Review: To be a Mac gamer

So here I was, perusing the Steam store looking games that may be worth while in both holding my interest longer than it would take to make a coffee so that I may actually have some creative turned on inside of me for these reviews, and something that the general populace would actually take an interest in.
However, as I looked through the featured MAC games section of steam, seeing that I am ascended above those on other lesser machines, I noticed the featured PC games section and couldn’t help but take a peak at what treasures the PC world were being offered.Much like in most MMORPGS where even after 5 years they still can’t get things balanced, I felt like I was on the losing side of something that should be great.

On my beloved Mac side of the balance board, my list of featured games looked aimed at the very casual gamer or gamers who have had Macs all their life and considered Counter Strike a new and break through game in which you could play in the first person shooter aspect.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure on a machine boasting an i5 processor, 1GB Dedicated graphics and a 27” Full HD Screen that it would make the $19.99USD for “Bejewelled 3″ all totally worth it, but when I see on the PC side of the board that for $5 less I can pick up “Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Vietnam” I can’t help but feel someones trying to punch me in the testicles while charging me for the privilege.

Other games I had a choice of downloading were “Football manager 2011″, “Back to the Future: The Game”, and “Plants vs Zombies”. Before I get flamed and have sunflower seeds thrown at me, I am totally not hating on PvsZ, I love that flower spitting, zombie killing game as much as the next person, but when you compare that to PCs featured choices of “Red Faction: Armageddon”, “HOMM VI”, and “Two Worlds II”, I’m starting to wish I had a game admin I could whinge to about balance issues.

Now I know there are a lot of MAC haters out there who will want to use this as another excuse to talk about how better their PCs are and that MACs are lame/ hipster/ whatever, to which I say, fuck off with your clunky OS, and your viruses that I hope gives you gonorrhoea one day and I’ll take my smooth OS without the viruses and a machine that I could use as one part computer, one part art piece if I wanted to.
I’m not trying to definitively  say that MACs are better, but as a PC user for 23 of my almost 25 years of life, building them, fixing them, selling them and the other mundane tasks of being a PC user, I can happily say that with MAC, I spend less time trouble shooting, more time actually using my machine, unless I want to use my machine for gaming.. which brings me to this point..

WHY THE FUCK ARE GAME DEVS SO LAZY? You have multi-million dollar companies, with talented developers at their whim, and they can’t be bothered making a PC and MAC compatible version of the game? And fuck off with cost, if a basement developer like ‘Frictional Games’ can make a game like “Amnesia: The Dark Descent” (which just the game trailer alone had me peering between half closed eyes standing away from my computer, with the volume down) available for both PC and MAC with a budget that would make third world countries feel pity for them, then these large companies can surely afford to make their games compatible across the OS’s.

I mean honestly, what does it take for MAC to convince these people that they are a worthy platform for gaming now? Games were designed with Intel in mind, so MAC got Intel chips. Games wanted quality graphics, so MAC threw in graphics cards that would handle the media creation they were known and loved for, as well as handling refresh rates and graphics for the latest games. Some developers even mentioned that there were not enough MACs out there, well APPLE is top dog for a computer company now, and I worked at Apple retail, unless the same tawdry fanboys keep buying MACs every other week, there would surely have to be a rather large portion of the community using MAC computers by now.
So all I can say to the game companies of the world is, stop rodgering MAC gamers with the splintered remains of games chewed upon by PC users years ago, and start throwing us some of those new tasty treats you dangle just out of arms reach all the time.

In the meantime however, much like the riveting excitement that was the “Words with Friends” review, I hope anyone reading this will look forward to exciting reviews about “Farmville”, “Bejewelled 3″, and the latest game to come out for MAC, “Pong”.

-Mattius86

Review: Words with Friends

Here goes my first review, and if you don’t like it, possibly my last.
However, because I don’t feel like spending the rest of my life serving smirking customers who want to keep saying “I’m sure you can discount this further”, to the point where I want to shove their smirking face so far up their ass that they’ll be shitting teeth for a month, and would much rather be spending my career writing antagonistic BS or playing in a rock band, you all better give me two thumbs up.

For those of you who have not heard of Words with Friends, it is a lot like scrabble, you remember scrabble? It’s that bored board game that used to be played by loving families in matching cardigans on a saturday night, but is now instead played by fucking hipsters in their “artsy” cafes while sipping chai lattes because they’re all to scared to play Mouse Trap for its irony.

Off topic… So Words with Friends, available on iOS and Android platforms, owned by Zynga, and if you don’t know who Zynga are, think of any game that ends in the word ‘Ville’, and that is the company making you neglect children, house work and personal hygiene while you piss off any friends you have left on facebook by sending them 100 fucking requests every day.

For those of you who haven’t played wwf, the game is quite liberal in its accepted words policy, quite true to the original scrabble in the fact that if you make up a word that you could convince your friends is legitimate, you could keep it on the board, however, if you wrote a real word that your friends don’t believe you could ever possibly know how to spell, it is discounted and taken off the board, except on wwf there is no dictionary available to contest the game with. This creates sometimes what I call the iPhones answer to button mashing, in which you throw your letters anywhere and everywhere in the hope you can create an accepted word, wether it is real or not.

Some of you may be saying, but doesn’t EA have a version of the original Scrabble on the App store? why not play that instead?
To which I would reply, sure, however electronic Scrabble is the first iOS game I’ve played where I actually wondered when the last time I checked the grass was to see how quickly it was growing. To play iOS Scrabble with another human, you need to be on the same WiFi connection, and you both need to be in the game, if you try to multi-task, the game will pause for the other player until you return. In single player mode where you vs the computer, the computer knows every long, letter scoring word ever invented and magically gains the appropriate letters to rub the fact in your face.

Getting back to the point, in short, wwf despite its varied flaws in regards to the English language, it is a strangely addictive game.
In long, if you like waking up shouting out a made up word you saw in your dreams, rushing to open Words with Friends on your iPhone and put the letters in so you can finally use that Q you’ve been holding on to for the triple word score and draining your battery life at work until you get caught in the rain and walk home because you didn’t have the battery life to call for a ride, then this is the game for you.

You do require a username to play wwf, and it is an idea to be original, like myself, I used Mattius86, add me, now!
If you own this game already, we should play Words with Friends so we can forgot about our existence outside of Zyngas grasp, if you don’t own this game, go do something else with Friends before you start dreaming up fake words and end up sending seedling requests to your mum because she’s the only one who accepts.

PS: For easy points just put your Q next to the closest available I.

-Mattius86

Change is a MUST, not an idea

Change is as good as a holiday they say, when it comes to me personally, I’d rather the holiday, but I can understand how a change makes you feel refreshed and gives you that feeling of anew.
However, when it comes to retail, change is about keeping your store fresh, it’s about keeping up with the times, being willing to adapt and wanting your customers to come back and feel comfortable in your store. If a store stays the same, never changes and as a general rule, things are not clear/ clean nor well planned, your store becomes stagnant.

I see it happen all the time, stores that never change then question why they are not doing so well.
For an example, I place I have worked was so set in their ways that my attempts to do something as simple as turn the IT departments aisles onto a slant instead of a horizontal straight line (which I had people comment the slant made it look more accessible and allowed an easier way to have products bunched with each other) was met with a very stern, “The boss doesn’t want it that way, he likes it as it was”, and that’s the way it has been for over a decade.

With another workplace, they hired me for the supposed purpose of me coming into the IT department and working out what was dead stock, what we needed to have as core-range and how we should present the IT department as it was under utilised. I spent days trawling all our suppliers websites, looking at stock and the type of demographic we had visiting us, I even looked at our competitors core-range and came up with a spreadsheet of stock and ideas. I was told, thank you for all your hard work, but we have our core-range that we are happy with, we’ll just stick with that, but maybe you can make new tickets to draw peoples attentions to the products.

I’ve seen one of these places already go under (luckily the over-all company bought out the store and booted out the management that were running it), and I see it happening it again and again, but these places are so set in their ways they can’t see the forest for the trees.
However I am lucky to be in new employment, an employer who appears to embrace change and embrace ideas and a company that is quite large anyway, in which I believe you can’t get large by staying the same. So here is to happiness and change and may I say to any retailers out there reading this.. EMBRACE CHANGE!
It’s the only way you’ll come out the other end.

-Mattius86

It’s love, but also riches

The future, it can be as early as 2 minutes from now, or as far off as a thousand years, but we all have something we look to the future for, whether it be scientists trying to figure out which planet we as humans may inhabit next and how we will do it, the dodgy psychic who foresees you becoming break chasing down psychics to tell you your future or the child who looks to the future of one day being an adult so that they can reach the cookie jar on the upper shelves.

For myself, it is looking to the future of what some would call ‘status’. I admit that I look at the expensive cars, and the 3 storey mansions on the beach front and the $60,000 Gretsch custom made drumkit with the equally valued set of Sabian cymbols and think it would be great to have, but those are not my goals.

I just want to be comfortable, to look at what I have and be happy knowing that without losing my life/ family or friends that I have achieved a certain level of prosperity mixed with happiness and life. There are a few things that would make me achieve those goals, one of them would be making a living performing and/or owning a media based business that is successful, the other is having a nice but practical  vehicle, maybe a sleek powerful station wagon (I need the room for my drumkit and my dogs), my dream drumkit (my one expensive vice, I WILL have that $60,000 custom made Gretsch), a nice cosy, comfortable but practical home and above all else, a healthy and happy marriage.

I am part-way with a lot of these things, or at least creating the building blocks.
I am in a healthy and happy engagement, and in less than a year that will progress into marriage.
I have a $6000 Gretsch kit, so I am 10% of the way there,I unfortunately only use cheap Paiste cymbols though.
I have a rather nice, somewhat powerful station wagon.. actually.. I’ll tick that box.
I am in a band, a band that I feel has a lot of potential, but currently not making any form of an earning from it.
I own a house.. a small, kinda needs A LOT of work house.. but it’s mine (well mine and Chrissies), but the other day while perusing a real estate website, Chrissie stumbled upon a house that we fell in love with instantly, it ticked all of our boxes, great location, not too big, cosy and comfortable but with practicability, near parks, shops, transport, not a busy but not a quiet area.. only issue.. we can’t afford this place =(
the place in question is here >> http://www.realestate.com.au/property-house-wa-bayswater-107302253 <<

Looks like I’m going to have work harder on the performing thing if I want this place, but that’s the point of goals right? If you didn’t have them, you wouldn’t have anything to work towards and life would be boring, I just wish that the goals were occasionally a little closer within grasp.

And thus concludes my somewhat vain blog post for today =)

-Mattius86

I may be obsessed…

Thanks to meeting some awesome people at iiNets topgeek and thanks to the power of twitter, I’ve made friends with some people who run a Minecraft server, and as a gamer, I find games 10x more enjoyable when the social aspect is present, I can play a game solo for a short time but without that other human interaction, I get bored.

So, I was already addicted to Minecraft but didn’t play often, now however, I can’t stop thinking about the game and what I’ll be doing next on it. It started with a small 5×5 hut that led into a small cobblestone cave, that then expanded into a 2 storey abode that grew larger and then into a 3 storey castle.
I later added a bridge that extended to a 2 storey house and then built stairs into the air, those stairs then led to me building a small in the sky garden and water slide that dropped down a good 50 or so blocks into one of minecrafts many lakes/ oceans.

I have now started building a tower with the entrance under water, and have plans to try and have a top the tower a small city set-up, but my ultimate plan is to collect as many resources as possible and build a city on minecraft.
I have this obsession to mine and build, mine and build, mine and smelt, mine and create, mine and build some more.

I’ve never been worried about a game coming between me and my life before, but if none of you hear from me for more than a few days, please come to my house and make sure I’ve eaten and showered and not just gone crazy building my minecraftapolis

-Mattius86

anger.. rising…

I was on WATODAY.com.au and came across this artile which caught my eye  Why christianity should be taught properly in our schools.

I am not religious, I do not believe in God, I believe in myself and the love and support of my family and friends and I believe that if I do something great, achieve the impossible or survive death somehow that it is because of my will and the support of those around me that made me do it.
That being said, if you wish to believe in Jesus/ Allah/ Buddha or who/ what/ whichever deity you want to believe in, that is your choice, and I am ok with that, all I ask is mutual respect and understanding, not arrogance., and thus, the point of this blog begins.

With the WATODAY headline, the word ‘should’, should be placed before the word ‘christianity’, not after it, and the word ‘properly’, completely removed. Why should christianity be taught in our schools?
Australia is not a christian country. We are a multicultural and diverse country and despite the loudest few, most of us are accepting of each other and respect, or at the very least, deal with others religious beliefs.

So why does the christian church believe it has the right to try and tell the Government that the christian belief system should be taught in schools above all other beliefs and religions out there?
Why does the christian church get to have a hissy fit when the idea of teaching morals in schools is becoming more favourable over teaching scripture?

It is my belief that in schools we should be teaching equality and teaching an unbiased class on ALL beliefs and religions. It is not up to schools, the government nor even the childrens parents to dictate what religion or belief one follows, it is up to the individual and the individual should be given the proper tools to be able to evaluate themselves and their beliefs and decide which path to follow.

I for one was completely turned off God and the christian/ catholic faith because of being forced to partake in scripture and “religious studies”, which were actually theist studies, focusing on the christian god and no other religions at all. I was told I would go to hell for not believing in God and that I would be judged based on my faith not on anything else I do in my life.

I was also told that ‘Judge not lest ye be judged’, and that also only God himself may judge us, yet I had A LOT OF judgement from these christian types. I was told God was a forgiving and accepting God and that the Christian faith was about acceptance.. that is unless you’re gay, black, of another faith or just plain don’t believe in God, and I thought to myself, why would I want to be a part of such an arrogant and hypocritical group?*

Anyway getting back on track, I think that all religions should be given a fair-go and be taught equally in schools, and I believe the christian church should get their hands out of the politicians pockets and back off, if they are losing followers, maybe they should look at themselves and wonder why instead of trying to force themselves onto a group that couldn’t care less about them.

-Mattius86

*I also want to say, I have a few christian friends who are delightful people and who will occasionally debate with me but still respect my choices and my beliefs,  my above writing is based on my observations over time and especially when I was younger.

Everything but the how/ when/ where

I’ve been toying with an idea for sometime now, an idea which I originally stole from Tycho and Gabe from Penny Arcade, stealing their idea was Childs Play, which in turn is actually the idea I stole, for those who don’t know what PAs Childs Play Charity is, please check it out.

In Perth Western Australia, we have Telethon, which the main purpose is raising money for research and improvements in various medical areas, but it is based around Princess Margaret Hospital. I wanted to do my bit to help Telethon and/or PMH besides my meager $20 donation once a year, and so I thought, I like video games, Penny Arcade have successfully raised money/ toys/ games/ etc for hospitals, why can’t I do that?

So the what?
To use gamers and gaming as a way to raise money and other things to help make stays in hospitals a little more entertaining and bearable for children.

The why?
For much the same reasons as Penny Arcade, to make childrens stays in hospitals a little nicer and also to help the hospitals that take such great care of the children that are in their care.

So the how, when and where?
I am not too sure about this, but I was hoping to create a gamer community that will focus on this as their challenge as gamers in Perth, or maybe even siding up with an existing gamer group/ clan/ whatever who would be interested in taking part in something like this.

I am also at looking at approaching various businesses and seeing who I can rally to help support this idea.
So if you or anybody you know would be interested in this idea, please contact me, my email is mattb@shotgunempire.net

Hopefully I can get this idea of the ground =)

-Mattius86