Dave's Blog

Well the complete track list for Rock Band 2 has been announced and I have to say, I really can’t wait for it to come out now! I’m guessing we probably won’t see it on these shores for a good while yet if they decide to release it the same way as the first one – America first and then quite a while later here, but hopefully not.

It looks like it’s going to be even better than the first for playing with others. With a lot more tracks (a total of 84) there is definately something for everybody, and some good party songs in general as well. I’m sure Eye of the Tiger, for example, will be a good one to play with people.

I’m also very pleased with the addition of the Jimmy Eat World track, The Middle, to the list. You may have noticed that this is one of my top tracks on Last.FM so I’m looking forward to being able to play (and sing, of course) it in the game.

The full tracklist can be found on IGN.

I got an email last week through work inviting me to watch a live webcast of Microsoft’s conference at E3. I decided to take advantage of it because I figured we would get a pretty good link within Microsoft, instead of watching a possibly bad quality, constantly re-buffering, version outside of work, and boy was I glad I stayed to watch it, there were certainly a few shocks in there!

FFXIII was a major shock, and a welcome one, I’m looking forward to that now!! I havn’t played a Final Fantasy game since FFX, but I really enjoyed it, so I’m looking forward to it coming our way on the 360 now.

I don’t think I like the look of the new dashboard, I hope we can do more with it ourselves to personalise it. I’m glad to hear the blade system isn’t completely going away because I really liked it as an interface. The avatars are an interesting addition but it remains to be seen whether they will have a big impact, I was perfectly happy with the standard gamerpic.

I like the look of the new party feature, it should definately make playing games with friends a lot easier, and even just a good way to chat with them as a group instead of individually. The idea of watching movies together was interesting, I just hope we get the feature of free movies outside America!

Brand new Geometry Wars is something I’m really looking forward to as well, especially with the co-op play in it. I’m sure this will be a first day purchase for me!

Some of the games look like they could be interesting for parties, You’re at the Movies being a main one (with a few drinks possibly needed). The way everything that you done was then edited into a video at the end was a nice addition. I thought the way we can load music from our iPods into Lips is pretty cool too, I wonder if there will be many restrictions on that one, such as having a not so well known song you want to use.

I was very disappointed in Gears of War 2, I was expecting a good bit more from it. Unfortunately it didn’t get me excited in any way at all when I was watching it. To me it didn’t look an awful lot different to the first. There were the obvious additions of weapons and things like that, but the game world itself looked pretty much the same to me. The new survival mode with friends sounds like it may be good the first few times you play it, but I think it could get old very quick. It remains to be seen whether I will become more interested as it gets closer to release. It’ll probably still end up being one I may buy (provided I eventually finish the first!)

It looks like E3 2008 belongs to Microsoft, I can’t see how Sony or Nintendo will be able to top this conference!

Eurogamer have provided a full report of what happened at the conference here.

I went to see Hancock on Saturday as my first expedition to the cinema in Dublin. I wasn’t so sure whether I wanted to see it or not because I had heard mixed reviews, but everybody else wanted to so I was slightly outnumbered. Unfortunately my expectations ended up being right and overall I never really enjoyed the movie.

The concept for the movie was quite interesting: it’s about a superhero (Will Smith) who isn’t quite your normal superhero, he’s an alcoholic who always causes damage when saving others and is hated for it, with the story mainly being focused around trying to sort him out and make the public like him. It was an original concept but just wasn’t executed in the best of ways. The first half of it wasn’t the best when they were introducing the story. I understand that a movie has to explain the story in some form, but it just seemed to drag along. Thankfully it did pick up a bit in the second half when the story picked up more pace but it wasn’t quite enough to save it for me. Fair enough, I will give it to them that there were some very funny moments in it, but there wasn’t enough of them.

Overall I would say I would probably give it about a 6/10, it would have definately been higher if the start wasn’t so slow, but this really dragged the movie down for me. I wouldn’t recommend seeing it in the cinema, if you really want to see it then wait for the DVD.