Entertainment

Jetpack Joyride

| trent

Contrary to what many academics might believe, research students can’t constantly work on their research. There is always a need to try and do something that isn’t the constant writing, thinking or data analysis. Of late, my choice of break has been Halbrick’s Jetpack Joyride.

I normally don’t blog about or review games, but in this case I think it is worth it. Originally the game was 99¢ or $1.99, but the developers of the game made it free. Given how much I play and enjoy the game, the new price of nothing makes me feel a little bit guilty (I did buy an in-app purchase to support Halfbrick on that feeling). The game is s side-scrolling, action, arcade style game with simple controls and simple gameplay. Just try and fly “Barry” (the main character at the centre of the game’s super-involved story) as far as you can collecting coins, tokens and achievements along the way, while trying to avoid comic death by “zappers” and missiles.

Jetpack Joyride - Angry Birds
Jetpack Joyride - Angry Birds crossover?

The game, while straight-forward, can be a massive time sink. The “one more try” factor in this game is huge and the constantly changing missiones (game objectives) give the game excellent replay value. The choice of “Barry” as the character’s name is as Australian as a thong-wielding, flanny-wearing, roo-riding bogan; but I love the choice of name.

Machine Gun Jetpack
Jetpack the steampunk way – The machine gun jectpack

The one thing that I would change about the game is the ability for the game to synchronise across iDevices using GameCentre. With the older version of the app, I kept loosing my achievements projects and had to restart the game each time. There was no way to recover achievements or game progress. I know other games sync to GameCentre and allow you to restore on other devices. I’d like to see Halfbrick to do this; although they just released an update that seems to fix the problem of progress loss.

My recommendation:Your a fool if you don’t try this game that’s available for free (and is developed by an Australian company).

Why nonsense movies are always best

| trent

I often hear movie critics dribbling on about movies, and seemingly arbitrarily handing out stars to movies. Most of the time artsy movies seem to receive an acceptable rating, animated movies receive about 60 million stars. The other main category are those ones that always get 0.0003 of a star. You know, those clearly overacted comedies that these movie ‘critics’ take seriously, as something with a real message and in need of a critical assessment. What gets me is that these people take this too seriously, forgetting that these movies were never designed to be absolute works of art. Rather they are meant to be a movie you can put on, watch and forget about having to analyse it in-depth. Sometimes all you need is time to switch off, and an easily accessible movie is the ticket. I am quite sure it would behove of these people to understand this when providing their assessment of the movie. I wonder, do these people take life too seriously? I’m sorry for them if they do.