dcp.im

Damn I love baking so much. Here’s a recipe I learnt in school when I was about 9. It has probably changed a lot since then because I lost the recipe!! It’s basically cinnamon cookies but they’re cool.

Ingredients:

• 250g Margarine
• 300g Caster sugar
• 400g Plain flour
• 2 egg.
• a load of cinnamon and mixed spices

You can really mess around with the amount of spice. I pretty much just open the top of the spice jar thing and just pour loads out, it gives the inside of the biscuits a nice chewy texture.

TURN THE OVEN ON NOW!!! 180 on my fan oven, alter as necessary for your heat container.

To make the dough just put the butter and sugar together and beat it into a fluffy mixture, you can melt the 2 together if you’re lazy, doesn’t seem to make much difference in end product. Dump the eggs in, you can beat them first if you like, again, the end result seems pretty similar to me. Stir it all together until it gets a bit thicker and the egg is fused with the rest and then put in the flour. I throw it all in at once and then get half of it all over myself when I start mixing. Probably makes sense to do it a bit at a time.

Mix until it is all clingy and stuck together. It’s a wet mix, not great for rolling or cutting. I tend to just take a chunk, roll it into a ball in my clean hands and then squash it down onto a baking tray lined with baking paper. If you use your palm to do it it gives the cookie a thicker center which leaves for some nice textures. I aim for about 5 inch diameter cookies but I’ve gone more and I’ve gone less without much difference in final quality, just keep an eye on them if you go smaller.

Sprinkle some cinnamon on them if you so desire and put them in the oven for around 12 minutes.

Here’s some pictures from my lazy attempt at this a few years back I happened to document. Notice the horrible melted butter/sugar and egg shell in the mix.

That egg shell will forever be my shame

All the egg is gone!! now put the flour in.

This is after the flour

Theres more than this but you get the idea

thanks!

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Portal 2 has been out for several months but I only got round to playing it recently and I have to say I am not a happy bunny. Quite possibly the most over-hyped, unfunny, linear and insultingly easy game I have ever had the displeasure of spending 7 or so hours with (coop is not included here).

The games introduction sets a sour tone immediately, waking up in a room that looks like it was rendered using technology that clearly hit its limits about 4 years ago. Bad graphics aren’t a huge issue for me, but something about recent entries with the source engine just immediately turn me off. Whether it’s the bad lighting or dirty textures there is something off-putting about the whole package.

Once you’ve had time to check the room over for textures from halflife 2 and sign them off in your book you are greeted by Stephen Merchant. I mean its not even hiding that its Stephen Merchant. Its the same guy from the Barclays adverts and other various television extravaganzas, putting on the exact same voice and mannerisms. I don’t really like Mr. Merchant, I think his vagueness and irony is entirely false and is like a British version of Family Guy.

After the short intro sequence which familiarises you with the controls and some heavy destruction of the 4^th wall you are subjected to a microcosm of the game itself; an on-rails “look at this scripted event” whilst some very hit and miss comedy is piped in by your accompanying familiar.

Things begin to pick up once you get into the protein filled part of the game, re-introducing the wonderful portal gun. Portal was a really great puzzler with some light comic relief between puzzles that threaded the game together. After blazing through the first 17 puzzles or so within an hour or 2 I began to realise the puzzles were no longer the games linchpin. The puzzles were all incredibly simple, mostly following basic formulas that could be done in one attempt, leaving items in places that made it obvious what the solution was. There was also a complete lack of inventive portal placements. Using items and interacting with context sensitive objects is all very dull unless you’re doing it by using portals in an interesting way. That just never seems to kick in during the entire game. All portal surfaces are clearly marked; you see that one square of white portal-compatible wall in the corner? Guess what… That’s where you need to put a portal! Hah, you figured that out, well done. Here is your complimentary false-sarcasm and/or diagram.

Not pictured: any gameplay

Once you’re free of the testing chambers you’re put on the most linear pathways I have ever seen in a valve game and forced to follow very specific routes to the next scripted set-piece. This is far from my largest gripe with the game, I didn’t buy portal 2 expecting a free-roam experience, but it would have been nice to have a tiny amount of worthwhile exploration. The only times you really get to explore the world you will find nothing except lazily placed static props with the occasional triggered voice work.

Alongside Stephen Merchant is the same woman who played GLaDOS from the original Portal. Her role in this game gets much extended, which is a shame because her entire storyline is very silly and she seems to have become a caricature of her original character. Taking her straight shooting with slightly-mental attitude from the first game and turning her into overblown sardonic stereotype.

J.K. Simmons is easily the best voice actor in the game, although he is immediately obvious and basically plays himself, same as Stephen Merchant. His character Cave Johnson is also the funniest addition although his jokes never really add anything to the actual game itself. It’s a shame that the best voice-work is linked into the worst part of the game.

You’re thrown into the basement of Aperture Science, where Cave Johnson is the CEO inventing new products. His new products are various goos that can make you bounce, run fast or allow you to place portals on surfaces covered in goo. I hate the goo. The concept just screams of laziness to me. Remember when you had to put together intricate portal combinations to pick up speed and momentum to reach a point? Well now you just put some goo down so Joe Bloggs on his Box Station X can play along. What happens if you try to get inventive with the goo, say by putting them on surfaces you weren’t intended to? Well, nothing. The game just doesn’t let you put the goo on anything but the surfaces they want you to put them on. No non-canon solutions or inventiveness here please.

Sonic 2 and Portal 2 share many similarities, which is what I believe Sonic Bak was getting at with this artwork.

It confuses me to consider how this game got so many near-perfect scores from journalists who will lament the “corridor shooter” and “on-rails shooting sequences” in things like modern warfare and it’s equivalents and then on the other hand praise Portal 2 as the rebirth of Christ. There is no point in this game where the player is invited to do anything other than point and click at the specific points on the map.

It may seem like I think Portal 2 is awful. I don’t. If the original Portal didn’t exist I would probably think this game is the bee’s knees. It’s just I had high hopes for the world of Portal and the new age of first person puzzle games that could reach larger audience from talented developers. The linear dot-to-dot nature of the goo and that part of the game killed any hopes I had for portal to become an interesting series. The raw concept from the original game has been completely destroyed, taking the humour and memes from the original and making them the games key selling points. How many people were playing the last 20 minutes of the game jigging in their seats waiting for a new silly end song? The writers proudly claim “There are no cake jokes!”, instead we get potatoes. I much prefer cake.

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Space marine is like a steroid fuelled wet dream, throwing you into a war ravaged planet full of small people where you get to run around like a tank, stamping on weak people and finally getting the respect you deserve from all those jerks who work in accounting. The problem here is that in real life dreams only last 10 seconds (its science, look it up) and this game lasts like, 7 hours. That’s probably 4/5 more hours than I enjoyed. It’s a shame to look back upon this game with scorn, I really enjoyed some parts and it looked nice but I just don’t think I could recommend it to anyone with a straight face.

Don't use the gun you idiot you have a sword with a chainsaw on it right there!!

The main thing you’ll be doing is fighting orks, which are based on the lower classes; always emerging from their filthy holes, ruining our nice things and taking them for their own without paying or even understanding how they work. Whilst it’s satisfying to jam your Power Axe into the skulls of the lowerclasses before ripping their heads of it does get rather dull after the 10^th time.

The melee is the main difference between space marine and gears of war, giving you a closer action orientated control scheme for wading through enemies with a selection of melee weapons that contains a knife, chainsword, a power axe and a thunder hammer (made those names up, probably correct). You’re introduced to all these chaps early on and get to swap throughout the game. I mostly stuck with the chainsword because even though it is probably the weakest it has wicked animations like sawing things heads off insurgent style whilst they scream for their incorrect gods.

The game mostly consists of fighting 15 enemies that run directly at you, 5 that shoot guns at you, 2 that shoot rockets and 1 or 2 big things at a time. This stays true when you meet chaos forces later on in the game. It would have been better if it was just 30 enemies that ran directly at you as I have never played a game that has ranged combat as frustrating as space marine. You’re supposed to be some hench freakazoid and yet you’ll often find yourself dying in 2 hits from out of nowhere if you’re not careful. The easiest way to clear these areas is to pick off the rocket people with ranged weapons but by the 4^th hour you’re so bored of fighting orks you just want to wade in and rip their heads off with your hands. At least sometimes the game sends these pathetic little child orks at you that you can punch so hard they explode, which is satisfying.

that's more like it

They decided to skip out on regenerating health, cover mechanics and including any interesting units. It seems like rather than designing it this way these things were just too much to ask for the development time period. The excuse that “space marines don’t need cover!!” is great in concept but when you get in the game and you’re stuck fighting 5 rocket launching orks that kill you in 2 hits, use their own cover and you cannot avoid their rockets whilst shooting back you loudly question it with a series of expletives that don’t actually form a valid question. Health is regained by doing the cool finishing moves on dazed enemies from melee, this is great when it works but so stupid when you die during the middle of an animation, especially as some of the animations last 1 second and some over 3, leaving you to hope for the luck of the draw or aim for enemies you know have fast finishers.

The lore of warhammer 40k is here in the visuals, giant monolithic buildings and soviet style statues on every street. The units known from the dawn of war series and the tabletop however aren’t evident. There are a few nods with some Imperial Guard tanks and such but there’s not a dreadnought, killercan or whatever chaos uses in sight.

Someone promised me the game gets better for the last hour; although that is perhaps true its only marginal. The end boss fight is a complete waste of space that I tried about 15 times before just cheating and sitting behind cover, shooting people with my melty gun whenever they dared step near my crate. Not exactly space marine style but that seems like the only way possible to win.

The storyline is basic affair, your space marines arrive to save a titan tank thing from falling into the capable hands of the orks. Once you arrive things get a bit more involved and everything ends salty. It seems like they were testing the water with this one, hopefully a sequel will be a much more fleshed out example of the 40k universe and its various inhabitants.

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