Recently the original Wolfenstein 3D was released on the Playstation network complete with addons for 4 quid. Bargain, original game, 6 chapters, good playability and a blast from the past so with the price I was quite happy.

Then I realised that this re release was because of the up coming new title Wolfenstein was about to be released. Curiously losing it’s 3D tag when this title is no doubt actual 3D whilst the original, was not. What a hoot. So I thought for once I’d actually buy the thing seeing as I’m actually working and all that, not wanting to rip the nice people off and all that Jazz.

Realising that the game was available on the PC it was a clear choice between buying it for my system with a keyboard/mouse or sticking it out on the PS3/Xbox with a control pad. First person shooters are majorly more fun in my opinion on a decent PC due to the interface, but we’ve been there before so lets leave it at that. Oh, and the PC game was 10 quid less, for some reason. Whatever!

Purchased the game from play and it arrived 1 day before the release date, result, installed the game into Windows 7 where it asked me to install… Direct X 9c (er … ok). I initially said no but then installed it anyway when the game started throwing a fit about missing files. Another slightly odd situation because Direct X 11 is installed in Win7.

My initial impressions of the game were a little disappointing, I was kinda hoping the scenery would be a bit more detailed and sinister but it wasn’t too bad. As I played through the game though I started to get more and more irked, not at the scenery (which got better) but by the actual game itself. I saw a couple of reviews on the net a couple of months ago with people who were on the team for creating the game, mostly harping on about how the game had to remain faithful to the original allowing for extremely fast paced action and hopefully keeping the focus on being alone behind enemy lines overcoming all odds.

So the first thing that happens in the game is you meet up with a band of Germans who all speak perfect English willing to get you out of trouble. Oh… and all the enemy Germans speak English too, perfectly, albeit in a German accent. How wonderfully commercial and overall, unbelievably shite. What a perfect way to ruin the atmosphere of making you actually believe you’re stuck in WW2 behind enemy lines by making all the native Nazis speak English. Tossers.

The lack of isolation is quite strange to be honest, especially for a Wolfenstein game. Initially the action is also not fasted paced at all. Forget anyone who has played the game before or has even played FPS games before, treat them all like babies and spoon feed them chunks in a linear order.

The biggest thing that leaps out, and this is the saddest part of it all, the new game has been created for a console audience and ported to the PC. It reeks of being a console game, the lack of energy bar in the game is the biggest giveaway. I really can not stand it to be honest, being able to take about 10 shots from enemy machine guns only to hide behind a wall/box for about 5 seconds, the blood from around the HUD disappearing and magically everything is alright again. Sigh, so much for being faithful.

So on the surface it seems this is just another one of these pathetic FPS titles designed for shite, casual console gamers who are handed a crap interface for controlling the character in the game. You know the type of thing, takes 6 seconds to turn halfway round to face an enemy, unable to react quickly enough to multiple incoming enemies. Very disappointing.

The fact that this game was clearly written for a control pad and ported to the PC where people generally use a much better interface shows through too. The action isn’t smooth at all, making the character run in the game actually makes me feel sick due to the excessive bob and generally the game isn’t anywhere near as polished and well presented as current or past FPS titles on the PC. I’d literally have more fun with playing the original Quake compared to the way this game handles and that came out 15 years ago. I find this all too often to be honest, which is a real shame.

There are other annoyances, the original game didn’t include a map which was frustrating at times, but what it did force you to do was to explore often leading you into a variety of well prepaired ambushes that literally made you jump out of your seat or pip you at the post at the end of a level. No such luck this time, you’re given a full on map (not such a bad thing) but the action is utterly hindered and linear.

The linear part is the most shocking, you’re lead around by a bunch of randoms and have to complete tasks they set you such as dynamiting a door open, gaurding a passage with a machine gun etc before you can move onto the next level. Zzzzz. However, should you want to disobey what you’re being told to do, you can still search around the scenery for secret items and passageways which is nice. What is not so nice about this is you’re reminded no less than every 30 seconds at full fucking volume that you’ve got a task to be getting on with by your new found german team mates which annoyed me so much that I wanted to fucking hit the people that made this thing.

One other thing that amused me in a sad way was the interaction between the player character and one certain npc. He was leading me out of a black market establishment after telling me I “had” to speak to the trader to upgrade my weapons before we could move on (again, le-sigh). So I came out of the black market house and followed Mr German towards a house he was taking me to. He stops by a wall, shouts at me “come on BJ, we need to make haste!” or something similar before shouting “follow me!”. He proceeds to stand fixed to the wall not moving a muscle. It’s a little hard to follow someone that doesn’t want to move. I realised what was going on pretty quickly, I had to run past him to the end of the tunnel and hit a trigger point where he twitched into motion and began off towards the house again.

Little things like that can really ruin things, not to mention the first time I opened a door and literally got stuck in 3 of my team mates and had to spaz the keyboard/mouse around frantically for about 2 minutes before one of them decided to move out of the door. They had told me to be quiet, not to attract the enemy’s attention, so me being me decided to open the door and ambush the bastards. Little bit sad to see that just having a bit of free will and opening the first door in the first room of the game caused it to bug but there we go.

One other problem is the “lack of stating the obvious”. At one point near the start you notice strange distrubances in certain parts of the level, weird little twisty lines that erupt from the floor and distort the scenery around them. However no one ever comments on this and even 3 levels in it’s not explained and I’m supposed to just accept the fact that these phenomenons exist and get on with it. No doubt they will become apparent later.

So… I’m about 45 minutes in this game, I’m not enjoying it so far and I’ve really not got much enthusiam to pick it up again. It’s quite sad to say that if they’d simply made the original game over again with newer levels and polished the graphics + added a map… I’d be enjoying it 10 times more than I am this major let down.

Give me the original, arm me with a minigun, let me see the guys face evil grin for a few seconds before mowing down enemy after enemy in serious fast paced action. That = fun. This slow paced console port = seriously dissapointing.

It would seem that the Scottish Government have ruled it appropriate for a murderer, responsible for killing 270 innocent people, to go free.  This is based on the grounds that he is terminally ill with prostate cancer, and might die within the next 3 months.  So his request of wanting to spend his last days with his family was granted, and he was freed today on compassionate grounds.

What the fuck.

I’m pretty sure that as Pan Am flight 103 was exploding in mid air, all the mothers, fathers, sons and daughters that were on board - all whilst being torn apart, smashed, and burned to death no less - were all wishing they could spend their last few seconds with their families.  Where’s the compassion there?  It certainly wasn’t sitting with Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi.

Megrahi is 57 and was convicted and imprisoned - for life - in 2001 (12 years after the bombing).  He has spent 20% of his adult life (14.04% of his total life) in jail.  Now he is not in jail, and he is still alive.  That’s not a life sentence in my eyes.

So what’s next?  After a murderer responsible for 270 deaths is released compassionately because he might die soon, should we compassionately release a murderer responsible for 1 death when they get a common cold?

Thanks to this decision, the ‘justice’ system has become ever moreso flakey and pathetic.  It disgusts me.

I guess this topic had to come up sooner or later so lets get started.
These sort of posts I do usually start with a disclaimer to put to bed any preconceived notions about what is going to come next, so why break a trend of a lifetime.

Firstly, personally, I don’t have much against anyone who actively chooses to be overweight. I used to be overweight for the vast majority of my teenage life so know full well what comes along with it. If the associated health problems decline of social confidence and acceptance are something you actively want to live with then fine.

The problem I have is with shows like “Fat and proud” or whatever the fuck it was called on Sky 1 the other night. An overweight lady was actively trying to change conscious notions of what it was to be fat, opinions of others aimed at fatties and how people reacted to overweight blobs that they might encounter through their daily lives.

To be honest no one deserves to be put down just for eating too much food, I can get with that, but the problem with this subject is it’s such a big ask. It concerns two schools of thought, conscious and unconscious.

She asked a bunch of teenage girls to draw their own personal adaptation of a “Slob”. The girls promptly drew pictures of a fat fuck sat on a sofa surrounded by garbage and washing up, clearly overweight, in poor personal health and hygiene and living an inactive life of solitude.

To this the women blew up in their faces demanding to know why the person sat on the couch in their picture happened to be overweight. This stunned me a little. She went on to demand to know if the girls thought she was a slob because she happened to be overweight. Missing the point a little here I think, being fat does not by virtue make you a slob, this is quite right. Being an inactive lazy slob however will frequently lead to poor choices in diet and the complete lack of exercise and being stationary in one position for so long will inevitably lead to the slob becoming overweight. This isn’t fucking rocket science.

No, a slob doesn’t HAVE to be fat, but they often fucking are due to the activities that go along with being classed as a slob in the first place. Duh?

See the problem here is, as mentioned above, split into two categories in my head; conscious thought about overweight people and how people react subconsciously. There is evidently fuck all you can do about the latter aside from actively trying to discredit it through strong conscious thought.

You see from my point of view it’s easy to turn around and say “hang on a minute, just because the person in front of me is a fat cunt, it doesn’t meant they’re nasty or useless or worth any less than a non fat person”. My subconscious side on the other hand is doing a lot more basic weighing up about how useful this person is going to be situations of a lot more primal nature.

Fat fuck’s can’t run fast, they are physically unfit, probably shite in a fight that lasts more than 10 seconds, so from a very basic physical side of things my subconscious has already weighed up the fact that the male fat bastard in question is probably of poor physical health and not going to be of much use hunting animals or providing for their family. For this reason this is a major turn off from the outset that isn’t actively decided by my conscious train of thought, it’s already occurred deep within my subconscious.

I believe this sort of thought comes from a very easy to understand principal, how we evolved. It’s natural for any animal to look at another and analyse it on a primal level to make fundamental choices about who we associate with, who we breed with, who we look to for protection and to make friends with. Survival of the fittest was the law at hand through our evolutionary progress and even though we don’t have to be concerned with these sort of matters in present day life, the subconscious thought is very much there.

Women look for physical features in men without even realising it, a strong V shaped back, big arms to protect and hunt, a good body for strength and fitness, defined features such as eyebrows or a square jawline for attractiveness and so on…

I’ve been a fat person in my life and I decided to change about 8 years ago and hit the gym hard, I’ve got the rewards for this now. Did I become more succesful, more driven, more of a hit with the ladies? Hell fucking yeah I did.

On the flipside, comments from fat people to thin/in shape people; one thing I find a lot of is jealousy in the form of misplaced compliments. “Oh you’re so lucky you can eat that and stay your shape” is a common one. Lucky? It’s lucky that I spent 4 hours or more a week down the gym working my asshole off until I’m red in the fucking face and feeling like I want to die. It’s also clearly “lucky” I’m smart enough to realise what is good for me to put in my mouth and I limit myself to eating shite to one day a week because I have a little will power.

At the end of the day I’ve got no problem with anyone for being hideously overweight, if they are actually, and I mean actually happy with it… good luck to you. Just be prepared for comments, slander, questions aimed at your self respect etc because on a very basic level it’s an equation that is subconsciously performed in every human being’s head… and something just doesn’t add up to attractiveness in the majority of our heads when presented with a moaning, outraged blimp.

Be overweight, be happy with it, but by the power that you happen to believe in ensure you can be strong, because you can not expect outright acceptance from everyone.

…can suck on my balls.