Critical Review - Just Cause 2

With the success of the Modern Warfare series of games, which are First-Person Shooters, a lot of sandbox games such as GTA and Just Cause don't get the recognition they deserve. A sandbox game usually consists of a very large playing area, and a general story that doesn't have to be followed. So essentially you can just run around doing what you want when you want. This is one of the more appealing aspects of Just Cause 2.

There are two sides to this game. First side is the shooting, which unlike an FPS its third person. This makes the gun fights less realistic and less accurate. You could be having a gun fight with ten enemies shooting at you, and your life will last quite a while, so realism has gone right out the window with this game. Thats not too much of a problem though because sandbox games don't have to be realistic.

The second side to this game is that size of the world and the amount you can do in it. The vehicles in the game range from different types of cars, bikes, planes and even helicopters. This diversity in vehicles allows for a varied game experience. Some people would rather go around the whole island on top of a car, whereas some prefer to fly from A to B, and then parachute (or even free fall) out. A major addition to this game that the first didn't have is the grappling hook. This doesn't just allow you to get to places quickly, but you can dual hook objects. This means that if you need to destroy a statue, you just attach it to your car then drive away to pull it down. Now of course you can use it for less moral uses, such as dragging a person around behind your car, or attaching two people together so they fly towards each other. Grim stuff, but very fun indeed.

On the whole, the story is very easy going, missions aren't too difficult but very fun. But most of all the extensive content and possibilities within the world of Just Cause 2 seem endless. Definitely worth a purchase.

RSS - Good or Bad?

I’ve been using RSS feeds long before we got this assignment and they’ve brought nothing but ease and joy into my life. To be honest I don’t actually see anything bad about RSS feeds.

In this day and age which is full of technology and information, it can sometimes be hard finding what you’re looking for online. The amount of content available on the Internet is so vast and ever growing, which is good and bad. Good in the sense that its an unlimited source of information and bad in the sense that its also full of pointless and more times than often, wrong information. The thing that’s good about RSS feeds is that it cuts out the time you spend searching for something, by delivering it straight to you. Some people may say that you still get all the pointless stuff as well, but with RSS you get control of what you receive. You can choose what sources you subscribe to, so if you prefer hearing about games from gamespot.com rather than ign.com then you simply subscribe to the gamespot.com feed and you get all the information about upcoming games from that site and no other. Another good thing is that you can subscribe to a vast number of things, ranging from your friends blog, to news on the war in Iraq.

     

RSS feeds have helped my practice because it has allowed me to search through posts about Maya techniques, upcoming games, the latest gadgets, the list goes on…and its all in perfect bite size chunks. This means I can flick through all my feeds on gadgets, and just select the ones that interest me and “star” them so that I can go back to them and read through them thoroughly. It also means I can keep track of all the latest things going on that interest me without having to search multiple websites and having a million tabs open on my browser. Instead I just go to my google reader and everything is organised for me.

So overall in my opinion RSS is good, if not great, and it has helped me a lot and I can imagine ill be using them for many years to come.