So, Army of Two: The 40th Day for PS3. I play almost nothing but co-op games these days and as Borderlands (by far one of the best games I’ve played in years) was starting to taste a bit too grind-tastic after 100+ hours of gameplay, I was really looking forward to playing The 40th Day co-op campaign.
Except that it’s nigh on impossible to enjoy the experience. Regardless of how good your internet connection is, co-op campaign throws you out of EA’s server every 10-15 minutes – totally at random. After that happens, you need to restart the co-op campaign, select your character and difficulty level, re-invite your buddy and start again from previous checkpoint. You lose all progress, all money and all weapons modifications you did before the disconnect. At the end of our first co-op session I told my friend I refuse to touch this piece of crap game until EA releases a patch which fixes the disconnection issue.
Oh, and while I’m at it, why on earth do we need to stay in constant connection to EA’s servers while playing the co-op campaign? Two players against an army of NPCs, you know? Why the need for anything but peer-to-peer connection, huh?
Anyhoo, EA released a patch for the game a few days ago. I downloaded the patch earlier today in anticipation for our 9 o’clock session. And off we went! Neither of us could remember what controller button did what, but a few minutes of experimentation soon sorted that out. The mission ahead was pretty tough, we effed up a couple of times and had to restart from previous checkpoint, you know the drill. Eventually we reached a point where we had cleared the immediate area of enemies and were planning our next move.
And suddenly… *KA-DONNGGG!!* “You have been disconnected from EA’s server.”
EA, what the fuck? Honestly, what the fuck? EA, surely you realise that the co-op campaign happens to be the reason why people bought this game? With that in mind, shouldn’t you, umm, you know, maybe have had a couple of guys playtest the co-op campaign in PlayStation Network before releasing the code for replication? Don’t say you did, because I know that’s a blatant lie. Check out your own forums and you’ll find umpteen players complaining about this issue. If you had tested co-op in PSN, you would have noticed the problem within ONE hour!
Or maybe you knew? Maybe you thought, “Hell, we need to make our Q1 figures look good for the shareholders so we’d better put this puppy out there! Yeah, co-op players disconnect from our servers all the time which kinda completely ruins the game, but we can fix it later by putting out a patch. Right? Right. Now let’s make some money – and fuck those gamers!”
No, Electronic Arts. No. Fuck you.
Artist: Babylonia
Title: Motel La Solitude
In brief: Well-produced electronic rock/pop from Italy, obviously influenced by DepMode
I don’t remember exactly where and how I first bumped into Babylonia. I probably heard their rather fantastic single “(If U Want) My Love” which spurred me into blind-buying their first album “Later Tonight v2.0″ from a German online retailer. I enjoyed the album immensely, especially “A Spreading Infection”, one of the v2.0’s extra tracks which was noticeably harder-hitting than the rest of the rather poppy, at times bordering on cheesy, album. In fact, it made such an impression on me that I had to contact the band.
Allow me to introduce a small-ish application which has saved me a lot of grief in the past year or so. I stumbled on HD Sentinel by accident, and it was one of the luckiest accidents I’ve ever had.
It was only very recently that I finally had a moment to hook up the Logitech G25 to my PS3 and to really get to grips with Codemasters’ Colin McRae Dirt. It’s a lot of fun – especially on a 3-meter-wide screen sitting at a distance of 2 meters. I was really looking forward to DiRT 2. It arrived from Amazon.uk today, and I stole an hour off work to try it out.
Lots of cool gear came in today. Philips BDP9100 Blu-ray player is supposed to be able to change the placement of subtitles on the screen, so I just had to ask Philips for a review unit.
Interview after the jump to stop RBMA’s player app from hogging your bandwidth when browsing my front page:
I’m building a video editing workstation and decided to upgrade my Canopus EDIUS 4 to version 5. While looking for info on the upgrade pricing, I found Grass Valley’s Firecoder Blu. It’s supposed to encode Blu-ray specced H.264 from HD source at speeds up to 2x real-time. That’s 48 frames per second which is far better than the 12-15 frames per second I get with a brand spanking new Intel Core i7 920.
Hobnox Audiotools is not a new thing, apparently, but it was news to me when I bumped into it earlier today. Imagine running a Korg Tenori-On, a Roland TB-303, a TR-808 and a TR-909 with FX units… in your web browser. I know, it’s insane!
But Hobnox has really done it. They’ve created passable emulations of Roland’s legendary boxes and made them run on Adobe Flash. I fooled around with Audiotools for a while and was utterly amazed by how well the whole thing works. Sure, the sound glitches sometimes when you twiddle the knobs etc. but that’s to be expected, I’d say.
Head on over to Audiotools and have a blast.