2011-A year in review/2012-A year to come

Hello one, hello all.
Apologies for not posting in quite a while, no real excuse really, more soon, promise...or something.
Anyways as 2011 draws to a close I thought it's be appropriate to look back at the year that was 2011 and a small insight into the year that will be 2012. Hope you enjoy!

2011

Ubuntu 11.04

I became a Linux user towards the end of April 2011, 5 days short of the Ubuntu 11.04 release if I remember correctly so as you can imagine I was pretty stoked to see the new Ubuntu in all it's glory. The day came, I didn't get it because I was in Wales, but then came the few days after...the day...yes. When I finally did get the upgrade, I was disappointed (to say the least) about this brand spanking new, all singing, all dancing or something interface Shuttleworth called "Unity". Don't get me wrong, I wasn't weeping to death over it like some of the Gnome vets you'd see out there. It's grown on me though but a turd is a turd no matter how attached you become to that turd, there ya go if someone wants to give me a billion quid for coining the world's worst phrase, you can, everybody wins! Except maybe Mark seeing as he fucked a lot of us over when he decided to abandon Gnome for the most part 6 months later.

Mortal Kombat 9

It was 19th April 2011 when we were graced with the ninth instalment of the 19-year old Mortal Kombat franchise. This game was observed as a homage to the 1993 game, Mortal Kombat II as shown from the redesigned levels from Mortal Kombat II, the inclusion of all Mortal Kombat II characters and the Mortal Kombat II style story tower. As well as these new features have been added which I hope we see in later instalments of Mortal Kombat, failing that, other fighting games. If you're a fan of fighting games with a particular liking to watching bones break, this is the perfect game for you, go buy it, NOW!

XVIII

Just to point out this is the review of MY year so bitching about missing games or events is pointless unless I've played them/these events have affected me. So anyway I turned 18 this year yayyyy! (for our funny foreign friends, in the United Kingdom 18 is the adulthood age, the age of alcohol, tobacco, gambling etc. I believe it's different in other parts of the world for example the drinking age in the United States is 21) anyway, thought I'd share that with you :)

Driver: San Francisco

This is a game I had been anticipating since July-ish, only got to play it in mid-December, gotta say, very mixed opinion boiling down to a pathetic aspect of my view on gaming: If it's a GTA-style driving game, it must have an Open-world aspect. I am the kind of person who will completely shun a game of this genre if I cannot leave my vehicle and there is no open-world bit, hence why I don't like things like this, I can see myself liking games like Carmageddon though, that looks cool.

(K)Ubuntu 11.10

As I mentioned before I'm a Ubuntu user but had a stint with Kubuntu in October and parts of November due to the 11.10 upgrade breaking my distro so I thought "Ah what the fuck, might as well". So I installed Kubuntu when I reinstalled and really enjoyed it...for about 2 weeks or so, the novelty wore off and the entire interface became a massive eyesore, so I went back to Ubuntu, well Unity at least. I haven't been using Ubuntu as of late sadly, mostly because Wubi has been giving me hell as of late (in that it constantly crashes and is thus barely usable). I may be using Ubuntu on my laptop when I go down to university though (leaving /root to handle the procrastination side of my university work).

11.22.63

John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas 48 years, 1 month and 8 days ago today, ending his short term of just 2 years as president of the United States. The novel shown to the left is about an English teacher going back in time to prevent the assassination and so far (I'm only 3 chapters in, why I'm talking about it now I do not know) it is somewhat based around the butterfly effect of time travel (seeing as there's 2 versions of this theory). The butterfly effect is the theory that if you went back in time and did so much as kill a butterfly you could change the world completely and thus they've been discussing how different US history would be had the JFK assassination never happened, seems really interesting so far, coming from a guy who usually only reads the metro on the train, I'll let you decide if I'm well read enough to provide an opinion or not. Anyway great read, I suggest if you're a fan of King and/or time travel, read it, you'll thank me. I was also gonna talk about The Travel Diaries of Karl Pilkington, but then again I was a pillock and left it on the train.


So that is 2011 summed up for me, it has been an overall decent year to say the least, now let's see what next year has in store so far.

2012


Skullgirls

Skullgirls is a game due for release in early 2012 for XBLA and PSN, it follows the style of Marvel vs Capcom 3 in that you can have 3 characters in your team and the characters are...cats...riight, another thing to add for those of you who watch Sanity Not Included, Ms. Fortune is voiced by the same person who voiced Amanda in Sanity. I'm really excited to get my paws on this game and hope you will join me in playing (my PSN tag: UnspokenEchoes).






Cast 2012 tour

For those of you who have bought a BBC DVD from around 2003 you may have seen an advert for all the DVDs that had been released from that year, the song they used in these adverts was Fine Time from a Liverpudlian band, Cast. So these blokes announced in November/December that they were going on tour in early-mid 2012, and I am going to see them, along with Tesni, at Liverpool University, on 31st March 2012. Fancy going to see them? The dates are in this article.



New OMD album

As well as a new Cast album we should be expecting a new album from another Liverpool (well...Wirral) based band, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, I don't really know much about this album seeing as they only started recording this month, hopefully more about that as it comes.





The year of TheOpenSourceGamer

Yes I am determined to make this year my year, I'm am going to start getting serious with my videomaking, I am going to script my videos, gonna get my hands on a copy of Fraps, I am going to edit my videos, the works. If my youtube career is new and fancy to you head over here, ta. See you there!






So there you go, 2011 is drawing to a close, I hope you've all had a brilliant year, I'll be back on the first Wednesday of the new year (4th January 2012) for the new year edition of the Flash Game of the Week, see you soon.
TheWardy signing off for the last time in 2011.