Cause, um, I heard there’s like, monsters down there or something?
The blank look you’re giving me is probably due to the fact that you didn’t grow up in the UK during the 1980′s, and have no idea who Berk is, or of the whereabouts of my dinner, OR what Globbits are. This may go some way to rectifying this lacuna in your knowledge.
Right. So Now you should be over the joke, and fully prepared to play a little adventure game. You have to use your imagination a bit, but there are some nice touches – good banter in the item shop, some good bosses and little in jokes. Here it is… the epic D&D adventure that is Monsters Den. There’s no facility for deleting old save games, so if you want to start a new campaign, keep a slot free.
FHM’s top model in 2009 – slim and sultry does it. Quite how she manages to maintain that complexion in the blazing S.A. sun I don’t know, but I’m not going to complain about it. Presumably the enormous and imposing bodyguards she must employ at all times block out not only the desperately impoverished black underclass but those harmful UV rays as well…
Possibly the most successful ever Myspace self-marketer, Tila Tequila has 3,680,664 friends. All of whom she is obviously on a first name, intimate and personal basis with. They’re not just there to check out her undeniably tight Singaporean junk. Oh no…
I do not condone or approve of these vacuous, arms-length photo snapping, egotistical it girl knicker-flashing slappers, but I do freely give the respect due to enormous, crass commercial success. Also: boobs.
The year was 1986; an American Italian plumber from New York found himself plunged (no pun intended) into a crazy, fantastic world of side-shuffling mushrooms, mutant man-eating venus flytraps and bottomless pits ready to destroy him at a single false step. Worse than this, the woman he idolised had been kidnapped by a ruthless, horny, giant, firebreathing, axe-tossing tortoise, and his limbs would only move under the remote control of a NES game pad.
Cue perverse level design, runtime flaws, millions of hours of young lives wasted and a whole raft of profanity.
We posted about Kutiman’s mashup stuff a while back – and now YouTube has made the huge intellectual leap of copying his style of video editing to make a piece of rambling aimless classical music. Enjoy?
Clear Vision puts you behind the lens of yet another high powered gun, popping the heads of the subjectively naughty. I’ve never been one of the alarmists who think that violence in movies and sex on TV are ruining the minds of the nation, but there does seem to be an inordinate amount of self righteous stick-figure glee collected around consequence-free death. Are we so pent up that this kind of hedonism is a release for us? Time for a jog around the block… +Continue Reading
Yeah. Sorry about that. Sometimes the puns just happen by themselves.
Anyway, the game’s pretty good – it’s a slowly animated card-battle game; don’t pretend that you don’t know what I’m talking about, I’ve noticed you looking wistfully at the Live Action Roleplay messageboards, you don’t need to pretend to me… At least with this you can be nerdy all by yourself and no-one else ever needs to know. It can be our little secret. Just like the dodgy embed frame. Shhhhh.
Do you like fire? Do you like balls? Then this game involving fiery balls is for you!
Ping little bouncy flames around a series of levels, setting fire to torches and picking up bonuses. Ususally I’d try and put this in a frame so we get ad impressions, but since you need to see what you’re doing, and I’m nice, I’m going to let you have it full-screen. Don’t say I never give you nuffink.
Amazing stuff, petroleum. More energy contained in it by weight than in TNT, 33.7kWh per gallon, in fact. The thing is, there’s only so much of it. What with all the hundreds of power stations, thousands of planes and millions of cars burning fossil fuels, we are soon going to be approaching what is called ‘peak oil’. The point at which the world is producing and consuming the maximum possible amount of fossil fuels. After this point, available reserves will become progressively smaller, prices will rise, and consumption will necessarily decline. Before you start getting flashes of ‘Escape from New York’ or ‘Mad Max’, consider that this is not necessarily a bad thing. More like the stimulus for the same kind of technological leap that took us from steam power to oil power in the first place.
Once we begin to move away from this clamorous demand for hydrocarbons, we won’t be pumping poisonous gas into the atmosphere at such a horrible rate, and there won’t be so much fuss about who’s in control of certain patches of land (although the Sahara might become a hotly contested source of Solar energy collection), and we’ll all get to drive lovely cars like this lot. Given the phenomenal rates of efficiency that you get from an electric motor these days (the fastest of them gets the equivalent of 170 mpg) and the comparative costs of the same amount of energy out of the wall-socket and the petrol pump, I’m quite looking forward to it. Here are some of the front-runners in the upcoming generation of battery powered vehicles.
This is a track-day racer being developed in California; if the lines look familiar, it’s because they are using the chassis from the Ariel Atom. This is matched up to a motor that evolves 150kW (about 205hp) to give it a 0-60 time of 3.07 seconds, and a 0-100 of 6.87 seconds. The power of an electric motor is available almost equally throughout the rev range, so full acceleration is always on tap with a press of the right foot. It’s not in production yet, unfortunately.
A very slinky looking GT coupe from British company Lightning. Boasting 700bhp and a 0-60 time of 4 seconds, the only thing to choose between this little number and an Aston Martin would seem to be the limited range of the battery. I rather imagine gliding the GT silently up to the lights next to a banker in his GT3 might raise some eyebrows. Expect to see the great and the good climbing out of these at movie premieres soon.
TechCrunch reporting in the above link, on the decidedly real-world, very much in production Tesla S. If you’re an American, you can put your name down to spend $50,000 on what is very soon going to be Hollywood’s hottest ride. It has the official endorsement that comes with being test-driven by the Governator, and lends the lie to the bleating demands for money that are coming from the rest of the embattled American car industry, having just sold out the company’s entire production capacity for their first year.
If these upstart manufacturer are not for you, and you want the reassurance of a marque you can rely on, then a little patience might see you able to buy a battery powered S-Class. They’re testing it at the moment, and have it’s range up to the 120 mile mark, another few years research will see charge times falling and power to weight ratios grow enough for Merc to make a practically useful car; look at the phenomenal rate of development of mobile phone batteries once they came into common use.
If you’re short on either patience or cash, and prepared to abandon any illusions of glamour, you may prefer to look to Indian manufacturer Tata to sell you your new ride. They’re the guys who bought Mercede’s old bodywork machinery off them, and used it to build the first incarnation of their TL pickup truck. Their native indian market is rather different to the one in the West, and they’ve been innovating without shame, this battery powered incarnation of their little saloon, and the RS, a one Lakh (10,000) rupee car, on the market now for £1,300.
The G-Wiz is a ridiculous looking little thing, but it’s becoming more and more popular for a reason; it’s a really convenient, sensible option as a town car. The size of a smart car, two reasonably sized human beings can get into it with a load of Tesco bags, and you can plug it into a 13 amp socket. As long as you don’t intend to travel long distances, it’s perfect, and in town you can park 3 of them in a normal parking space. I will say that the only time I’ve ever had my hands on one was trying to push it off Shepherd’s Bush roundabout where it had broken down, but this is undoubtedly an unrepresentative experience.
Now we’re talking! In full production now, using proven technology, and for sale at a mere £107.50, this racer is within everybody’s budget. Obviously it’s only 1/10th scale, but it’s still great fun to drive.
Double the game for your money this April Fool’s Day, two games based on roughly the same premise; aliens come to visit. They take over our minds and bodies, and for some reason embark on a massive bloody killing spree. Presumably this is some kind of inter-stellar tourist package holiday; five nights in the Sol system, all the blood you can spill, and an economy class ride home on next week’s Vogon freighter back to Sirius. I feel an epic space-exile backstory coming on…
