Stem Cells

I'm not sure what to think.

I read on a site that they think of stem cells as:

"little seeds that can grow into and be accepted by organ tissue. They are like a blank microchip that can ultimately be programmed to perform any number of specialized tasks.

Most of the body's specialized cells cannot be replaced by natural processes if they are seriously damaged or diseased. Stem cells can be used to generate healthy and functioning specialized cells, which can then replace diseased or dysfunctional cells, so instead of replacing an entire organ, you can repair damaged, vital parts of the body with cells.

This aids people who are on a donor waiting list, and considering there is no federal pressure to get people to donate their organs once they die, people often die while waiting for a donor who is a match to become available. It also aids people who have injured organs that cannot be donated and accepted, such as a spinal chord."

Blimey, that was long. OK, so it's a piece of their article on stem cells. (Link)

Anyway, the big problem with stem cells is that they can only be taken from embryos and fetuses, because they are a lot more versatile and easier to work with.

So, when you hear people talking about 'killing babies to get to stem cells' what they actually mean to say is 'removing the stem cells from the embryo of a developing baby (if you will)'.

There's a difference between an embryo and a fetus. First, the embryo are (I am lead to believe) is a bunch of cells. They have potential to grow into a new life form, but they have not yet. And since they are not really a creature yet, the idea that your killing something lacks weight.

But, I have just run into a bit of a dilemma - your eliminating something that has the potential to be a human.

For example, you have no idea if what you just took stem cells out of was going to be a brilliant film maker or the next president. Or, for that matter, a psychotic serial killer or someone who gets drunk and kills a bunch of people and him/herself in a massive car crash.

I guess my problem is that we aren't entirely sure what we're removing from the gene pool.

Don't get me wrong, stem cells are great. They can help repair organs, cure blindness (they can grow into corneas), cure diseases, spinal cord injury, and just so many other things. I guess it's just my thrice-damned conscience playing up.

Call of Duty 4: Multiplayer Guide (Introduction)

I've been playing Call Of Duty 4 Multiplayer a lot (primarily because MW2 multiplayer won't get past 'fetching playlists') and I believe I have become savvy enough to post a guide on how to survive a COD4 Multiplayer match.

These guides will involve:
- General Tips
- Etiquette
- Communication
- Custom Classes (and how to make them properly)
- Perks and Weapons (kind of adds on the end of Custom Classes)
- Maps (and strategies to go with them)
- How to make the most of your class
- Surviving 'Hardcore mode'
- Surviving 'Old School mode'
- Combat Tips
- Sniping 101
- Stealth 101
...And probably a lot more.
(These sections will appear in no particular order.)

I'll spread all these out over a series of Guides, each one specialising in a certain area.

So, stay tuned for the fist one. Shouldn't be far away.

Joss Whedon

I've just found out he's making a movie called Cabin in the Woods. I thought, 'Oh good, Joss is getting back in the game after the stupid pricks at Fox cancelled Dollhouse'.

But I think Joss Whedon sold his soul. Cabin in the Woods looks like one of those pathetic horrors in which a bunch of college students go to a cabin deep into the forest. You can probably guess that there's some serial murderer out here.

Come on, Joss! You made Buffy, Angel and Firefly! You can't just cop-out to a $h!tty 'bunch of college students get massacred' horror movie!

I can already see the plot, and the characters involved.

- Main guy: The person who 'leads' the group. Probably dies.

- Girl with big tits: Self explanatory. Probably dies.

- Nerdy guy: Frail, weak, but smart. Most Likely dies.

- Whiny kid: That little prick who never shuts up. Dies.

- Secondary female character: Like Uncharacterised Character/s, but always female. Dies.

- Uncharacterised character/s: These are the people who you have no connection too. They could be one person or several. Dies.

It'll probably rely on startling the movie-goer instead of scaring him/her. Really scaring someone is keeping them on the edge of their seat and having them as tense as a cat on water skies, waiting for the jump out horror, while never needing to give it to them. Once you have the watchers attention, you can hold them like that for a good portion of the movie while not having a starting thing jump at them from behind.

Music and ambiance helps set the atmosphere, and so does the environment. Even the most 'Oh, I see where this is going' movie-goer wouldn't know what might happen.
Well, maybe he might. But the point I'm trying to get to is that slasher horror films are predictable and shallow, the characters are almost never likable, and the startling things jumping from behind the screen get old after the hundredth time you've seen them.

Let's hope I'm wrong about Cabin in the Woods, although I don't think I am. They're delaying it until Janurary 2011 so, get this, it can be in 3D.
I'm right. Joss has sold his soul. Let's hope he can get it back.

Core Hound Pups

So, I'm as my banker character on Aman'Thul, and I see this other character with a vanity pet called a 'Core Hound Pup'.

First thing that crossed my mind was "I didn't know Core Hounds had puppies".

But then I watched it for a minute. One of it's idle animations was digging into the ground, picking up a bone, fighting it's other head for it (did I mention it has two heads?) then throwing it up into the air, catching it by the tail, and scoffing it down.

After watching it for a bit more, I thought "this is... so cute! I must have one!"

Turns out you gotta have a Blizzard Authenticator to get one. In case you didn't know what it was, It provides your account with a totally random (although I suspect pseudo-random) 6 digit number in addition to your regular password. Click the button, get your generated key, enter that and your password into your login screen, and you get to enjoy increased security.

Plus an adorable Core Hound Pup, if for no other reason. Bonus is that the pet is account bound, so you can send it to all your characters, just like Mr. Chilly and the Onyxian Whelpling (two recent vanity pets mailed to players).

For New Zealand buyers, it's $6.50. American or our currency, I don't know. But I keep thinking that's a small price to pay for this awesome pet.

Blood Bowl

So, I bought Blood Bowl yesterday. My dad and I specifically checked the scores online, and after we decided it was all good we bought it.

So, installation went fine, a bit slow but that's neither here nor there.

After a bit of faffing around I get to the 'input player key here' bit. And, naturally, I guess that the activation key is the same as the player key.

It's not.

So, here I am, trying to put the activation key into the player key box. Now, you may say 'Oh jee, how stupid of you. I would hate to see your children', and that's all very well, but you would make the same mistake if you never actually got the fucking player key.

My game box doesn't have it anywhere, and when I bought it I noticed the lack on manual. It's all very well that the manuals on the disk, but the manual lacks the player key where it usually is (on the back of the manual). In fact, if you look at the on-disk manual, it has the blank section for the key, but not the key itself.

So, I'm going to go back to the store and demand my cd key, politely but firmly. And if they say they never got the manual/player key for the game, then I'll ask for my money back.

I was going to blame the company that made this for having excrement in their heads because they didn't package the cd key (or player key) with the game, but it's most likely the stores fault.

I would write my first impressions of it, but as you can plainly tell I can't.

Halo 2

The Halo franchise seems to sell on one thing and one thing only - the Master Chief, the iconic game character that, to me, isn't all that great.

He has no health, just a 'shield' that takes about five seconds to recharge after you get hit.

I'm just wondering whether it was Halo that introduced what I like to call 'Threshold health', where you don't have a health bar per se but you can tell your in danger, usually by something flaching on your screen or, in the case of MW2, blood all over your face.

Anyway, back to Halo 2.
I noticed that there isn't the usual "This game is awesome" quotes from gaming websites, and I imagine Microsoft pays for all the 'reviews' anyway, so why not include them?

I actually don't know. Maybe because everybody thought the same wahy I do about Halo 2 and said they wouldn't defile themselves by taking a bribe, or more likely Microsoft/Bungie knew that this game would sell like hotcakes wrapped around a stripper regardless of internet reviews, so they just didn't bother.

Oh, the game? It's shit.
I'm sorry, but I'm not going to sugar coat this just so I won't hurt some ten year olds feelings or enrage a rabid Halo fan - This. Game. Is. F%#king. Terrible.

Right off the bat, I'm beset by hidious textures covering the walls around me. And I'm insulted that they included a tutorial that, no jokes, makes you look up and down three times. That's it. Considering that they think we're that stupid, why not explain to us in that greater detail how to press the forward key or how not to break your keyboard trying to figure out where the hell to go next.

So, got past the tutorial bit, and there's a sort of playable cutscene, than a not playable cutscene, then another, then they actually let me play the game.
Finally.

So, after finding out that Bungie forget the Sprint button and coming to the horrifying realization that I had to literally walk everywhere, I plunged myself head first into the combat, firing on all cylinders with my Battle Rifle.

At first, I was alomost impressed by the Dual Weild capability, until I figured out that you drop your secondary weapon if you do one of the following;
- Switch to your other weapon
- Throw a grenade
- Attack with melee
I thought that was pretty damn bad. And I thought the worst thing that I could possible think - "How could this possible get any worse?"

Well, can you say 'No clear objectives?', because I certainly can.
In MW2, your given a decent UAV minimap to mark the floor plan of the map, including the edges, and tells you where the next waypoint is so you can get to those objectives easier.

In Halo 2, you get no radar. You get this sensor thing that pings every three or so seconds to tell you where the good and bad guys are, but it only effects the direction your facing, so you can't make sure your corners are safe. And don't worry about telling me where the enemies are right in front of me Halo 2, because the sensor's range is roughly 15 feet in front of you, so it's of bugger all use and should either be severely improved or removed altogether.

Then I get out of the space ship. Up until now, I assumed that Master Chief did that slow, bouncy kind of jump because he was in space. Makes sense, right? I even went out of my way to not notice the fact that artificial gravity had clearly been used inside the ship.

But then we get onto Earth where miraculaously, a bunch of marines walked out of the crashed Pelican dropship unscathed. Now, I watched Black Hawk Down the previous night and that helicopter want down a lot lighter than the Pelican did and everybody early died, apart from the pilot (I think). That thing flipped and buried itself in the ground, and people made it out of there. Hell, you can tell the crash was bad because Master Chief was shaken up.

The town thing I've crashed into... how do I describe it? Doom II pisses over the textures here.
It's like they didn't even try. Fallout 3 had pretty bad textures and some of it was a little blocky (on a machine that's roughly four years old), but at least you knew that it looked great on a proper computer.

Halo 2 looks like the texture artist did everything in Paint. Bland, blocky, and wears the 'no effort here' label like a f&@ing crown.
The street I was fighting in was a sandy colour all around, and the buildings were simple boxes fitted into the square city blocks. There was no colour, apart from the bodies of the marines and covenent starting a sprinkle the ground.

But the excremental graphics wasn't the worst part of the game for me, although it did come very close.
The fact that there's no clear path or objectives pretty much killed it for me. You could argue that Halo 2's levels are pretty linear, but at one point I was fighting off a group of covenent, trying despratly to figure ou whether I was supposed to do something or if this was how it played out.

Since there isn't any Ghost or Soap on the other end of the line talling you what the deal is, I just sat there, confused, waiting for someone to communicate to me.

I've gotten up to the beach bit where you got into the Warthog and are driving around everywhere, until your team mates inevitibly die, and your forced to procede on foot. I do remember a concrete tower with no cover inside the walls or on top, and I kept getting attacked by Elites in Ghosts. At that point, I gave up. Maybe I'll try the multiplayer, but I'm not holding my breath.

So that's my take on Halo 2, quite possibly, and I'm pre-quoting this so you can rant about it on forums with minimal effort;

"Halo 2 is the worst game I've ever played of any genre. Ever."

Overall, I'd give Halo 2 two stupid Dev Teams and level designers out of ten. Just save your money - don't even buy it to see how bad it is, because that way your giving Microsoft more money to make even more terrible Halo games.