Someone To Drive You Home

Thesixtyone is a music site yeah ? That’s cool you’re thinking but why are you writing about it, well its got achievements! Combining two of my favourite passions listening to obscure bands and metagaming.  Thesixtyone doesn’t just allow you to listen to songs it also remembers what you’ve listened to and gives you Reputation (rep), think of rep as musical experience points, and every time you get to a milestone number of rep you are bumped up to a higher user level.

Well what does a higher level give you? You cry! well so far the only ability I know of is that you can heart a song more than once pushing it up the charts (extra rep is earned if a song you hearted is featured on the front page). At this point you guys are more than likely split into two camps those of you who think this sounds totally stupid and those who are intrigued and the real decider is if you don’t really like music that much this is a bit of a non starter for you. I thought it was a great way to find new music (I personally am always looking for new ways to find music that wouldn’t get any play in traditional media).

The website is super slick as well for instance it will load a whole page in the background so that the song you are listening to won’t be interrupted, this is achieved by some fancy pants AJAX computer nerds, it also allows you to download tracks or points you in the direction of a outlet where they can be bought from.

All in all a fairly interesting site it does have some basic social networking features you can friend people, send them messages, listen to their radio made up of tracks they have hearted. Nothing approaching Last.fm’s level of social integration but honestly not really fussed about that aspect (it’s all about the music man!).

Oh yeah and when you get there tell them Pedantic Sent you.

What’s this all about then. Merchants of Brooklyn (M.O.B.) is a first person shooter by Paleo Entertainment , Who? yeah Indie Developers Paleo Entertainment fresh from finishing their Half Life 2 mod  Paleolithic Revolution.

M.O.B. premise is that the polar ice caps have melted and submerged planet underwater so the survivors decided to clone a new lower class from Neanderthals to do their bidding. Somehow they over estimated the number of Neanderthals needed and the decided to use the spares in gladiatorial style arena matches for entertainment.

First off surely if most of the world is underwater they would want to be more conservative with their resources. What I’m trying to say is the premise is flimsy at best. All this you learn in the long slow cut scene at the start which features the player character walking slowly to his next arena fight.

The Disappointment starts to creep in pretty soon when playing this game but my advice to you would be to save some you, will need it for later.

So you are a Neanderthal pit fighter your last fight went poorly you lost your arm and had it replaced with cybernetics. This new arm allows to perform a charged up punch or pick up scenery and throw it.  So you’ll be think oh that sounds pretty cool I’m a pit fighter so i must have a few melee attacks to mess folks up with right and at this point Paleo Entertainment shoot you a look like nah you just need punch *ok being fair you can swipe with a object you are holding same animation for every item tho, charge punch , and perform a canned kill animation on a almost dead bad guy.

Disappointing but within the first few minutes of the game you find out your arm can also transform into a Unreal Tournament Style Flack Cannon (superficially at least) great bet the gunplay makes up for the lack of melee sophistication another head shake from the boys at Paleo. Seems the guns have little to no heft with the difference between a guy falling to the floor or exploding to a thousand pieces being arbitrary. The lack of visual cue when you are taking damage is a massive flaw you can literally go from full health to dead in about five seconds.

I feel its about time i got to real barrier to my enjoyment when it came to this game. bugs! huge bugs  bugs the size of your f-in head my friend. Now don’t get me wrong i can understand one on two bugs in your main storyline, you know if the player does something you cant account for but in MOB i was stopped by a door that wouldn’t open and left by a lift that ran off without me. This was within the space of five minutes  yeah you guys are indie developers but if you are going to release a game and expect people to pay for it it does need to work. Case in point i for one will not be getting their next game unless its made out of magic or something (what im trying to say it ruined my confidence).

I really don’t like writing negative stuff about games especially ones made by the little guys. I mean nobody wants to make a bad game right?