Sandboarding

Last weekend Daniel, Liam, Katie, Shaun, Dave and I all went sandboarding. It was all their first time sandboarding excpet for Daniel. So it made for some pretty good entertainment.

Dave had brought a snow mat thing with him which turned out wasn't half bad as a toboggan.

We went to North Entrance first - Katie, Liam and Shaun got lost on the drive there, then got lost in the sandunes trying to find us, luckily we were on the biggest dune so we could see them wandering aimlessly around and they eventually headed in the right direction. Except for Shaun who disappeared for a while, but he eventually found the way.

Dave had his first go at jumping on the board and managed to get completely horizontal in the air before landing very hard on his back - It was hilarious. Luckily the sholw thing was captured on video which will soon be available on www.duneboarder.com

We spent a couple of hours at North Entrance, then headed up the coast a bit to Pebbley Beach (just nort of Soldiers). There we enjoyed a picnic lunch followed by some more sandboarding on the much steeper dune. The ride down was hapes of fun, but everyone was wearing out on the walk back up....

Since that day, Shaun has now ordered himself his own sandboard, so next time we go we can race and try out some other stuff, which should be sweet.

My First Drive In Daniel's Car

Well i went for my first drive in Daniel's car on the weekend and it wasn't anywhere near as scary as what i expected (yes Daniel, that was a compliment).

Below are a couple of pics that i took of him and his new (second hand) car.

Fahrenheit - XBox - A second Look

I tried playing Fahrenheit on the XBox again yesterday. And some of the features that i may have initial thought were cool i know find very very tedious. One part of the game you have the characters working out in the gym and it's pretty much the same as GTA: SA where you quickly click alternating buttons so they can do some form of exercise. Except in Fahrenheit you have to quickly click the Left and Right triggers. This is sooooo hard to do, the triggers just aren't meant to be used in this manner, i ended up holding the controller with my knees and using 3 fingers on each trigger to get the character to workout.... I think it would have been easier if i'd actually done the workout myself.

Then there was another part where you have to navigate a character around the basement while quickly clicking the triggers.... after about the 10th attempt at this and the character about to commit suicide i was going to throw the controller at the TV, but figured it would actually be cheaper if i just turned the game off....

One thing i'm still impressed with is how you have to use the left and right thumbsticks to match a pattern on the screen - so when left flashes you move the thumbstick left... this is fairly easy to follow. Only while you're watching what thumbstick to move you miss out on what action is going on on the screen. There was one section where your character is trying to escape these giant bugs in his office building, Daniel who was watching me play was going "aw, oh wow, check that out" etc But of course i couldn't check out what he was so impressed with cause i had to watch out for the next move to perform.... So it's good and bad....

Interesting story - But painful to play.

Daniel's New Car

Well Daniel got his first car yesterday - I forget what type of car he said it was, but you can get the idea anyway if you look at the pics below.

He's still on his L's - so can't actually take the car anywhere by himself yet. Should be interesting driving with him on the weekend. oh and by interesting i mean very very scary!

Sandboarding

Daniel and I went sandboarding over at North Entrance on Sunday, took a few photos while we were over there, plus some video which will of course be appearing on the duneboarder website shortly.

Daniel Sandboarding


Me Sandboarding

Peddling up Crackneck

I went for a bike ride up crackneck this arvo - which is a large hill at Bateau Bay. I took a couple of photos while i was up there and figured I'd use one of them as the header for my blog - so as you can see, the pic up the top has now changed.


My bike parked up the top of crackneck

A Day At The Beach

I went over North Entrance today, there was pretty much no surf at all, i took the short board out first and got a few waves, but nothing much good. So then i took out the long board, didn't get any better waves and decided i'd muck around in the shore break with it instead. Caught some very very small waves with it and then decided i'd catch the "outs" instead (the little tiny waves that we're heading back out to sea over the sandbar) - that was fun, cause you can really only stay on them until you hit a wave thats coming towards you, then it's all over - I can only do this on the long board though cause i can stand on that even when it's not on a wave.... definetly doesn't work with the short board - that just tends to sink. Tried a bit of bodysurfing after that, the waves weren't even much good for that.

Cause i was over North Entrance i'd brought my sandboard with me and Dad had a go of it on one of the dunes, he had no hope - he had trouble strapping it onto his feet, then standing up and then he somehow managed to go down the hill sideways before falling over - oh well, at least he gave it a try. And it was very entertaining to watch. :)

North Entrance

Fahrenheit - XBox

While at the video shop we also hired out Farenheit. I haven't made it very far into the game yet and didn't read the instruction book, but this is a very interesting game. Essentially you play multiple characters. So you start off playing the murderer - which is actually rather fun as you meticulously move the body and clean up and stuff (watching CSI really comes in handy for knowing what you should do). Then the story switches and you start playing the two detectives looking into the murder. Which is nowhere near as much fun, there are already way too many boring games out there where you are trying to solve the crime.... Playing the crimenal on the other hand is a different approach and rather fun.

Essentially its an interactive movie, you kind of go along with whats happening making certain decisions along the way and see what happens. There is also a lot of talking in the game, so you select what you want to say to a person from a list of options - only unilke most other games, you only have a certain amount of time to decide what you are going to say, or any other decisions that you are going to make for that matter.

The controls are pretty standard, except for when you have to react to something quickly - when that happens you have to quickly move the thumbsticks in a certain pattern that appears on the screen - so far it doesn't seem like a too bad idea. Anyway i'll most likely keep playing this game and see what happens.

Burnout Revenge

Hired out Burnout Revenge from the video shop yesterday, and spent a few hours playing it on the XBox. Mostly i really dislike racing games cause i keep on crashing into stuff then just get annoyed with it. But the whole point of this game is too crash into stuff.... So of course i'm not half bad at it (excluding the "hot lap" challenges, cause then you can't really crash into stuff if you don't want to slow down). I really liked the previous Burnout game, but they've fixed up a few things that i didn't like in that one. The main thing that is gone from the previous game is the annoying voiceover from the over excited, over the top guy at the start of every challenge, he used to really annoy me - i think i ended up turning him off.... Oh and the crashing challenges no longer have the 2x, 4x - rewards and "heart breaker" penaliser... Instead you just crash and theres a target car - ooh lots more jumps too, i like the jumps.

The levels and amount of levels and challenges in it are huge, like the previous game... there is soooo much stuff to do it, luckily it's all made pretty fun. This is a top game in my opinion.

Serenity

I went and saw Serenity yesterday morning with Daniel and his Mum at the movies. I'm a big fan of the TV series Firefly which is what its based on, and I have to say that the movie wasn't better then the series and it definetly wasn't worse either - so about on a par to the series. Which of course means that it was absolutely excellent.

A lot of the movies i see can get boring in parts, so you kind of notice how long the movies been going for and how much longer its got left to go. This was not one of those movies. I'm not sure if the movie would be as good for people who have never seen the series before. But because i've seen the series i have to say that it adds something more to it, cause you already know the characters and their backgrounds so parts of the movie mean a lot more.

Oh don't read this next part if you intend on seeing the movie - cause it will ruin it for you. *Spoilers*

There were a few surprises in the movie, like when they killed off Shepherd Book and of course when Wash got killed by the Reavers - Didn't see that one coming. The Reavers in it were pretty cool - not the scariest things ever - they actually kind of reminded me of the zombies in "Dawn Of The Dead (2004)". Only more intelligent.

hopefully there will be a sequel movie or a new TV series. That'd be pretty sweet :)