Friday 25 July 2014

Making a PlayStation button necklace

I had a PlayStation 2 controller that was beyond all usefulness. I took it apart but unfortunately could not fix the problem inside. Rather than just discarding the whole thing, I decided to make a necklace with the D-pad and buttons.

I used the following:


  1. Broken PlayStayion 2 controller
  2. Rolson Archimedean drill
  3. Silverline 1mm drill bits
  4. A 1mm cord (I used a goat leather cord, but this is a bit soft and you may prefer something firmer, or a chain.)
  5. An old pack of beads.

Of course, you can do whatever you like with your buttons and hang them on anything you want. You could even make a bracelet, anklet or keychain.

Start with these (yoghurt optional).


Drilling the D-pad is quite tricky. You need to make sure a hole comes out in the middle.


Try to ensure that you have a clean straight line all the way through a button, for ease of inserting a cord or chain later.

Clean the buttons, then grab yourself some beads and a cord of sorts.

Thread through the holes!

It's definitely quite difficult to do the D-pad. You might need to poke your cord through with a sewing needle.

Tah-dah!


You may wish to glue adjacent beads to each other so that they do not keep rotating to face all manner of directions.




In other news, I now have a television. Granted, it's the old television from my mother's house and it's certainly not state of the art, but it should mean that games can be played and reviewed!





Thursday 10 July 2014

Tomb Raider 2: A Reflection



Tomb Raider 2 has always been a very interesting game to me. I can remember getting easily confused and frustrated with the complex levels in the game (Damn you, Opera House!) and resorting to cheats to skip the level (often resulting in me accidentally exploding Lara...which made me burst into tears). Now, 15 years after I started playing it, when I finally found some time for myself, I got around to completing this game (after completing the first Tomb Raider) and I am glad I didn't let my negative childhood experience interfere with what I have come to find, though flawed, a pretty enjoyable game (the first will always be my absolute favourite). Sure, I had some help with strategy guides, but I'd like to think my adult logic has helped me this time around as well.

So, this game (in terms of both graphics and storyline) is vastly different from the first. For one, this is the first game where we can see Lara's plait (or braid, if you prefer), instead of the weird cut-off bob in the first game. Her figure is more realistic, especially her breasts, which in the first game were pointy and in this game are round. Her movements are somewhat advanced, she can now roll in the air and light flares in dark areas. There's also some awesome new weapons, such as a grenade launcher, M15 gun, automatic pistols and there's the harpoon, which you may as well not have, it's pretty useless as far as I'm concerned. Level wise, some may argue that this game isn't really 'tomb-y' enough. The only 'tomb' related level is Temple of Xian, but if you consider the shipwreck Lara explored in the underwater levels, that could be considered a tomb of sorts, although certainly not in the conventional sense. There's still a lot of different locations to explore like the first game such as China, Italy (Venice, to be exact) and Tibet and there are still ledges, blocks, boulders, switches and keys and everyone's favourite; the spikes and the developers being ever so kind, decided to treat us with some broken glass this time around, too, which is instant death if you fall on it.


This game is a lot more difficult than the first, so without being familiar with the format and controls of the original Tomb Raider game, you may struggle with this one. You do however get to practice everything in Lara's Home, where you get to run around her gigantic mansion while her butler keeps offering you tea (really, though? Obviously I'm not going to want to drink tea halfway through an assault course). The puzzles are somewhat harder, and from the third level onward, you may find yourself getting frustrated and annoyed, resorting to a guide or even cheat codes to help you through. The original Tomb Raider game, for me, started getting hard at the Palace Midas level (level 7), so you could get almost halfway through the first game before it became a real challenge.


Opera House, the third Venice level and fourth overall, is the level I struggled with. It would have been far easier to complete had it not been for the constant string of enemies. I will say that there are a ridiculous amount of Marco Bartoli thugs in this game, sometimes you trigger three at once, which take a lot of your health, so of course medi packs are an essential, but in Opera House, you may not have an extensive collection thus far, which is what makes it so difficult. Every time I complete this level, my health bar is at the lowest, beeping away in the corner of the screen and flashing red. Maybe it's my technique, but in this level, it pays to have your guns out at every corner. And that really goes for most of the levels from this point onwards. And of course, there is the obligatory floating islands level (creatively named Floating Islands), where if you don't know where you are going, you will fall into oblivion and die. But once you get past that, it is a pretty cool level with the introduction of stone enemies, which slowly fly towards you and upon death, fall apart.


My favourite part of this game is the underwater levels (levels 7-10) which explore ship wrecks and this is where we come across sharks and eels, and even some more flame throwers, making me grateful that there are several pools of water. It was nice to see a costume change in this game to suit the environments she would be in (we see another change when we reach the Tibet levels). The loud orange and blue colour scheme was oddly calming and it was a genuinely surprising environment considering, again, it's not a conventional tomb, which did make me re-evaluate the definition of the word. I found the puzzles to be challenging, and not in an overly-complicated way, but for the first time ever playing through this game, I actually wanted to figure the challenges out without resorting to the guides. The music, a booming heartbeat, is perfect for setting the atmosphere of these levels. 




The Tibet levels (levels 11-14) made Lara change into an awesome bomber jacket, and if you didn't struggle with the earlier levels, this is where you may start to. The snowmobile, while awesome, can become instant death if you land at the wrong angle or fall down a pit. There's also a ridiculous part of the first level, Tibetan Foothills, where after picking up a key, a thug comes along and runs you over on one of Marco Bartoli's fancy black snowmobiles, which is pretty annoying. Barkhang Monastery is an interesting level, the monks help you, but you really have to be careful not to shoot them when your enemies show up, because for some annoying reason, Lara targets them, and it gets very messy when they're all attacking each other. It pays to stand back and watch and only intervene if the monks don't manage to kill them. The subsequent levels introduce us to a new breed of antagonist; yetis. Now these terrified me as a child, I skipped Catacombs of the Talion because I was too scared to go down the when the yeti was angrily howling at me. The last snow level was pretty forgettable, but the weird giant chicken boss was pretty funny.


After these levels, you are pretty much coming to the end of the game. Temple of Xian is a very long and complicated level, with spiders and dodgy traps and annoyingly, more springboards (as seen in the previous level). It's a trap a minute, so you need to expect danger with each step and have a lot of medi packs, otherwise you might have a bit of trouble getting through this game. You also have to have jumping through mid air perfected at this point, or you may struggle to reach compulsory parts of the level and despite being good at this technique if I do say so myself, sometimes she just doesn't seem to do it. After the Floating Islands level, you get to fight the Marco Bartoli dragon, which is pretty fun. You get plenty of water to hop into if you catch on fire. But this is not the last of it, once Lara is at home and settled with her new artefact, more of Marco Bartoli's thugs come with their bats and guns and dogs to take it back. You only get your shotgun in this level with only three medi packs (you have to unlock her cupboard, conveniently at the side of her bed) to top your health up with so you must be careful, as there are way too many of them with guns. But once you've completed that, you get a nice clip of Lara beginning to undress for a shower, before telling you nicely to piss off before shooting the camera.


Overall, despite its flaws (excessive number of enemies, sometimes awkward controls, lack of conventional tombs), it has an original, interesting concept and it's part of the franchise that really changed the way we play games today. It is a thought-provoking, challenging game that although exceptionally difficult, makes us feel proud for being able to power through it.
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