driving standing up, which would be silly.

The wheel itself has a good solid feel to it, with a decent amount of tension on it's steering column, with both lightness of movement and enough resistance to make action an actual physical effort. The back of the wheel has two paddles within easy reach, and these are primarily there if you're into manual shifting. for the purposes of this review, I'll be doing just that.

Onto the games!

---F2 2010---

Car: Mclaren MP4-25

Track: Istanbul Park.

Lap Time: 1:26.733

It took a me a good while to get back into the swing of F1 2010 when I plugged the wheel in I haven't played it in quite a while and I'd completely forgotten that driving an F1 car around the track is completely different to any other kind of racing game. For a while I found myself pretty much missing every single apex on the track, and given it was my first time using a manual shift I hate to think just how many times I would have blown up a £100,000 F1 engine. When I did finally hook together a lap though, I felt absolutely brilliant. Using the wheel was intuitive and fun. Flat out through Istanbul's infamous Turn 8, I had no problem holding the wheel to the racing line and shifting up at the same time. One worry I did have was that, given the options like wing angle and engine setting are selected from the D-Pad in the centre of the wheel, it would be difficult to do all those things at once, but once I'd gotten into the habit, I selected a higher engine setting without any great difficulty. While I doubt I'm ever going to be a great threat to Seb Vettel (lets face it, who is these days), I was able to bring home a pretty decent lap time in the end.

---Need For Speed: Shift---

Car: BMW M3 GT2

Track: Brands Hatch GP

Lap Time: 1:39.099

Now, this one was certainly a bit more... Interesting. Given that it's intended as a more arcadey game anyways, NFS:Shift's cars come with a handfull of oversteer that it takes a while to get used to. I know the Brands Hatch Circuit pretty well, but it took me quite a while to hook up a half-decent lap, as I was too busy trying not to bin it into the gravel. I started with a Nissan GT-R, but it was so slidey that I decided to try with the M3 instead, and found it much better. to be honest, I've always struggled to find Grip in shift, and using the wheel didn't help much as the inherent nature of the game meant the wheel felt very sensitive. Once I'd adapted to that, however, it was pretty good - I was nailing the corners pretty well, if a little bit driftily. The earlier twitchiness did mean that out of habit I found myself shifting down a gear too far on the high speed corners, which probably accounts for my fairly slow lap time. The once fault I had with the wheel is that the Brake pedal seemed to switch suddenly between very light and very heavy with no inbetween, but again, this might just have been my heavy left foot. Once I'd gotten used to the game mechenics, it was decent fun. thank god for the runoff areas though!

---Race Driver: GRID---

Car: Chevrolet Lacetti Touring Car

Track: Donington Park National

Lap Time: None Set

Oh Dear. Oh Very Dear. The game and wheel both fell down very hard on this one. I've enjoyed GRID a lot over the year since I got it (I've only had the Xbox about 14 months) and both offline and occasionally online its been a good, punchy Arcade racer. But not with this wheel. If NFS:Shift came with a handfull of Oversteer, GRID came with both hands, legs and it's mouth full of it. I tried playing with the settings for the wheel in the games menu, I tried being less sharp with the wheel, but a typical corner went "slight turn, slight turn, slight turn, MASSIVE OVERSTEER, Spin." No matter what I did, the car simply wouldn't turn in properly to a corner, as even on front wheel drive cars like the Lacetti, the rear would step out and I'd spin the bastard. I didn't even get around a full lap of Donington before I gave up and Rage Quit. Very dissapointing.

---Forza Motorsport 3---

Car: Ford Focus ST

Track: New York Circuit

Lap Time: 1:33.771

The wheel definitely took a round back with Forza. I picked the Focus as a baseline car, and it worked pretty well, although since it wasn't race tuned, the steering felt very heavy at times, and I ran out of pedal lift before being able to brake at some of the sharper turns. The steering was still quite responsive and the gearshifts felt realistic without being clunky, and I was able to access the telemetry screen using the D-pad without any major dramas. I do have to say though, for anything like livery design and storefront on Forza, stick to the joypad - the wheel is not suited to it.

---Sega Rally Online Arcade---

Car: Skoda Fabia RS

Track: Alpine Circuit

Lap Time: 1:12:38

The wheel works, to be frank, pretty damn awesomely with this game, but to be fair, it is a very forgiving game - except when you clip a wall. Manual shifting worked as close to perfectly as you can ask, and the steering had just the right balance of sensitivity and rallying-oversteer to allow me to flick the car into the corners. I had the accelerator buried to the floor most of the time, and the brake pedal barely needed more than a dab, but I've been using the wheel both offline and online and it's won me victories in and of itself by giving me the chance to be smoother through the corners and sharper on the gearshifts. One weird bug though is that the force feedback locked on after the race and turned the wheel into a constantly vibrating presence in my lap, and I had to exit the game before it stopped.

OVERALL SCORE

4/5 games. A good score, but given that one of the games it's said to be ideal for on the box is one of the ones that let it down, make sure that you're not buying the MC2 specifically for one game, becuase if it turns out not to suit it, you're going to have a large £35 paperweight. I'd still have it over a £295 logitech paperweight any day though!

Why I prefer Nerf Now to Ratfist.

Since my blog got a ton of hits last night from a two sentence review, I felt I should clarify something. I do not think Ratfist is a bad piece of work. I think it's a brilliantly drawn comic, with writing that just isn't my cup of tea.

A commenter yesterday seemed very offended that I dared to give Nerf Now a ton of praise in comparison to Ratfist. You want to know the reason why?

Because at 8:30 in the morning when I feel crappy and I'm building up to go to work, Nerf Now makes me smile in a way Ratfist doesnt.

Nuff said.

Creative Commons Music: The Butcher's Ballroom

Well, It's been over a year since my last Creative Common's music review, so I figured I'd throw one up now, and what better one to review than an Album it's taken me almost eighteen months to listen to properly?

The Butcher's Ballroom By Sweden's Diablo Swing Orchestra has sat o at least two MP3 players I own over the past year, and it wasn't untl the last couple of days that I actually sat down and listened to it.

One question sprang immediately to my mind - "Why the hell havent I done this before?"

The Music that DSO brought to me blended a mix of swing, Jazz and Metal to give a fun folky mix that sounds like it would be completely at home on the soundtrack of a Horror movie. Actually, I take it back, this music is far too good for a Horror movie. It genuienly stands on its own as something unique and Eclectic - I@m not the biggest fan of Metal, but once I stopped and listened, Butcher's Ballroom gripped me by the eardrums and refused to let go.

There were, admittedly, some of the songs that caught my attention more than others - Infralove Didn't really tickle me all that much, but Was more than made up for by Balrog Boogie and Velvet Embracer. probably my favourite track though was Rag Doll Physics Which Blended two different Vocal styles into one brilliant whole.

The Band's Wikipedia Entry describes them as Avant-Garde Metal.

I find myself unable to argue with this description.

The Band's Site
---
Downlaod the Album on Jamendo

Greetings Programs!

So, what better way to start the new year than with an entry about a film I've been waiting for for twenty Goddamn years. So...

Tron. Tron tron tron.

What can you say about Tron, really? The original movie, in my opinion, was something special - even though it's very much a product of its time. The idea of being sucked into a computer, competing in games from the inside is one that has been revisited a few times since then.

I mean how many films has Tron arguably influenced, merely in plot terms? The Matrix, Gamer, Virtuosity... The idea of computers being more than glorified number-crunching machines is one that took a bit of getting used to.

Visually, Tron was revolutionary - the first true use of CGI ever used in computer. It's an outright tragedy that it was disqualifed from the special effects oscar category because the committee didn't consider CGI to be 'proper special effects.'

ET won instead, with a glorified puppet show. I hate that little bastard.

So, twenty-eight years later, Tron finally has a sequel. Tron: Legacy. So the beig question is, given that I am big fan of the original, did it's sequel live up to the expectations?

Well... Mostly. Visually, Legacy is the perfect sequel to Tron. The effects are updated, and its the first movie I've seen that didn't rely on 3D as a crutch rather than in integrated part of the movie.

And the Music, my God, the Music. Could anyone but Daft Punk really managed to do this movie. It's as close to perfect a movie score as I've ever heard.

The script... well, the script is no better than I expected. it was fun, but it feels like a setup. I can tell you that I was in no way surprised when I heard that the sequel was already in the works, as the whole of Legacy felt like it was building to that. The story is servicable as an introduction to the dynamics of the grid, but it's very slow in the middle when Sam finally meets up with his father on the outskirts of the computer world. The Initial burst of action on the games is excellent, and the finale is as good as anything I've ever seen. The acting is good, and the script does improve after the inevitable slow patch, but you can't help but feel that the writers could either have done a little bit more, or shortened the movie by about ten minutes.

But it's good. it's damn good. and if they can pull a sequel off, I'll be more than happy to go and see it.

Creative Commons Music: Unfinished Business

Well, I suppose the run couldn't last forever. After three days of excellent albums that at least kept me vaguely interested, I finally came across one that did precisely nothing for me.

The shock really comes from the fact that Unfinished Business by the band of the same name is a band that splits itself between Lisbon and England, thus meaning that the music was at least in my native language.

I'm not saying that the music is bad. Technically its at least accomplished, and the blues sound is at least bearable.

But then thats the problem. Unfinished Business Isn't bad. It's merely Indifferent. With this album, its like the band decided it was going to lump every generic sound of 80's rock onto and album and let it go at that. Theres no real flavour to this music, no real verve. In the end its just... unintersting.

The lead singer sounds like he's trying to be Sting. The music sounds like its trying to be Genesis. The whole album comes across as the generic soundtrack of every eighties detective show you remember.

Every song sounds like something you've heard before - and not in a good way.

Download Unfinished Business.

The band's site.

---
-Bendana
---

Ben Watches the Watchmen. Perv.

Watchmen was always, in fairness, going the be an incredibly difficult comic to film. It wasn't exactly built for it, from the start. The comic itself is incredibly slowly paced - to its advantage - which, even with a three hour film, was going to be exceptionally difficult to translate.

To Watchmen's credit, it works very well. combining almost graphic-for-graphic images from the comics with the film. It's also carried by very strong performances from the actors. For a guy whose face you rarely see, Jackie Earle Haley gives an amazing performance as Rorschach. His vocal style and different levels of physical acting made the character come across as a personality of its own.

It was definitely a good idea of Zack Snyder to cast relative unknowns for the parts - it allowed the characters to speak for themselves. Personally I didn't like 300, Snyder's previous effort. I thought that it was vastly overdone, and in all fairness, would have been all of ten minutes long if it hadn't been filmed almost entirely in slomo.

But in reproducing most of the comment almost shot for shot in Watchmen, Snyder manages to retain most of the Atmosphere from the comics. Admittedly he has to change some of the plot elements - the Cthulhu-esque monster from the end of the book would have just looked stupid come the end of the movie.

...The books been out for 23 years. If you claim I'm spoiling it, fuck yourself. Sideways.

There are other elements of the story different from the Books. The overall tone of the ending is a lot... happier. For lack of a better term.

The Problem with reviewing it, is that theres no way to detail any of the plot without really spoiling anything else. So I'll stick to what I know...

See Beginner's rule handbook #2: "Why Re-invent the Wheel."

...Ze Action in Watchmen, It be fucking awesome. you do get a good amount of Gunplay in some scenes - primarily flashbacks to the days of the Comedian - But the Hand to hand scenes are utterly fantastic. If you read my "Top-Ten Fight scenes" from a few entries back, you'll have noticed that I have a bit of a thing for realistic fight scenes. Watchmen somehow manages to do bigger-than-real fightscenes without actually losing the realism of the movie. Its also illustrated by the fact that each character has a very distinctive individual style, from Nite Owl II's more heavy handed kickboxing/bodyblock style to Ozymandias' uniquely defensive counter-fighting technique, it contrives to give each fight a very individual flavour and makes for very compelling fights - something 300 distinctly lacked.

Watchmen Is, truth be told, one of the best superhero movies I've seen, even when all the characters are substantially less than super.

Until World War 3, I remain,

-Bendana.

Harry Potter And the Grim Grim Dark Grimness.

So, after a few days of my wifes nagging, We finally went to see Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince.

And you know what? I thoroughly enjoyed it. Now, this may seem rather insignificant to you, but as my wife could probably tell you, I've always been rather indifferent to the Harry Potter movies. Not that I dont enjoy them, I've just never been particularly bothered about actually seeing them. I liked Order of the Phoenix, but again, I was very indifferent to actually going out and watching them. The same again was something I felt for Half-Blood Prince.

Now, the Book of the film was the only one in the series I found truly problematic. it wasnt bad, but It felt as if the entire thing was merely a setup for Deathly Hallows. To be honest, the last few books felt a little flabby compared to the rest, with multiple chapters of Harry being a whiny little bitch.

Daniel Radcliffe's performance in the film, however, takes a slightly different tone. After the rather miserable opening of Order of the Phoenix, admittedly, leading from the death of Cederic in Goblet of fire set the tone for the whole movie, leading up to the death of Sirius at the end of the movie.

...Look, the book came out in 2003, and the film in 2007. If you claim I'm spoiling it for you, fuck yourself. Seriously.

Anyways, Radcliffe's performance is the true sign that this young actor has truly ound his feet in the part. In the first few movies I was genuinely underwhelmed with his performances - even making allowance for his age - but in Half-Blood Prince he genuinely makes the part his own, bringing a certain zest to the performance that he previously lacked. And it really worked. His personality leapt off the screen in this film, bringing fantastic life to the movie. Similarly, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson have matured into their roles, allowing the chemistry that the three have shown in interviews to finally come through on screen. Given that the film is far more concerned with the relationships between the characters than those that have come previously, it was just what they needed.

But thats not to say there isn't plenty of action. There is, but it's far mor subtle than in the film's predecessors. There are no really huge shootouts, no extended battles, which is good because there isnt any way this film could have done those sequences without either looking tame next to the last film or overshadowing the climax of the next (two?) films. The attempted attacks on Dumbeldore - especially the scene when a cursed Necklace takes hold, are fairly nerve-wracking.

And all of lends to the general feeling of darkness about this movie. This is not Shiney-Happy Potter. This is the culmination of all the grim imagery thats influenced the last three films, and its all a buildup to the Final sunrise of the last Film. It's a genuine credit to JK Rowling that most of the imagery in the film can be lifted directly from the book. Her Novels are incredibly visual in their writing, and that's one of the things that makes this film what it is: an amazing visual experience.

We all knew it was going to happen.

Tomorrow, me and the missus are going to go and see Dragonball Evolution. After which, I will post the first of what will undoubtedly be many shite film reviews.

-Bendana.