I had a question posed to me not long ago by a friend, and it went a little something like this; “Reko, when you rate games, how do you rate them?”.
Now this got me thinking, how do I rate my games? Whenever someone says, “Oh, have you played X? How was it?”, what do I think about?
My answer to this was Gameplay, Story line, addictiveness. I think these are the core things you look at, even though Gameplay is a little broad. Where am I getting with this? Well The Getaway just seemed to fit these three things almost perfectly, and seeing as this is my first game-related blogpost, i felt I should state these three things.

“…Gameplay, Storyline, Addictiveness. I think these are the core things you look at, even if Gameplay is a little broad…”

The Gameplay was just as good as the story line. Whilst the steering of the cars were a bit jerky, and controlling the character was difficult at times (making the game much harder), I still persevered to get used to the controls and finish up the game in a couple of nights. The graphics were pretty good if you compare it to it’s competing games Sandbox-themed GTA: Vice City and whatever else was out at the time. For those who haven’t played GTA:VC, it featured a very fluro environment, with bright pinks and what not. At the time, it seemed fairly okay, however when the graphics are compared to it’s predecessor GTA3, it seems that, if anything, the tackiness to the game had just been increased and the weapons system refined. It makes you wonder what they were thinking, however even that game had provided years of entertainment. Oh, but don’t think the changes in Tommys voice at the start of the game (When he’s driving Mercedes) went unnoticed!
I think the more impressive part about The Getaway game is it’s environment and AI. You’re placed within a living, breathing model of London, spanning a (now this is testing my memory) 5KM, or 50KM radius of the city. Whatever it was, I remember it being a factor of five, haha. Regardless of the area size, the remodel of London not only provides a snapshot of the city at the time of making, it also goes to show just the capabilities and determination of game developers. Whether you enjoy playing this game or not, you’ve got to respect the immense amount of planning, research and legalalities that would have been completed and faced throughout the development of the project, and you’ve got to give Team SOHO props for doing it in such a stylish fashion.
You can tell the developers were proud of their work, because not only can you go through these words in two intertwining storylines, but they even unlocked the entire city as an explorable Sandbox with added features and eggs. You can drive Nissan Skylines, Lotus Elises, TVRs, all the way to Go-Karts and tanks! To complete this entertaining mixture, they’ve left Hyde Park open for exploration, with various parkland vehicles stationed in various areas. If you combine the easter-egg cars with the wide, open plains of Hyde Park with all the people walking through… well… use your imagination

So a couple of times I have touched on the Storyline of the game. Sorry, I really must note;

This next part contains spoilers!

Now that has been said, I can tell you that you start off as a man named Mark Hammond who lost his wife and had his child kidnapped by some local thugs. You are forced in a wild frenzy through London town, completing jobs for Charlie (if that’s his name) such as stealing drugs, killing people and just rampaging through the town. Through your rampage, you stealthily work behind Charlies back, teaming up with one of the girls involved in Marks’ wives murder and a police officer named Carter. Your rampage across town seems fairly normal for a game, no twists or turns until the introduction of Carter, and I dont know about you but I was interested in his background information. This interest was soon wet, with the story returning to the start after finishing “Marks Story” (btw,  by now you’re completely unaware that there are two stories taking place unless you’ve read it somewhere externally or taken hints from the documentation).
So there I was, playing with DC carter and I have to say, I much preferred playing as this copper than Mark. This is not a retell, however, it’s a review. The intertwining story lines definitely made things a little more interesting, and being able to play as a copper who has followed Hammods mayhem from it’s beginning definitely helps paint a broader picture of the consequences of Hammods actions.

So if you’re a sandbox fan who always wanted a little direction for a story line, but still wanted the freedom to drive where ever you like and do almost whatever you want, than you’d definitely become addicted to this game. This is where addictiveness comes into it, and it’s a product of the Gameplay and Storyline combined. I personally found myself drawn in by the graphics, as I’ve had a soft spot for the grey skys and non-exagerated graphics (GTA3, The Getaway, etc.), and the storyline kept the action and twists coming and coming. With games like this, it’s probably best that you don’t read any sort of guides or previews before playing, as it’s story line is addicting to play through over and over again.
One thing that amazed me though, is that I thoroughly enjoyed the Storyline, even though it didn’t change with the decisions you made within the games. Games like MGS3, where parts of the game change depending on your actions in areas (killing The End whilst in the wheelchair, not killing enemies when rescuing Sokolov the first time), have always captured it’s fans attention through their changing Storyline (well, dialogue and gameplay more like it). This changing makes every game seem different, and it’s intelligent AI make every run a challenge. The Getaway, of course, maintains a difficult gameplay, however sometimes I can’t help but blame the controls or blinkers on vehicles. The gunfights are still difficult, only being able to take a few shots and not having any sort of powerups (unlike other games where you can collect tokens or eat), and when you’re running through a large gunfight, such as the end, resting and aim is vital. Furthermore, if (somehow) you become an expert at the games controls, you can take a further challenge and try not to auto-aim, to make things just that little bit harder (in same cases; easier).
When I am thinking of how addicting a game is, I try to think about how often I played it, if I even really get feelings / cravings to play the game again, how long I had played it for and  if it had impact me in anyway. These elements all account to judging how addicting a game can be, and quite frankly, The Getaway has covered almost all of them.

All in All, I thoroughly enjoyed this game and just thought I’d do a little content filler whilst my game doesnt seem to want to load parts of it’s map, haha.

What is Flock?

Flock is a “Mozilla-powered” web browser modelled off the Firefox source code, which is quite evident. It share extreme similarities with it’s brother, Firefox, however as Chrome is to Linux, it’s definitely not just another Flavor.
Sure, it’s features could have been nestled into add-ons for Firefox, so that changing browsers is not necessary, however it wouldn’t enable the development team to truely capture and enhance the social networking theme that Flock tries to present. That’s right, you heard me correctly…

“Flock is a Firefox based Web Browser, looking to capture the social networking trend and integrate it into the average users online lifestyle”

That’s basically the gist of Flock.

Day One

On the plane ride home from my tropical “holiday” up North, I decided I would have another flick through a PC Authority magazine which I had purchased primarily for entertainment on the plane ride up. This re-used magazine somehow changed between going up and returning down, because it seemed to be boasting newer, more interesting articles than I had originally remembered (maybe it was the interesting people that distracted me from noticing them prior to this). Without babbling on too much, the magazine contained a number of interesting articles, however there were two that really caught my eye.
One was an article on a multi-platform application for beginning Ruby developers, and introducing people to the world of programming. Depending on how my time goes with school, there may be a test-run of this program later on in this blogs life, however for today I will be focussing on a web browser called Flock. The magazine contained an article reviewing Flock, and providing the authors personal opinion, humorously of course, on various aspects of this innovative piece of technology.

However, these are my thoughts, my opinions, and yet I can’t say they deviate a great deal. My initial thought was, “oh my, I see what he meant about the interface”. The interface for Mac was a lighter shade of grey, almost white, with a glossy feel to it (probably produced by the two tones of gray at the top of the page). The buttons are styled with a gradient of light blue, to a dark blue, and are bevelled into the GUI to make them look more button-like, whilst the smaller buttons were refused the right of bevelling, and appear to have been given an inner-shadow.
The thing that took my interest was the over-lapping “tab” styled bookmarks bar. The Flock development team obviously had some great brain processes going, as they have avoided the traditional, sloppy, window-cluttering approach of adding their own Toolbar, by reworking the Bookmarks toolbar to have a small addition on the left of it, which stands over the top of the bookmarks toolbar (it doesnt cover your precious bookmarks, though some may be able to be deleted with this new addition). Though small, this toolbar seems to be where the social networking takes place.

“Though small, this toolbar seems to be where the social networking takes place.”

The toolbar will automatically check your web email (I use Gmail, haven’t tested with other providers), changing the toolbar icon to orange if a new message has been received. This was said first as it was what caught my attention more, largely because it’s saved me the hassle of installing an app to check my mail for me.
At this point, I should note that there are actually 10 buttons in total, and in order of appearence (left to right), they are ..

My World

The My World button will open a new tab, and direct you to a page called “My World”, which is kind of like a little homepage with various widgets. I can be customized to suit your own web-browsing experience. Why it has a search bar, I have no idea. I think it was just a content filler.. Any-who, it has definitely got potential, and could prove quite an interesting focal point of the program (for those who use it as a homepage).

People Sidebar

This button will open a sidebar on the left of your browser which will open a mini facebook when configured. To configure this sidebar, all you need to do is log into Facebook via the Facebook homepage, and click “Remember password” from the drop-down bar. (Very mozilla style, but why change what works?). From my experience so far, it’s got the abilities to view and upload hypermedia, and post links to your wall. Not only this, but you can update your status and view what other people are up to (with my friends, I can’t say this is too interesting.. “seriously. I can’t sleep.” “…just sneezed ” “facebooking 4.15 in the morning” “yur a” (might be Korean though) “@*#&! :S”, you get the message).

Media Bar

The media bar is something I quite haven’t figured out yet. It opens a large bar at the top of the page with pictures from your “Media steams”, and also contains a bar allowing you to “Search Flickr”. This search bar tells me that this is probably an addition for the people who enjoy checking out pictures on the internet, which leads me to think that maybe this could be introduced for a deviantart fan, or even to browse Facebook friends’ pics. Of course, you could use it for it’s original intentions, and browse Flickr, but how conformist do you want to get?

Feeds Sidebar

Great for those who use the internet for its original purpose; gathering information. It can also be used to keep up to date with your favorite blogs, forums, or any other sort of “RSS-able” content. The available, added feeds are all displayed in a neat sidebar on the left once clicked, and will display how many new feeds have been posted up on this site. I dont use feeds much, largely because i have confined myself to the “trading” scene for so long, and the failures for webmasters ignored all suggestions to enable the vBulletin RSS capabilities.

Email

This is for everyone who uses their email for any sort of purpose. It is a little drop-down menu type thing, which displays how many new emails you have, what these new emails titles are and has options for settings you can play with. It would be nice to see a built-in email composer, so that I dont need to be going into my Gmail for anything more than reading my email, however I guess that could be an intended implementation.

The others

Whilst still vital improvements for social networking, I dont really feel like they need their own little heading. Next on the list is the favorites sidebar with your history and all that there. The next is a sidebar which allows you to configure your browser with your social networking accounts. After that is a “web clipboard” where you can drag/drop content from a webpage for later use, which is handy for forums or sharing information with friends. Post-that, we have a “blog editor” which I haven’t played with yet, as I haven’t been able to configure Flock with WordPress (inevitably, this post will be editted five minutes after being publishes, with a note saying, “I did it, lol”. So that’s nine, the tenth button is an uploader for your hypermedia. You can upload your hypermedia to any accounts you wish.

“Apart from it’s obvious, yet subtle, integration of various social networking sites, Flock is simply Firefox with very well implemented add-ons. However, will these add-ons attract devoted Firefox, or even IE and Chrome, users?”

It’s true to say, that apart from it’s obvious, yet subtle integration of various social networking sites, such as Facebook with the friends updates, built-in chat in the status bar, on-the-fly, updatable status and much more, Flock is simply just Firefox with well implemented add-ons. The challenge the Flock development team face ahead of them, is if their Application is enough to attract the devoted Firefox, or even IE and Chrome, users and enthusiasts. With a bare extensions area, and a non-existance theming area (which is a much-needed item, mind you), Flock certaintly doesnt appear to be up to the competition that lies ahead of it. It certaintly has the potential, the concept and the building blocks to take on the monsters of web browsing, but somehow I can’t see this app being used as the default web browser in any up-coming Linux releases (apart from social networking themed Distros, hey.. now there’s a thought! FlockOS, or Flos for short)

Looks / Appearence:  60%
Functionality: 90%
Over-All: 75%

It’s theme is a let down, looking tacky on first use and almost childish. However, it got an extra 20% as the browser accomodates it’s purpose quite well, and without any sort of blatant intrusions as some browsers and toolbars sometimes have.
The functionality of the browser received a 10% deduction, as I didn’t like my Facebook conversations taking priority over my cursor, nor did I like them popping up, covering my window. They could have included a built-in mail composer, which would have made emailing so much easier, but hey, maybe next release?
Over-All, it is a great system, one I may stick with. It’s basically just Firefox with add-ons, as I siad before, so I definitely have no real reason to switch (other than the theme), so I could be using this browser for some time to come.
I don’t feel it’s over-all of 75% does the system any justice. If the development team had just made it look a litte less childish, it could have gotten a high ranking, however it did pull itself down. Needless to say, I am growing to like the theme (or maybe tolerate could be another word..?)

We have three main sections which I will cover. One will contain reviews on various pieces of technology, which is fairly exciting. As a sneak preview, we will do a review on a web browser I just found called “Flock”, and even though I may be a little late, I’ll post up my thoughts on the Sony PS3 (Which STILL hasn’t arrived in my mail!)
The second blog will focus on a bit of everything in relation to Linux, largely in the hope to help users who may be having problems with their system. However, it’ll also receive a good number of posts regarding us being bored and trying out pointless things that the normal user would never really do.
The third blog will be a bit of an updater, which will tell everyone what’s happening with reKo.in, and rekosblog.wordpress.com. It’ll also have updates regarding the whole reKo “syndicate”, so you can catch us where-ever the social scene is sending us.

If you’ve read this whole post, I thank you, and hope that you soon become a subscriber, commenter, or even just an occasional reader

Regards,
reKo