The Price of the Past

So... how do I explain our absence? Sadly I can't say that this was all planned, but I guess it certainly was foreseen. As a consequence of my absence a brain aneurysm of events have passed us by. But let me at least try to catch you up to speed with this piece of enriched literature:

A Short History of Me

Last time I posted we were all in the month of March and for me and many other avid gamers, just on the eve of events that would send us into a spiral of costs. I think many would agree that 2010 will be forever be remembered for the big bang of game releases. Shall I make a post or should I play on Heavy Rain? Soon turned into, Final Fantasy XIII! to yes I can finally have my own starship on Star Trek Online into Resident Evil 5 updates! and again more Resident Evil 5 updates!

to Jesus I must play Battlefield: Bad Company 2 proceeded by bad ass Sam Fisher then Starcraft II followed by Ruse. If you haven't died from reading one of the longest sentence on the Earth then you see my point. But don't get me wrong, my life hasn't been completely consumed by gaming as I portray. A lot more significantly important events have happened too. So important in fact that they will be omitted from this post and instead replaced with this adequate summary of my previous sentiments to posting.

Things Are Changing

Lets be frank, Major Sheppard and I are bored with Blogger. Blankmind is becoming more than a blog, or is at least trying to be. We now have an upcoming Youtube Channel, Blankmind.tv, a Twitter, Blankmind Tweet and now more recently we want to introduce an image gallery for the blog. In short we've pretty much reached Blogger's limitations in terms with what we can do. Nothings set in stone, nothing is around here, but its time for the blog to become more and we plan to do just that. One thing we are focusing on is promoting Anime artists, or more generally, digital artists. Some new and some well known ones, but overall ones that we think are note worthy. In a nutshell we want to spice things up here. I wont say near but in the future we plan to move the blog. Come the forth Birthday of Blankmind we'll be on a whole new server with a whole new site.

Summer is here and its bloody hot.

It has once again been... well a very long time, and sadly there is nothing major to report. Though some small updates, I have added yet more games to my wonderful collection, with the release of Alan Wake, Red Dead Redemption, Splinter Cell Conviction and my late, late purchase Dragon Age: Origins. I’m still playing through all of them, well actually I still have yet to start Alan Wake, so many things on my to do list for this summer and it just seems to be getting longer.

UK + iPad = More expensive than USA

So the iPad has finally seen the light of UK shores, and to no surprise at all we people of the UK are expected to pay more than people in the USA. Now this wouldn’t be so bad it is were a few pound, or even £20 or £30 more, but the base model for the Wi-Fi only version is £429, that’s around £84 more than the America Wi-Fi only version. However importing the base model would cost you about the same as buying the UK mid range Wi-Fi only version (32GB), or the same as the 16GB Wi-Fi + 3G model.

Hotter than Hell...

The weather over here in the UK has been wonderfully hot the past few days, although the forecast for the rest of the week isn’t as good (but almost just as hot). So we did what any other English family would do in times of hot summer weather, we had a BBQ. I won’t bore you with what we had but it was all rather nice, especially as it was the afternoon, so a nice cool breeze.

So I’ll be keeping this one short, I do plan on posting more and posting it more often, just in the process of forming my summer to do list, which seems to be more and more never ending. Anyway, not to long till I receive this years Uni results, I think it all went well, but not as well as it could have gone. I will post again next week, or later this week as writing this has actually been quite enjoyable.

Three Years Old

Yep, its that time of year again! Its Blankmind's third birthday and in time for the celebrations we have upgraded the look and feel. In version 3 of Blankmind the most noticeable feature you may have already seen is the Blankmind Cloud. Allowing you to navigate past posts by theme, the Cloud gathers all tags in the Blankmind Network, generating a list of all posts by that particular theme. We have also given the reader better ability to share our posts to any of your favorite sites, all thanks to ShareThis. These are just a few things amongst many features we are adding. Expect to find more updates in the near future!

The cost of gaming

Once again it’s been far too long since I was last here, just like my good friend I wish I could tell you I’ve been off doing something magical, or saving the world, but sadly it’s something far different from that (perhaps even better?). Lots of my time recently has been spent in the amazing story of Heavy Rain, and the gorgeous world of Final Fantasy XIII, before I go on I’m just going to say how much I love both of these games, Heavy Rain is just brilliant beyond belief and so enjoyable because of its new, unique style. Final Fantasy XIII is amazing, (I haven’t finished it yet), despite its linear nature (of which I agree with my co-writer that Final Fantasy games have always been somewhat linear in nature to begin with), its storyline is nothing short of brilliant, but what do expect from a Final Fantasy title, although I know a few people that would disagree, but that makes me wonder if they have been skipping cut scenes, or perhaps aren’t paying attention to them.

HD is too hard?

As many of you know, a large portion of the games linear aspect has been blamed on the difficulty to produce cities in HD. Now, many people have pointed out that there are a lot of companies out there that can produce HD cities without any problems, however I haven’t noticed that many people reference something that I have noticed so easily. Now I’m not saying that this is the reason, it’s just my opinion, Final Fantasy games have often used 2D artwork to create areas of vast detail, two good examples of this would be Final Fantasy 8, and Final Fantasy 10. So when it comes to HD, the cities would need to be modelled, like any other element of the game, so when you consider that vast amounts of previous games details came from 2D artwork and that this is the first HD Final Fantasy game, it’s no wonder that creating these cities in HD was a problem for a team that are so used to creating them with images. I think that gets my point across, simply put it’s a challenge for a team that have spent many years making detail with 2D art work to jump into creating highly detailed cities without the use of 2D art work.

End of the tunnel?

Ok, so that’s my little rant over with, as for the what else I’ve been doing with my time is sadly just University work, lots to do, and a considerably small time to do it in. Although after a small worry this weekend, and a burst of working, I believe I am pretty much on top and on schedule of it all. Yesterday I started looking into the world of Linux, and Ubuntu, I must admit it looks rather nice, and it’s something I’ll be installing as a dual boot once I’ve finished this semester, although I may install it on my laptop tonight. I have many things on my to do list, including completing my unfinished trophies and achievements, creating a theme for my new Tumblr account, purchasing a good quality HD camcorder and getting things ready for our visit to this years’ Amecon in Keele.

Lightning... Vanille...

Just to round off this short update, I think that Lightnings character is awesome (yes I know she’s hot), but she’s also brilliant, seeming to be comprised of the best elements of previous kick-ass characters. Also I must disagree with my co-writers comments on Vanille, yes admittedly I was thrown byt he accent, the varying degrees and Australian, English and American did cause some confusion, but the more I play the game, and further I get, I just seem to like the character even (and the English voice actress) even more.