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Day: 22 November 2012

Lord of the Rings: Guardians of Middle Earth – Preview

Written by Jack Crutcher on . Posted in Games.

Monolith Productions will bring the latest entry in the Lord of The Rings franchise Guardians of Middle Earth to Xbox 360 and PS3 on December 4. This time around console gamers will be introduced to the MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) style of game-play. The pressure to impress is huge and in no small part due to the hot competition offered by the rival PC platform which can boast such titles as League of Legends and Starcraft.

The game will offer a choice between five classes and 20 characters, gamers will be encouraged to specialize according to their preferred style of play early on. Warriors, Strikers, Enchanters, Tacticians and Defenders complete the options available to the player with each bringing a distinct set of strengths and weaknesses to the table. For example, where Enchanters like Gandalf lose out in terms of health and minimal resistance to incoming attacks, they will make up for in devastating offensive moves. Defenders on the other hand are able to withstand high amounts of damage, but offer little in terms of attack.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Guardians of Middle Earth is the character customisation made available through three forms; Potions, Commands and Guardian Belts. Potions and Commands are typically purchased with credits earned through mission advancement. However the Guardian Belts are a unique feature introduced by Monolith. The Belts are carried by every character in the game and can hold up to seven gems and/ or relics each (more slots are unlocked with game progression). Each gem or relic gives the holder a unique trait that increases their ability and can be placed in order of importance within the available slots. The higher a relic or gem is placed, the greater its effect on the character. The game should impress when it comes to character personalisation if nothing else, something that will attract RPG fans to the genre.

This is certainly a brave release by Monolith and could prove to be a stroke of genius if it lives up to the hype.

Teething problems for Wii U US Launch

Written by Alasdair Preston on . Posted in Games.

Nintendo’s Wii U was released stateside last week, marking the dawn of the next generation of home consoles.

As with all launches, there were teething problems. The biggest complaint that arose from the first wave of Wii U owners was about a firmware update. Gamers were complaining of a slow download that was required to get most of the Wii U’s online features to work. Despite rumours of it being a hefty 5GB, official sources claim its only 1GB.

Frustrated fans took to the web to complain. With one Twitter user summing up gamers’ frustrations: “Things I have enjoyed doing so far with my Wii U: Waiting for things to download. Waiting for things to install. Entering passwords.”

 Worse still turning off the console during this update bricked the machine completely for some. Word eventually got round about how to shift the download to the background, and Nintendo of America hastily released a warning to those yet to download. But for many this was too little, too late.

The Wii U’s online space suffered some day one downtime. For a new system this kind is to be expected, but it surely caused disappointment for those who had been looking forward to launch since summer 2011. One user reported accidentally hacking the admin side of the social hub, and being presented with the option to moderate all submitted messages (although he claimed that it wasn’t fully functional). Nintendo were quick to point out that this menu was just a mock-up, and has since been removed.

Despite all this, Nintendo should be pretty happy with the launch. They successfully avoiding the usual stock shortages that we have come to expect, and launched some great first-party titles.

The MiiVerse, Nintendo’s biggest step into the online world by far, seems popular and is being compared favourably to the Xbox Live and PSN services by many. There is plenty to look forward to on November 30, but early adopters would do well to prepare for that big download, or risk turning their Wii U into a £300 paperweight.

Retro Corner – Batman: Vengance

Written by Thomas Lee on . Posted in Games.

I may be speaking to a niche audience when I ask “Does anyone remember Batman: Vengeance?” But hear me out.

As a kid, I loved superhero cartoons, but was too young to catch Batman: The Animated Series (which I’ve since purchased on DVD, and can heartily recommend). I did however play the video-game spinoff, Ubisoft’s 2001 Batman Vengeance.

It was my first video game and my first encounter with the caped crusader. Eleven years later, I still collect Batman comics. And I still swoop around Gotham beating up Joker thugs, but now I tend to do it on a seventh-generation console. The Arkham series has been tremendous, but for me, Vengeance will always be the original. In more ways than one.

Vengeance was great fun. The decopunk noire of the animated series was captured beautifully in a game where Batman roundhouse kicked his way through his usual rogues gallery in a chain of episodes that were bound together by a shady criminal conspiracy, with voice talent from Misters Conroy and Hamil. Some things never change. The plot worked and the dialog was ripped right out of a 40s gumshoe detective novel, but the controls were awkward – the Arkham series make Batman’s utility belt much more utilitarian.

The new games are, objectively, much better (even if they haven’t yet let me drive the Batmobile). But it’s hard not to notice how they ‘borrow’ from Vengeance. There are several intentional tips of the hat, including Joker quotes and Oracle’s reminder of what happened the “last time” Batman fought Mister Freeze – but Arkham Asylum’s plot of Joker is putting strange fluids in the sewers was an almost direct steal, as was the miraclous ‘Titan’ formula. The theme of the Joker’s death features in both game and the fact that Vengeance ends with a remarkably farsighted cutscene of the Asylum makes you almost wonder if the Joker has something in store for us.

Far Cry 3 – Review

Written by Sam Dumitriu on . Posted in Games.

Far Cry 3 is a rare breed, the thoughtful first person shooter. When you’re first introduced to protagonist Jason Brody, he strikes you as nothing more than a rich kid out of his depth, but your view of Brody will soon change as you break out of psychotic pirate Vaas’ prison camp.

It’s a rare FPS that has the lead character recoil in horror at his first kill and delivers a truly emotional moment when he has to apply pressure to stop his brother bleeding from the neck, all before you’re even given a gun.

Jason Brody is a reluctant hero, a man who at first refuses a gun, yet as time passes, he begins to feel at home in the role.  He starts to enjoy the violence, comfortably burning down villages with his flamethrower and setting loose wild animals on his enemies.

His character arc is reminiscent of Dustin Hoffman’s in Straw Dogs; he goes from being repulsed by violence to eventually embracing it as a fundamental part of him.

At times it is a little hard to suspend your disbelief; for a man who’s never used a gun Brody has an incredible aptitude for killing trained pirates armed to their teeth.

Once you escape the prison camp, you spend a good hour getting acquainted with the key-mechanics of the game. Gathering herbs in order to create drugs that can heal you and enhance your combat abilities, and learning to hunt pigs, goats and leopards to make equipment from their hides.  It is important to pay attention at this point, as you won’t get far with the bog standard gear.

You also get access to the game’s levelling system, where you can develop new skills such as, stealth kills or being able to reload while sprinting. In a nice touch, the new skills that you purchase appear on your characters left arm as tattoos.

What sets the gameplay of Far Cry 3 apart from the other big titles on the market is the freedom it gives you in approaching each mission. You get to decide whether you run in guns blazing or attach C4 to a vehicle and create a makeshift car bomb or sneak in taking each guard out with your knife. You can also use the environment as a weapon setting fire to crops in order to block off your enemies paths or lure wild animals like leopards and even water buffalo to the enemies for backup.

The freedom isn’t just limited to how you approach the missions, you have free reign over the massive map, which spans two islands. You can go hunting, try some off-roading in one of the game’s many vehicles and even explore the island from above with the help of Far Cry series staple the hang-glider.

The freedom extends to your weapons giving you a vast choice, from handguns and machine-guns to flamethrowers, rocket launchers and my personal favourite the bow and arrow. All of these weapons are customisable superficially with different paint jobs and functionally with scopes and magazines.

The graphics are strong. The islands are nice to look at, with realistic water effects, lush foliage and sharp textures. The character animation is strong as well, which alongside quality voice acting helps the story draw you in. The distressing healing animations from Far Cry 2 remain, popping Brody’s bones back into place and picking out bullets with your knife, will cause even the most-hardened gamer to cringe.

As well as the main story, the game also offers a co-op mode separate from the main plot where you play as one of four misfits drawn together when pirates attack their ship. The free roaming is traded for more linear gameplay here, although the levels are still vast. The levels are designed for four players and it can become frustratingly difficult playing with just two.

The multiplayer isn’t much cop either, compared to Black Ops 2 and Halo 4; it’s likely to get ignored. The levels lack the scope of the main game, and force you into closed quarters. Thankfully, the game has provided players with a map editor allowing you to create your own levels.

Far Cry 3 is a great shooter that excels with open-ended gameplay, a strong story and a huge map to explore. While the multi-player doesn’t live up to the single player, it’s a must buy on the quality of the single player alone.

9 out of 10

Art History Lessons with Lucy J

Written by Lucy Johnson on . Posted in Arts.

1) He was born Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa in 1864, to an aristocratic French family

2) His parents were first cousins

3) He put himself into his painting ‘The Moulin Rouge’, and is pictured walking next to his cousin Dr. Tapie de Celyran

4) He fractured his legs at 14, and they stopped growing, meaning as an adult he only stood 4 ft 6 in tall

5) He contracted syphilis from one of his favourite models, a prostitute named Rosa la Rouge

6) His paintings often depict the music halls, circuses, brothels, and cabaret life of Paris

7) He invented a cocktail, a mix of absinthe and cognac, called the ‘Earthquake’

8) Although his paintings were not received well in his lifetime, his painting ‘La blanchisseuse’ sold for 22.4 million dollars in 2005

9) He was an astonishingly productive painter – 1,000 paintings, 5,000 drawings, and 350 prints and posters

10) He died aged only 37

Review: ‘I’ – The Sleep Collection

Written by Mancunion on . Posted in Arts.

Art exhibitions and creative spaces are not the natural grazing grounds of the Mancunion’s laziest contributors. However, living with the Arts editor does, at times, mean we have to bite our tongues and agree to attend such cultural arenas. Our first foray into creativity saw us attend ‘I’ – The Sleep Collectionat one of Manchester’s (sort of Salford?) most titillating industrial spaces, the Islington Mill.

Roshana Rubin-Mayhew installed a bed into one of the twenty gallery spaces at the Mill for two weeks from the 6th-20th November. Each night over the first week, members of the public were invited by Roshana to sleep over whilst they were being photographed falling asleep, during sleep and as they were waking up.  The resulting triptych of photographs were arranged together around the bed, made up with black sheets, forming the focal point of the exhibit.

Initially confronted by what appeared to be a potentially underwhelming set up, we opted to quell our boot shaking fear of the arts and embrace what we had been ordered to see.  In doing so, it became obvious that the image of someone sleeping carries far more cultural, emotional and aesthetic significance than may first appear. Lucy embraced her academic calling and Toby attempted to keep up as we embraced the restful yet challenging images.

Most of the pictures were composed of the subjects face, occasionally with a section of torso and/or arm. The ambiguous camera angles free the subjects of the constraints of the bed they’re in, suspending them in a state of timeless innocence.  In particular the central images of the triptych, depicting actual sleep, evoked the expanse of the dreaming mind or as if they were poised in space.

Although all compositionally similar, each image had an aesthetic beauty emphasised by subtle individualities. The sleeping self, that is to say ourselves at our most vulnerable, tends to be something belonging in the private sphere, a state only those closest to you would witness. Transferred to the public arena, we engage almost voyeuristically with the act of sleeping, and are for a moment gifted access to the private space of the individual. It is the sense of immediacy and intimacy that the exhibition so strongly conveys.

Although attending under duress, we both left the Mill with a more informed    sense of the capacity of photographs to convey truth and intimacy. There is an honesty in the exhibition in part due to the photographic medium but also reflected in the simplicity of the composition.

 

A Night at the Museum

Written by Grace Williams on . Posted in Arts.

To mark 100 years since the opening of the first Egypt gallery in Manchester Museum, the Ancient Worlds exhibition has been redeveloped and three new galleries created. As part of the Museum Meets initiative – the museum’s adult programme – I attended an After Hours event which promised to showcase the new galleries at night and offer some related amusements.

After being greeted with wine and live Greek bouzouki music, I entered the first of the new galleries which explores Manchester’s contribution to archaeology.  As well as displaying locally found artefacts, the individuals involved in the discovery, analysis and preservation of objects are brought to attention through photographs and media displays. Contributors to Manchester’s archaeological legacy, past and present, are acknowledged and celebrated. The opportunity to meet with the man behind the displays and Curator of Archaeology Bryan Sitch felt like something of an honour, and his passion for the artefacts and their unique stories was infectious. Serving as a prelude to the Egypt collection, the displays go some way in explaining the processes involved in archaeology today.

Egyptian Worlds, the second gallery, transports us right back to Ancient Egypt. The awesome impact of brightly decorated coffins and the delicate beauty of tomb jewellery powerfully convey the remarkable achievements of civilisation all those thousands of years ago. Just as Egyptian life and culture revolved around preparation for death, there is greater emphasis on ceremonial objects required for transition into the afterlife, and of course the coffins and mummies themselves take centre stage.

Finally, the third space, Exploring Objects, offers visually stunning mass collections of everyday objects such as jewellery and stone vessels from the ancient civilisations of Greece, Rome and Egypt. The Ancient Worlds galleries now have more objects on display than ever before. Selected artefacts are free to be handled and new smart phone interactivity will allow greater accessibility to objects.

Aside from the exciting new galleries, the opportunity to attempt mummification (with an orange!) and watch a pharoah perform tricks was much enjoyed. Overall the once cramped galleries of the Ancient Worlds exhibition are now light and well arranged, and there is a continuity in the material presented that leaves you with a deeper understanding, not only of ancient life, but of the discipline of archaeology as well. The sheer number and diversity of objects on display, combined with the implementation of the newest technologies and approaches in museology, yields an impressive exhibition experience.

 

These attacks on smart drugs aren’t very smart

Written by James Jackson on . Posted in Opinion.

“One in six students have experimented with some kind of performance enhancing drug” wrote Antonia Jennings in last week’s Mancunion, in an article that considered ideas such as random drugs tests and sniffer dogs to stop people from taking cognitive enhancing drugs during exams. Her reasoning seemed to be that “heightening the brain to some unnatural level gave the remaining students an unfair disadvantage,” and that therefore taking these substances is unfair and wrong. I have one question for Antonia: do you like coffee?

The concept of a ‘drug,’ like ‘pornography,’ is notoriously difficult to define. With something like ketamine, it is obvious to everyone that it is indeed a drug. However, when you think of substances like caffeine, which have a less obvious affect, the line blurs. Caffeine is a cognitive enhancer, and therefore any bans against “smart drugs” are inconsistent and ill-thought out. Any way you look at it, coffee is a performance enhancing drug, or at least contains one. Caffeine has been proven to increase alertness, improve concentration and short-term memory; these are the same performance-enhancing properties that supposedly give Ritalin-taking students an unfair advantage. And yet they are present in most of our drinks. This is especially true for Modafinil, the main purpose of which is to increase alertness. Should some students be deemed “cheats” or penalized because they prefer to get their alertness in a £1 pill rather than £3 coffees?

Following the Lance Armstrong scandal, where cycling’s most famous sportsman was found to have used performance enhancing drugs, it is understandable to want to do something about cheating. However, viewing academia as a competitive sport similar to cycling is a grave mistake. There is a reason economists don’t take part in the Olympics: academia isn’t about beating your opponents, it is about producing good quality research or learning the skills to do so. Does it matter if you discover the Higgs Boson stoned or visualize the double-helix of DNA while tripping on LSD? It has been widely reported that Francis Crick had indeed taken the powerful psychedelic when his greatest discovery came to him. Should we strip him of his Nobel Prize like we stripped Lance of his medals? Of course not, because the point of research is not the competition, but the result. If the statistics are anything to go by, there are probably researchers at this university taking smart drugs. If this helps them work harder, and discover a cure for a disease faster, isn’t this a good thing?

At the root of these ethical questions are, I think, a number of unchallenged assumptions. The nature of the human mind is one of them. Many seem to think of drugs as unnatural and therefore fundamentally bad, but many smart drugs work by enhancing or inhibiting systems already found in the brain. Taking Omega oil supplements helps keep your brain healthy, but so does Piracetam, an Alzheimer’s drug that prevents age and alcohol damage and promotes cognition and memory recall. It has also been proven to increase the performance of dyslexic children.

I belief that many of the students who take non-prescribed cognitive enhancers are doing this to self-medicate undiagnosed learning difficulties. Would someone really go through the effort, and risk, of gaining a black-market substance such as Ritalin if they did not have a serious problem with concentration? Adult ADHD is poorly understood, and doctors are often suspicious of young people looking for a prescription. Some people have had bad experiences with doctors and the bureaucracy of the NHS and therefore prefer to find their own treatment, taking matters of their (mental) health into their own hands. What is wrong with a dyslexic student deciding on how to treat their learning difficulties? They probably have more time than their GP does to research new treatments, and more motivation to make the best decision for themselves.

Drug abuse has brought significant suffering to our society, with millions of people a year dying from alcohol, tobacco and other drug-related illnesses, but it is dishonest to pretend that they can’t be used positively. In the words of Bill Hicks: “If you don’t believe drugs have done good things for us, do me a favour. Go home tonight. Take all your albums, all your tapes and all your CDs and burn them. ‘Cause you know what, the musicians that made all that great music that’s enhanced your lives throughout the years were rrreal fucking high on drugs. The Beatles were so fucking high they let Ringo sing a few tunes.”

 

Blind Date: Louisa & Richard

Written by Zara Zubeidi on . Posted in Lifestyle.

Richard, 1st year, Medical Imaging MSc

First impressions?

Confident and stylish.

What did you have to eat?

A burger and then Sticky Toffee Pudding

What did you guys talk about?

Lots, our home towns, our courses and life in Manchester mostly

If they were an alcoholic beverage which one would they be and why?

I would have to say an Irish coffee. Apart from the fact that she’s from Ireland, she also seemed very energetic and focused.

Were there any awkward silences?

Maybe a few…

Rating?

7

Finally, hug, kiss or something more?

None of the above.

 

 

Louisa, 2nd year, Psychology 

First impressions?

He seemed friendly and was easy to get on with

What did you have to eat?

A Trof burger and brownie

What did you guys talk about?

Lots of different things, about our courses, where we go out in Manchester etc.

If they were an alcoholic beverage which one would they be and why?

A tangy cocktail because he was eccentric and interesting!

Were there any awkward silences?

No, not at all

Rating?

7

Finally, hug, kiss or something more?

None, and we did not swap numbers so it’s unlikely that we will see each other again

 

Louisa and Richard ate at Trof, Fallowfield. Thanks to the guys down there for getting involved. To check out their menu and what’s going on there head to http://www.troffallowfield.co.uk/

To sign up for blind date please e-mail your name, year of study and course to [email protected] with ‘blind date’ as the subject

Must See This Week In Theatre: 26th November-3rd December

Written by Josephine Lane on . Posted in Theatre.

Arabian Nights

The Library Theatre Company’s Christmas show this year is the infamous tale of Arabian Nights. The classic story of a thousand and one stories is staged in the round and promises to be visually stunning!

Runs from 30th November until 12th January 2013 at the Lowry Theatre

Tickets £14.50-£20

 

Peter Pan

The Bolton Octagon’s family festive show this year is the timeless classic we all know and love: Peter Pan. With a talented cast of actor-musicians playing originally composed music, the show is sure to bring out the child in all of us!

Runs until 12th January 2013 at the Bolton Octagon

Tickets £9.50-£22

 

Orpheus Descending

Whilst being one of Tennesse William’s lesser-known plays, Orpheus Descending, still has plenty of what we love about him: a young male drifter, an unhappy Southern belle and lots of passion. Stars Imogen Stubbs as Lady Torrance.

Runs from 24th October to 24th November at The Royal Exchange Theatre

Student Tickets £10 or £5 on a Monday or Friday

 

Irving Berlin’s White Christmas

A musical based on the Bing Crosby film classic, following the success of the record-breaking, sell-out run of 2009. A spectacle that’ll warm any Scrooge-like heart, White Christmas promises to deliver ‘lots of laughter and some of the greatest songs ever written’.

Runs from the 30th November to 5th December

Tickets £24-£45