Greetings squires,

I’ve been building my new site recently and its just about done, I’m in the process right now of getting it all moved over including the blog address and rss etc. If you subscribe to my blog I’m hoping you won’t have to change over the link or resubscribe or anything but just incase you do the new rss feed will be  http://feeds.feedburner.com/bbeckford, I shall never need to change it ever again now fingers crossed! I’m re-routing my old Blogger rss feed http://feeds.feedburner.com/studentgamer though so that one should still work fine too. For those of you using my old old feed that one will break, so I’m posting a final message over at Blogger for those who will need to change.

So what’s new on my site? The layout is WAY better, its more orientated to getting a job and showing my portolfio, it has loads of new screenshots and videos, you can download and try out all the game projects I’ve worked on including my latest still-in-development project shootr. As usual I’ll be blogging about games & tech news as well as what I’ve been getting up to in my quest in the games industry.

So, Monkey Island Chapter One: “Launch of the Screaming Narwhal” came out Wednesday (GMT) and I finished it this morning. Its around 4-5 hours long depending on how many of the funnies you want to hear and whilst its fair to say that isn’t long enough for a full game you have to remember it is part 1 of 5, which means ultimately you’re getting 20-25+ hours of gameplay for about £20 which is well worth it. I loved every single second of it, it is completely true to the old games and it is hilariously funny - very rarely does a game make me laugh out loud at all and I was constantly during this. The graphics are suprisingly nice with some great lens-blur effects, lively animations and movie-like camera angles which is nice to see in the series (especially after MI4 – UGLY). It really feels like a Monkey Island game and that’s what’s most important, they haven’t ruined it with any atempts to be overly-innovative or clouded the gameplay in any way. There are tricky, funny and well thought out puzzels that will perplex you enough to give you a decent sense of achievment after each. The story flows well within the episode, but also in setting up the next in the series too – there are TWO cliffhangers!! [!Spoiler: I reckon the voice is Carla - former swordmaster of Mêlée Island]
So yeah, LOVED it.

Google announced an OS called Chrome OS, can’t help but wonder if they’d wished they’d brought it out first as Chrome is an awesome OS title – oh well. It sounds interesting but as they’ve said it will be mainly for netbooks at this stage, I’m guessing its Linux based? Anyway, this isn’t a huge surprise as I think Google have been going this way for a while now – especially with the release of Chrome. Only question is now – will it catch on? My guess is not as much as their other apps, but only time will tell.

Only other news is that the great job hunt 09 still continues, sending out CVs and portfolio links galore right now. Then I’ll be working on another project whilst I wait for replies/interview, but more on that later.

Happy Thursday to you,

-Ben