Guardian Force UK

One thing I love about the gaming industry is that it seems to have an almost infinite amount of space to take this piss out of itself. Gamers are happy to laugh at each other, dress up as characters and mess around or generally have fun singing and playing air guitar with our mates. Unless of course you are a “serious” gamer or a “fanboy” in which case you’re still really funny because we’re [real gamers] laughing at you.

Anyway one of my Twitter Fellows, good web chap called Rhys Wynne, put me onto a little gem of a “professional” gaming reviewer who goes by the handle of Yahtzee and writes in a column he calls Zero Punctuation. (more…)

So we mainly post about gaming, media and cats playing musical instruments but alas politics affects all things, even lolcats and so with the upcoming UK general election I thought I could offer a brief insight into where and why my vote is currently going. Let’s get the fact right first.

I am 25, that means I have only voted once before in a proper election, I come from a mining town in the Midlands and I have worked, at least part time, since I was about 13. Tax Records will state that I started significantly later. I’m not ashamed to say I have an anti-Tory bias.

I come from a mining town, my dad was a miner, and I was born in the early 80′s that means my childhood was heavily influenced by the fallout of the miners strikes. On top of this the Tories are hardly the most “in line” with my belief system, I am libertarian (although that Wiki article is shit) and even though this Political stance embraces many ideals it does not stand for the unbalanced “save our rich people” campaign the Tories are basically pushing.

This being said I have approached this election as unbias as possible, I listened to what Cameron had to say just as much as the other parties and I would not deny them my vote just because past policies have been pretty crap.

Anyway, the truth is that this election is really important, the World Wide economic crisis has really shook things up and there are a lot of game changing decisions to be made over things like tax, immigration, virtual law, privacy and national defence that drastically effect me and my peers, we really need to get this one right. So far we have had months of campaigning and one interesting TV debate (with two to go) so here are my thoughts so far… (more…)

Not maqny people out there, even in GFUK, will be aware of an ace little manga style comic about a hard done , unlucky in love dude named Scott Pilgrim.

Although I’ve not read the whole series the essential premice for the first one is Scott goes after dating a pretty new girl but for things to be on track he needs to defeat her ex’s in nigh Dragon-ball-y combat.

Yeah that’s seriously the plot but I promice it works. Anyway here is the might fine looking trailer, it’s a link at the minute sorry I can’t embed.

http://trailers.apple.com/movies/universal/scottpilgrim/scottpilgrim-tlr1_720p.mov

Thanks to BleedingCool News for the heads up on this one.

So we are all pretty excited about the emergence of L4D:The Passing which is apparently coming our way soon. Recently a few new details have emerged and since I have been in and out the country I have not had time to bring you all up to speed on them so here we go, some of this is rumours (although most is confirmed) and there is also a bit of a spoiler ahead, I will mark it further down so you can click off if you don’t want to read it…

Weapons

OK in our previous L4D: The Passing Post we discussed how there will be some new weapons in this campaign, well a few of those have now been confirmed. The first melee weapon to be shown from some in game footage is the gold club.

Looks pretty cool a new melee weapon is always welcome, a lot of speculation so far suggests it will be similar to the crowbar in power hence fairly fast and powerful.

The second confirmed weapon update is a tier two weapon, the M60. Any are game fan will know the M60 is a good old heavy duty machine gun, great news for mowing down zombies. Maybe a little too good so there are a few downsides, here’s some more details on the M60.

• Like the grenade launch it is special tier meaning it will likely be fairly rare.
• It has a lot of ammo all in one clip however you cannot carry additional ammo for it, once you’re done, you’re done.
• It is very high power and fire rate meaning it will be best used against tanks, witches and large hordes.
• It will slow down run speed and push back efficiency(rumour)
• Since it has one big ammo clip upgrading with special ammo will give you a mega ammo boost.
• It probably won’t have great range accuracy (rumour)

All in all I am sure it will be an ace gun for at least one party member to carry for those special occasions and with a bit of tactical ammo carrying can become a party staple.

The New Special Tier M60

Infected

There will be new infected in the L4D2: the Passing, so far the big announcement has been the feature of “the Fallen Survivor”.

The idea behind the fallen survivor is that he is a gun totting, zombie killing survivor, just like you, who has fallen to the zombie hordes. Unlike his comrades he still has firearms and a survival instinct which means he is going to be running and hiding from your party as well as dropping some cool items when you finally take him down. He has more HP than your average zombie and can carry literally any item from the game so chasing him down and killing him may be really worth it at some points in the game.

He was actually supposed to be in L4D2 but was cut due to some problems with his behaviour and mods and he is rumoured to act like one fo the other cut special infected, the Screamer.

The Witch is also reviving a little change, she gets a special bridal costume for the Passing campaign so I imagine she will be especially upset and prone to jumping your team, after all, zombies ruined her wedding!

There will also be some new common infected models including Midnight rider fans and wedding guests.

The next bit contains the spoiler so don’t read on if you don’t want it spoilt, it’s a pretty big one.

The new Bridal Dress for the Witch

Survivors

The Survivors are going to meet up in the Passing expansion but the real reason it’s called the Passing is one of the original Survivors will be dead.

Hard going and a little upsetting but a cool twist none the less.

We don’t yet know which Survivor will be gone, it’s going to be revealed in a special “joining” comic released around the time of the expansion.

The even cooler part?

After L4D2 the Passing has been release a new bit of L4D1 DLC will come along allowing the the original cast to play through events that ultimately lead to the missing characters death, the big rumour at the minute is that this will involve a finally event where one player has to sacrifice themselves to allow the rest of the party to carry on (although its not yet known if this will be a finale from L4D2, maybe 2 people will die!).

My L4D1 characters was Bill, who unfortunately looks like a likely candidate for being taken out since he is old, don’t die Bill I need your beard powers!

Who  you think is going to be the unfortunate character and why?

Oh dear today is not a happy day for PlayStation gamers worldwide.

Earlier today several news sources(that’s right I cited the Christian Science Monitor, what you gonna do about it?) began reporting that a very bad bug had crept into the old “fat” (as in, not slimline) PS3 consoles that caused some major problems when it came to connecting to the PlayStation Network, syncing trophies and generally playing games.

** UPDATE ** Apparently all is well now, Heavy Rain here I come…

Sony got around to doing an official announcement soon after and to be fair to them have been pushing Twitter and other updates out to try and keep people happy.

So what are the facts?

• Firstly this problem only effects the old fat black PS3′s and most reports have focused on the original launch ones being more of a problem.
• Yes that’s all of GF:UK!
• Upon trying to sign in to the PSN you will receive the error “An error has occurred. You have been signed out of PlayStation Network (8001050F)”.
• Launching any game with trophy support will result in the error “Failed to install trophies. Please exit your game.” and even worse may remove any trophies you had earned for this game.
• The clock will reset to Jan 1, 2000
• If you try to change the clock you will get, “The current date and time could not be obtained. (8001050F)”
• You won’t be able to playback rental content from the PSN Store.

Basically if you have a fat black PS3, don’t turn it on for the next 24 hours.

OK so there are definitely some serious issues here with a majority of people getting this error not being able to play games at all. Especially annoying considering that Heavy Rain has just come out and Final Fantasy XIII is out in 9 days!

Negative stuff aside this is actually no where enar as bad as some people are making out. I’m no console fanboy and no matter what this is a major fuck up for Sony however comparing it to Red Ring of Death is retarded. Firstly this is expected to be a temporary issue, secondly it is unlikely to reoccur since the fault has now been identified and thirdly it is not writing the hardware off, look at the error the complete worst case is you loose a few trophies. No doubt it’s annoying but it’s hardly having to post your console back to the factory and wait a week for a new one with no fucking data on it at all.

Sony posted around 3 hours ago that they will have the issue sorted within 24 hours so take a deep breath, go to the gym, put on your PC or 360 and wait until tomorrow before getting too excited.

Oh and in case you are upset here’s the seemingly undying Hitler Internet meme done up for Sony’s latest fiasco!