Modern Combat 3 for Android

My first game review on my blog!!

Having been playing a lot of "Freemium" games by Gameloft and Glu I found myself following them on Twitter.

Much to my luck I read Gameloft announcing they would be dropping the price of Modern Combat to 69p for one day only so I got it.



Firstly, the one player campaign is good solid fun. Gameloft have pulled out all the stops to make this a Modern Warfare clone and it works VERY well.

The second level doesn't fail to impress as you play a chopper gunner and even have a choice of thermal viewing and 3 different guns to play with.

The story is nothing ground breaking but for that of a mobile game is solid with great voice acting and unlike anything seen on mobiles.

Sometimes the game can be a little odd, like when sneaking through a village and your ally will shout out random warnings even when you haven't been detected, but I guess this is nothing that a patch can't fix.

That being said, the minor flaws I have experienced can be over looked because the rest of the game oozes quality.

The touch screen controls take a little getting used to (as with most mobile games) but if you own an Android device you are in luck!!

In my previous blog I wrote about the Sixaxis Controller App which, as long as you have root on your mobile and some time to map your controller it works beautifully with this game.

Here is a youtube video of it in action:

On top of the single player campaign, multiplayer is another area where this game shines.

This has to be without a doubt the best multiplayer I have played on a mobile device.

I think it has six maps, seven game modes, up to 12 players online, 100 ranks to level up, and like  Modern Warfare, each rank brinks perks, weapons and attachments.

This can be great fun to play with the only downside being that there are no playlists so you tend to get stuck on the same map a lot (Gameloft please take notice here as this would make the online mode amazing).

So to sum it all up:

Graphics: 9 - All round lovely graphics and effect.
Sound: 7 - A little buggy at times but genrally very good.
Lastability: 10 - Four difficulty modes and an epic multiplayer will make this one to last.

Overall: 8.5 - Slightly buggy sound and the lack of online playlists are the only things that drag this game down. Gameloft could easily patch these issues and if they do I will adjust my score accordingly.

Don't miss out on this game if you like mobile gaming.

Available on iOS and Android.

Sixaxis App for Android

Having decided to add more stuff to my blog (I tend to find I don't have time and then have a window where I blog a few things) I've decided to start adding more gaming content.

Something I love, but don't tend to write about as I prefer to spend my time playing and not writing.

Anyway, since being reunited with GTA 3 on Android, I found as much as I found the controls intuitive, you can't beat playing with a pad!

So I bought the Sixaxis Controller App for Android by Dancing Pixel Studios.

This is now how I play my Android games!

Phone is stuck to my PS3 Keyboard.

What a joy! It allows you to map the physical buttons of the pad, to touch screen areas on your screen, so basically ANY game can be controlled with your Playstation 3 Sixaxis Pad.

Without having to explain too much I made a video on youtube showing how this works, but for a tiny £1.07 it's worth every penny!!

Enjoy!

Weird Exoplanet Discovered Orbiting Two Stars

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If you could stand on the surface of Kepler-16b, you'd have two shadows. At sunset, you would see an orange star about the size of the sun and next to it a much fainter red star. As the stars slipped toward the horizon, they would change places in the sky, like partners in a square dance.

You would not need to be Luke Skywalker visiting his home planet of Tatooine in the movie "Star Wars" to watch the twin sunset. The only science fiction in this story is how to make the 200 light-year journey to Kepler-16, a binary star system jointly sharing the Saturn-sized planet, Kepler-16b.

The finding, reported by scientists on NASA's Kepler planet-hunting space telescope team, adds a new page into Mother Nature's recipe book for extrasolar planets.

"It's the first one that circles two stars, so it's a fundamentally different kind of planet," lead researcher Laurance Doyle, with the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., told Discovery News.

From a distance about as far as Venus orbits the sun, Kepler-16b circles both its parent stars in 221 days. The stars, which on average have about 21 million miles between them, fly around each other about every 41 days.

The whole system is perfectly aligned to Kepler's viewing spot, with the bodies crossing paths so that tiny amounts of their radiating starlight regularly, repeatedly and predictably vanish and reappear as the stars and the planet fly past one another.

The telescope points at a fixed position in space, looking for changes in light streaming from about 155,000 target stars in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra.

Because the Kepler-16 system is so perfectly aligned, scientists believe the planet formed alongside its parent stars from a common disk of gas and dust. The plane in which the two stars orbit is aligned within one-third of a degree of the orbit of the planet.

"It shows the gears of celestial mechanics turning and interlocking so vividly, you almost want to reach out and touch it," exoplanet scientist Marc Kuchner, with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., told Discovery News.

"Kepler himself would have been dizzy with excitement," he added, referring to the telescope's namesake, Johannes Kepler, the 16th century scientist who deduced the laws of planetary motion.

Both the Kepler-16 stars are smaller than the sun, so their planet lives largely outside the so-called habitable zone where liquid water could exist on its surface. Water is believed to be an essential ingredient for life as we know it.

The planet is estimated to experience temperatures that plummet from -100 to -150 degrees Fahrenheit (-70 to -100 degrees Celsius).

Timing also played a role in the discovery, notes Doyle. Computer models show that in early 2018, the planetary transits across the larger star will disappear from Kepler' view until around 2042. The passages across the smaller star's face, already slipping from view, will vanish in May 2014, and won't be back for 35 years.

"Working in film, we often are tasked with creating something never before seen," said John Knoll a visual effects supervisor with Lucasfilm, developer of the "Star Wars" movies. "More often than not, scientific discoveries prove to be more spectacular than anything we imagine."

Story and source: Discovery

Drunk Moose Found in Tree

A seemingly intoxicated moose has been discovered entangled in an apple tree by a stunned Swede.

Per Johansson, 45, says he heard a roar from his vacationing neighbor's garden in southwestern Sweden late Tuesday and went to have a look. There, he found a female moose kicking about in the tree. The animal was likely drunk from eating fermented apples.

With the help of police and rescue services, Johansson later managed to set the moose free in part by sawing off tree branches.

But the animal appeared confused and wandered into Johansson's garden, where she was still resting Thursday.

Other neighbors in the Goteborg suburb Saro had seen the animal sneaking around the area for days. Johansson said the moose appeared to be sick, drunk, or "half-stupid."

Story & source: Telegraph