Wii Goodness

Wii Logo Well finally the purchase of a Nintendo Wii has been made, yes yes the wallet was breaked open by the misses.
The Wii is so far infront of every other console on the market that it's almost scary. A big hats of the R&D team at Nintendo.

To celebrate the Wii I've setup a special Wii page on eazyp.com. I'll attempt to review all of the games that I get and hopefully some previews of games and Wii updates.

Have a look at the page here....it's very Wii like ;)

China's Olympic Deceptions

Beijing Olympics Logo Unfortunately the great name of the Olympics have been dealt a major blow thanks to China. We'll start off with, how can a communist country with a terrible Human Rights record be allowed to host the greatest sporting event in the world?

Due to that overbearing communist impression, spectators are barely even allowed to look at the venues let alone view an event. A prime example is the men's road race... 95% of the course was deserted... not a sole except for the competitors and the officials.

Now we move onto the Opening Ceremony, which personally was entertaining in parts... when Channel Seven inserted some of it in between the TV ads... poor form Channel Seven, it should have been commercial free.
Due to some bizzare line of thinking, Australia came out 3rd last of 200 odd competing countries, which sucked majorly. Next on the list is again the cold feeling of communism flowing through the ceremony, like the kids saluting the Chinese flag during the national anthem, sent chills down my spine.

The first major deception to occur during the ceremony was when the young girl started to sing solo, this was fake. The little girl with the very beautiful voice was actually deemed to be not cute enough for TV, so Chinese officials pre-recorded her singing and got a cuter girl to fake the singing. The second, was the use of CGI incorporated into the final fireworks display and then beamed it worldwide and locally, as if it was actually happening in real time. Another deplorable act that the IOC should investigate further on is the restricting of foreign media's internet access.

Now Eazyp.com doesn't usually go to this extreme of bitching but I'm a major Olympics supporter, both Summer and Winter and seeing the games being treated like this is just plain wrong and disappointing. Other countries need to look at Sydney and the 2000 Olympics, the greatest of all time by a country mile.

Google Street View

Google Logo Google has finally released Google Street View to Australia. This is by far my fav website of the week.

As per usual there are plenty of people who are in an uproar about privacy and the usual stuff, but I say get over it.

This is fantastic technology, the amount of data that Google must store to generate seamless images is mind blowing. This adds another string to Google's bow in their dominance of the internet and the Web 2.0 era.

Project Firewall

Smoothwall Logo With a very small budget and four Firewall OS's to choose from, I set out to implement a hardware firewall solution for my home network.

I'll give you a run down on the parts that I selected and the OS I finally went with.

The project only took a couple of hours to complete with a day or two of research but I'm pretty happy with the end result. Click here to have a read of my write up.

Vista Selling Really Well?

Vista No joke according to Microsoft's Steve Ballmer "Vista sells on almost 100 per cent of all the new consumer PCs around the world," the Microsoft CEO proclaimed. He added that the operating system was also selling on, "45 percent of all of new business PCs".

Maybe so on new boxes that are pre-installed with Vista, but what about of the shelf sales?
I'm still wary of moving to Vista for my main rig seeing I had Vista Home Premium installed on my Media Box before I blew it away and moved back to XP due incompatibility issues constantly driving me insane.

On the other hand I have a friend who got a new laptop with Vista installed and everything has been all sweet.
So for the new typical user buying an off the shelf PC/Laptop Vista may be the way to go...but for the enthusiast I certainly wouldn't be going to it, specially if you play online-games where you need all the hardware resources available for optimal performance.

I wont rant on any further, have a read of the article on the PC Authority web site.

Call of Duty 4

COD4 I was a fairly late comer to Call of Duty 4, but I have no doubt that this is the new benchmark in FPS's.

I'll take a moment to comment about the Single player side of things first. The single player mode of this game follows two soldiers across the Middle East and Eastern Europe on a mission to stop terrorists from setting nukes off.

The single player mission story lines are expertly woven together to suck the player in and keep playing, which it does very well. The cut scenes are also brilliantly done as they play while your next mission loads up, there's no just head of for a drink or anything as your thrown into the next mission straight away.
Graphics are awesome, the environments have an attention to detail that I haven't seen since Half Life 2 days. The sound effects are also of high quality even the ingame voice acting is spot on. The only downside to the single player is the length...if you put the effort in you easily finish the game in a day.

The multi-player game mode offers the real goods with this game. When you first hit the ground you will be absolutely smashed, I still get smashed now after playing the game for the last 3 or so weeks. When you get over the being smashed part you will find that this is the first game where they have gotten things right. You rank-up regularly instead of the old BF2 style of things where you don't rank-up for like acouple of months of playing. With ranking up you get unlocks aswell and there are plenty of unlocks ranging from new weapons to skill upgrades called Perks.

Now this is the best part of the multi-player, you get to combine these weapons and perks into your custom classes. You can make up to five custom classes and call them whatever you like...it's such a simple but brilliant idea that I'm really surprised that no other big FPS game has thought of it before.

With the good there has to be some bad points, yes getting absolutely hammered the first couple of times you play is a bad point but the main bad point is the ingame server selection. It astounds me that somebody can make such an awsome game but stuff up the server selection screen. To rectify this just download QTracker and connect to the server you wish play on by this.

Overall this is an outstanding game with plenty to offer and likely to keep you playing for the time to come...which is pretty unusual for a FPS in my opinion. This deservers two big thumbsup from me.2thumbs