I’ve been busy writing an application and database to store my collection of video games in. It’s finally at a stage where I consider it “complete”. I’ve put my application and my collection of games online here:

http://dev.bencoleman.co.uk/gamedb/

I wrote this for my own personal use, but figured that somebody else might want to make use of it, so I’m releasing it to the world. Note this is not for the non-techie and you’ll need to know a fair bit about PHP, MySQL and so forth to get it running. I’m providing this “as-is” with no support or help (other than the info below) and the code is covered by GPL. If you want to use this I’d be interested so please let me know (out of curiosity really!).
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Not a very good name for a game…
Anyhow name aside, The Club is a arcade style shooter set in a illegal underground fighting tournament. From the screens it looks like a modern 3rd Person Shooter such as GRAW or Gears of War. However it’s almost pure arcade game, with the main objective to kill quickly and stylishly as possible in order to keep your combo multiplier high and so hit the high scores.

Having played through the main tournament in a couple of nights and unlocking most of the single player Achievements, I’m about done with this. There is loads more to do but it’s all basically unlocking gold/silver medals on higher difficulties and getting better and better scores. It’s a nice game but really one for the highscore freaks out there, that are prepared to play the same level 50/60/100 times, memorising it and perfecting their score. I decided to spare Sue (and myself) the tedium of me trying that across 48 levels. Sue did find the voice over announcements vaguely amusing with the commentator bellowing “Head Shot!”, “Great Shot!” and the classic “Death Roll!”, the last one leading Sue to speculate what would go into a Death Roll, I’m guessing it’s not cheese and pickle. Might be one to go back to and have a quick blast on from time to time. Oh and Sega & Bizarre Creations at least deserve a nod for putting out something a bit different, and very old school in 2008.

Girlfriend Friendly Factor: Very Low – Lots of annoying announcements. Very shooty, bang, bang. Zero plot or storyline to follow.

You may recall some time ago that the nice people at Logitech sent me a beta preview of their new Squeezebox remote control. I was so chuffed I blogged about it. But now they’ve gone one better, and sent me a new base station unit and another remote. Again these are beta/preview devices (but they work perfectly). This is the new model replacing the old Squeezebox 3 and is called the Squeezebox Duet. As you can see they’ve removed the screen from the base unit and put a colour screen into the controller. The base unit connects wirelessly (or through a CAT5 cable) to the network and has both digital & stereo phono outputs on the back. Set-up was a doddle and it was up and running in no time. They seemed to have ironed out the bugs on the controller and browsing through your music is easy and with all the album art displayed it looks good too. The server behind it all – now called SqueezeCenter is much improved over the old Slimserver, it’s still in beta phase but I’ve not found any problems with it all.

For now I’m going to use this new one in the office room and keep the old Squeezebox 3 in the living room, the old unit has a screen on it, so it acts most of the time (when not playing music!) as very expensive clock, date & weather display. The core functionality of the two models, apart from the screen seems identical – the sound quality remains as good as it ever was.

Again I’m bowled over at the generosity of Logitech for sending these out. Thanks guys!

I’m 100% back into “buying games faster than I can play them” mode… Also buying them faster than I can blog them, so I thought I’d do a quick run-through on what I’ve been buying & playing:

• Uncharted – PS3
  Fantastic game. Looks absolutely f-ing gorgeous, nothing I’ve seen comes close to this visually. The use of light, animation, textures, colour are all top class. Not only does it look good, but it plays pretty darn well. This came as a real surprise and I really enjoyed playing this through to the end.
• Resistance: Fall Of Man – PS3
  Just shite, really dire. Completely drab, almost entirely grey/brown looks like an old Xbox game. Horribly generic FPS. Total waste of money
• Lost Planet – Xbox 360
  Seemed OK only played a tiny bit. Has some hallmark Capcom dreadful voice acting and a main character called Wayne. Made the mistake of starting on Easy difficulty, which is so easy it’s a joke, the enemies practically kill them self – need to start again on Normal
• The Club – Xbox 360
  Got this super cheap in GAME, £20 quid new. Dunno what to make of it, it’s pretty hardcore. Very old school shooter at heart, which rewards repeated replays of the same level over and over; not sure that’s my scene anymore. Going to persevere as it’s good to see someone try something a bit different.
• Rez HD – Xbox 360 (Live Arcade)
  Once a classic, always a classic. Looking very, very nice with it’s HD lick of paint. I’d forgotten what a totally unique game Rez was.
• Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros’ Treasure – Wii
  Candidate for worse game title of all time. Looks like a kids game but, in fact it’s rock hard. It’s a point and click puzzle game, but the puzzles are infuriating and most require ridiculous use of Wiimote gestures, which the game is terrible at detecting. Very much a case of missed opportunity here, as this could have been brilliant. Still it does show how good the Wii would be for point & click type games. Hopefully someone will see this and make a good one. Or port ScummVM :wub:
• Geometry War: Galaxies – Wii
  I played a lot of the original on the 360, this follow-up adds some new stuff but the core game remains the same. Doesn’t control too well with the Wiimote, you need a Classic Controller for this one. Even with that it’s still not as slick to control as it was on the 360 pad. Still there’s a great shooter at heart here

Wow that’s a stupidly large number of games to have on the go at once! On top of that little lot, I’ve still got Half Life 2: Episode 2, Crackdown, EDF 2017 all started and still to play! I must stop buying games…

I’ve been hankering after a PS3 for a while. The only thing preventing me from getting one was the tiny issue of there being no decent games for it. At the end of last year Sony announced they were no longer selling the 60Gb model and replacing with a 40Gb model than had no backwards compatibility with the PS2. Ah bugger I thought, I’ve got lots of PS2 games and some of them are classics. But still I let it slide…

Until last week that is. I randomly asked in a branch of GAME if they still had any 60Gb models (I knew the answer, but sometimes you just have to ask) to my surprise the guy told me they have one, but it’s a pre-owned and it’s only 10 quid less than they were new. So I let it pass, but I get home and it’s still gnawing away at the back of my mind, a quick look on eBay and I can see the 60Gb models going for 400, 500 even 600 quid. OK so now the one if GAME is looking a bit like a bargain.

Eventually my willpower gives way, I dash back to the branch of GAME and buy the damn thing. It was dusty as hell and had a couple of tiny scratches on the top. But the dust was blasted off with some compressed air, and the scratches can be seen as I have it on a shelf under the TV.

First Impressions – Good.
It looks beautiful running at 1080i over HDMI on my telly. I like the user interface, everything seems a lot more accessible than on the PS3 than the 360. It found my uPnP server no hassles and I was able to stream music and DIVX movies without any effort. The on-line store (equivalent to XBLA and the Marketplace on the 360) seemed a bit lacking; only a handful of games for download, some pitiful old PS1 games and a limited selection of full games (admittedly it’s quality over quantity here with the likes of Tekken 5 DR)