Unfortunately this means that bitcolumns will come to a stand still for the next couple of weeks, as problems are sorted.

I am hoping to be back by the end of May, and to continue full steam ahead with what we have been doing thus far. I would like to take this time to apologise for the stop on the web front whilst this happens.

(I will still be doing the weekly show on www.csrfm.com at 1830GMT on a tuesday, so if you want the latest news please listen there.)

I hope to see you all again in a couple of weeks, and we will then take bitcolumns further.

Well. The N10 “netbook” from Asus.

If history has taught us anything over the thousands of years besides you should never accept a giant wooden horse for a gift or remake a horror film more than once, it’s that making something completely pointless is still pointless even if the said thing is good. Things like the ‘charge while you play’ adapters for the wireless xbox 360 controllers, yes lets take a wireless device and give it a wire to make use of… well yes you get my point. Stupid.

The point I’m getting at is the whole “netbook” idea in general. I see no real need for them; they are a needlessly small version of a normal laptop which runs Vista more slowly than the average laptop anyway (or PC since Vista is a POS!). I awoke to the delivering of the N10 one morning with the hope of being able to try some games on it. While this was possible, it was somewhat undesirable. I played through the first couple of levels of Condemned criminal origins on medium settings and the laptop chugged along reasonably well, but fell flat on its face when the screen had more than 1 character on it; which sadly meant 90% of the game. At this point I got bored and passed the N10 to my loving girlfriend who proceeded to play through Indigo Prophecy on it in ONE SITTING. Anyone who says girls don’t game, you are wrong.

On to the main features of the netbook, the overall look is nice. It has a stylish, neat and tidy exterior and some sexy looking blue lights which contrast the black interior keyboard + screen very nicely. Brownie points here Asus, your designer knows what he’s doing. As for features, there’s a TON of software included with the N10. Mostly though, it’s stuff that the average person would never ever use such as fingerprint recognition (seriously). All of which just seem to make Vista run even slower than normal. (more than 3 minutes to startup and be on the desktop without the egg timer icon.) The processor inside is somewhat underpowered for everything that is going on. Windows Vista sucks the life from the poor old 1.60GHz cpu like a gigahertz vampire.

There really isn’t much to say about the N10. It’s a small, underpowered netbook with a heck of a lot of pointless software included, that would have benefitted a lot more from running XP. The half-decent graphics card included is a good idea, but falls short because the rest of the specs are low-end. And for the price of around £500 you may aswel save a few more 0’s and get a macbook or a proper gaming laptop.

This is where bitcolumns.com comes in, we are adding a new section to our focus: we will be bringing you as many of the latest and best special offers, discounts, and student discounts we can all in one place: http://discounts.bitcolumns.com. bitcolumns will also be working with companies to secure exclusive student and reader discounts, so that our readers can get the best price when it comes to their tech purchases.

http://discounts.bitcolumns.com will also feature all out best advice on how to get the lowest price you can, and purchasing advice.

We will be taking photos and video throughout the two days we are at the event, as well as trying to secure some cool interviews with tech companies, and hopefully the presenters themselves. bitcolumns will also be bringing you the latest news and product information that we can get from the show floor, and presenting this on the site as soon as possible. Photos and audio will be uploaded at the end of each of the two days, with video being onto the site as soon as we can edit and compile it.

You may remember the distaster that happened with Stuff Live, pretty much nothing,. But I guarantee we have learnt from our mistakes and have made sure we have much lighter kit (easier to carry around and use) as well as computers and a room with internet access.

We will be at the show for the Friday (Press Day) and Saturday, so will have plenty of time to get as much information and news as we can from the stands. Images from the stands, press releases, etc will all be uploaded as soon as they are taken.

We will be video recording at the event.  We are hoping to get a good look at the latest gadgets at the press releases, and looking at some of the cool tech on show.  Hopefully we will also be getting some interviews done. All the video will be compiled and released as a special edition of the bitcast.

Sam and Ian will be wearing their brand new bitcolumns hoodies and t-shirts, so if you see us walking around the event feel free to come up to us and say hello. Would be awesome to meet some of our readers.

And if this is not all exciting enough, here is a video of what you can expect to see at The Gadget Show Live:

I shall start from personal experience, with 2 laptops i have bought in the last 18 months. These are the MSI GX700 and the Dell XPS M1530, both of which came to £999. The MSI was purchased in October 2007, and the Dell in October 2008; so comparing spec would be a worthless task. But I can compare the reliability and customer service I received from the two companies.

A fight for customer service dominance

MSI vs Dell
The MSI GX700 was purchased from an online retailer in September 2007, it took 2 weeks for me to receive the machine and only 2 months to be sick of it. For you see during these 2 months the power supply on the machine had failed, and the graphics card was overheating beyond what should be expected. The machine was returned to MSI for repair, and I got it back within 10 days. Now this all sounds well and good, but the start of this took forever. Contacting the retailer I was alerted that I need to contact the support department for the laptop directly. Now this is a normal measure, but much more difficult when the retailer gives you the wrong number, and you then get passed through 4 different phone connections to then find out that you have to phone the retailer again.

After all this, I got the machine back and a couple of months later put a disc into the drive (I rarely use discs, as transfer most data online or with USB memory sticks) and as the drive spins up to speed it makes a horrible buzzing noise. I send the machine back to MSI to be repaired, and it returns with the bottom of the machine not being secured properly, in fact the bottom falls off when I move it on my lap. One return to manufacturer later, and the piece of metal enclosure that covers the processor has been put on badly, and there is a good couple of millimetres gap between the cover and bottom of the machine.

After 11 months with the machine, I was able to wrangle a refund out of the retailer, due to the product and the repairs being useless. And with this refund I purchased an XPS M1530 directly from Dell.

I ordered the Dell machine on Friday, and it arrived on Wednesday. Everything was good, all questions I had at any time were answered, but a problem soon arose. My Hard Drive was making strange noises, and failing to boot sometimes. I phoned Dell Support, and as an XPS customer got launched to the front of the queue, and the technician was happy to talk me through the steps to update my bios, drivers, and check the drive for failures (all at 11PM at the weekend). When it was deemed that the Hard Drive was in fact failing, they sent a technician the next working day with a replacement hard drive and touch control panel (the original had been scratched when it arrived). The laptop was fixed and ready to work again within 2 hours of the technician arriving.

This difference in customer care shows you the added value you can get from buying a certain system over its competitors. Although the modern MSI had a higher spec, the Dell customer and technical support was much more comprehensive and useful.

But this value for money can extend to other areas, for example the ever present Mac vs PC argument.

Who helps you out more?

Mac vs PC
It is well known that if you equivalently spec an Apple Mac and a Windows based PC, that the Mac will more often than not be more expensive. But there are reasons for this, such as the Unix underpinnings that makes Mac OSX more reliable; the fact that the computer and OS are made by the same people, making them more reliable; the inclusion of iLife software giving you easy to use Photo, Music, Web and Video editing out of the box; Apple’s customer service.

Working as an IT technician at a school, you see all sorts of computers come in and out of the site; and end up fixing most of them. This normally involves reinstalling windows and setting the school provided machine back to how we gave it to them in the first place; or replacing a piece of hardware. Now, when it came to fixing a Mac Pro, which we had never done before, we were slightly intimidated; so decided to contact Apple Technical Support. The technician on the other end of the line was more than happy to help us through the installation and fixing of software, as well as have a laugh with us when we were searching for the serial number. Customer service much higher than what we get from our network solution provider, that we pay loads for, and get “Look at this article online” answers from.

Moo.com
But this sort of thing is not just something you should think of when buying your new MP3 player or Computer, it can affect you in more standard medias, such as business cards; something we had to purchase recently.

From recommendations on the internet, mainly Twitter, we decided to use www.moo.com to print our business cards; and we are very pleased that we did. We were unsure if the images we had were the correct size, etc for the cards but one of their customer service agents answered our questions very quickly. He was happy to look at the images we had and make sure they were right, he even checked the cards once they had printed to make sure they looked as good as they did on screen. And we were kept informed at every step. Now is where you get to have a laugh at me.

For you see, I accidentally uploaded and had the wrong image printed onto the cards. This image had the wrong phone number on it, which rendered them useless, something I felt silly over. Shortly after receiving the cards, I had an email land in my inbox from Moo, asking what i thought of the cards. My reply said that the printing quality was awesome, and I jokingly mentioned that I had accidentally put on the wrong number. Twenty-four hours later, I received an email with a voucher code for a free set of business cards.

This has to be some of the best customer service I have ever received, as the number error was entirely my fault. Therefore, I am going to have to go at a tangent here, and say that bitcolumns very much recommend moo.com.

Buying Tips
These tips should help you make sure you get the most from your money, no matter what you are buying.
Do your research. Read about the product and the company online; ask friends if they have ever bought anything from the same company. Check to see what their warranty and technical support cover.
Shop Around. The best prices can be found by looking everywhere you can. Price comparison websites, online retailers, the manufacturer’s website, etc. Never rule out high street stores though, as more and more are putting out offers to attract customers back through their doors.
Check their customer services.If they have an “Ask Us” feature, use it. Get a sneak preview of what their customer service is like. This link is there to entice you into buying their products, but can give an insight to their support. If they are quick and helpful then this is a good sign.
Try the product. If you are able to go to a shop or a mate’s and try out the product before you buy it, do it. This will let you make sure it is the product you want, and ensure it is right for your needs. No point buying something because it is cheaper, or got good customer service, to find that it is useless.

This video aims to explain the history and developments that led to our modern Internet, and we think it is pretty nifty.

“History of the Internet” is an animated documentary explaining the inventions from time-sharing to filesharing, from Arpanet to Internet.
The history is told using the PICOL icons on www.picol.org. You can already download a pre-release of all picol icons on http://blog.picol.org/pre-release-picol-icons

You can see the credits and more information on this movie on

http://www.lonja.de/motion/mo_history_internet.html

The new design brings all our new features to your fingertips (video podcasts, better links, better commenting, and more). And we are gonna be here for you more than ever. With tickets to some of the UK’s biggest technology shows, we will bring you the news as it comes. And with Twitter, you can be badgered even when you are out about, keep an eye out for our feed links in the sidebar of the home page.

This year we will be bringing more competitions, discounts with companies, and hopefully even some events and parties. So stick with us, tell your friends, and we will see you through the technology maze that is bound to happen in the coming year.

We wish you all the best as we move closer to the end of the first decade of the Noughties, and we hope to see you again very soon.

Best of wishes,

the bitcolumns team

Tis the season to be jolly, drink and eat too much, and celebrate what gadgets and presents you get (and of course, a time for family and rememberance).

We would definitely like to take this opportunity to with all of our readers, listeners, friends, family, and monkeys, a Very Merry Christmas.

With the best of wishes,

the bitcolumns team (xxxx)

Fable II is the long awaited sequel to Fable, the highly acclaimed action RPG from Lionhead Studios. It’s 500 years later in the world of Albion, and while it may have been a long 4 years later for us, the wait was definitely worth it. Peter Molyneux’s promises and subsequent disappointments from the original game aren’t to be found here, and the only thing seen instead is a delightful gaming experience that should be experienced everyone.

Good points:
Brilliant art style gives the world a unique feel to it
Strong soundtrack ties in perfectly with the game world
Simple yet effective and rewarding combat system
The addition of the dog as a companion is genius

Bad Points:
Sluggish menus
Less quests than I’d hoped
Not enough variations of clothes
Small co-op issues

The world of Albion has changed a lot over the past 500 years, but townsfolk still talk of stories that occurred in the original game. Fable II follows a young hero on a quest to defeat a man called Lucien, who is responsible for a life-changing event very early on in the game. After this event, and 10 years later, the hero has now grown up and can finally take his revenge on Lucien. With a mysterious woman named Theresa leading the way, and his trusty dog companion by his side, is there nothing the hero can’t do? As his quest continues he learns that he is a very important Hero, and he is necessary in taking down Lucien. As well as himself, he’ll need to recruit three more Heroes (of Strength, Will and Skill) who will also use their own individual skills to help defeat Lucien.

The story itself is actually quite short (if you just rush through the game doing only the story), but it’s paced well so that it all seems to fit into place in a structured timeline. Once again Lionhead have done a great job of giving the world of Albion a unique charm that makes you want to come back. Be it the beautiful environments, the genuinely funny dialogue or the citizens of Albion themselves, the work that has been put in is clearly evident and it’s a joy to play through it. The moral choices that your character is faced with are also very interesting. One particular quest that stuck in my head was one where I ended up meeting a ghost, who was just as surprised as I was that I could see him. He loved this woman, who then ran away on their wedding day, so he sadly took his own life. It’s not done in a morbid way, so don’t let this sad story put you off. That said, he then wants you to go and find this woman, make her fall in love with you, then give her a note from the ghost telling her it was all a joke etc. You find the woman who immediately falls in love with you and it turns out she wants to marry you and have children. You then get to make the choice of giving her the note, therefore showing her it was a lie and the ghost gets his revenge. Or, you can get married to her and steal the ghosts love of his life. I won’t say what happens if you pick either choice, but the two results are very significant in relation to those two particular characters. That’s just one of the moral choices you have to make, and there are several more that you’ll have to make along your quest.

Moral choices lead us on well into a key part of the gameplay. In the original Fable you had a bar of Good/Evil, and while that’s still present in Fable II, they’ve added another bar. This bar is for Purity/Corruption, and it makes sense after reading into it. Certain acts, such as murdering citizens or letting an evil guy keep some slaves instead of setting them free, will gain Evil points, which will affect your Good/Evil bar. Others such as eating meat, drinking alcohol, or charging high rent on your real estate, will earn you Corruption points, which affect your Purity/Corruption bar. The reason for this is because there are several ways to play the game. It may be that you’d never kill anyone and you’re generally a nice person, (meaning you’re Good) but you like to get drunk and charge high rent (meaning you’re Corrupt). You could also just as easily have a completely full Evil bar, but you’re completely Pure, which to be fair is a lot less likely, but still completely possible. It adds much more depth to the morality system of the game, and ultimately it allows the player to still be Good overall but do a few bad things along the way without too much punishment, which leads to a more enjoyable experience.

The main part of the gameplay that you’ll be experiencing most however is the combat. Thankfully, while it seems simple, it’s a very effective yet rewarding system. Melee attacks are assigned to the X button, Magic attacks to B, and Ranged to Y. When you start the game your melee combos will be weak and simple, your ranged attacks will be one shot at a targeted enemy, and your magic will be very weak. To level up these skills, you’ll be killing enemies, and apart from getting Strength (melee), Skill (ranged) and Will (magic) experience, you’ll also get General experience, which can be used in conjunction with another amount of experience to make a total to learn an ability. It sounds confusing, but it’s not. Say you need 50000 total experience points to level a magic spell. It may be that you only have 20000 Will experience, but because you have 65000 general experience, you can take 30000 from the general experience and level up the magic spell. You can do this for Strength and Skill abilities as well, and by the time you max out your stats you’ll be attacking with fast fluid combos and countering enemies attacks, as well as being able to zoom in on enemies with your gun and decapitate them with the bullet, and finally your magic attacks will be devastating. The sound effects pack appropriate punch, and the animations are fluid and well done to make each confrontation as enjoyable as the next. The best thing for me though personally was finding out about decapitations. Call me violent or whatever, but it’s a lot more satisfying to shoot someone’s head clean off with a bullet than it is to simply kill them with a shot to the head.

As well as the combat, there are also lots of minigames to play throughout the world of Albion. When you’re starting out and you need a bit of cash, you can take on a series of jobs. My main income for the best part of half the game was training as a blacksmith in Bowerstone Market (the main town where you’ll spend a lot of your time). The minigames are a simple enough affair, where you need to time your pressing of the A button so that it fits into the green area of a shrinking target. It’s actually quite hard to explain, but again it’s very straight forward in practice. Most of the minigames follow this structure, and while it may get boring quickly for some, I actually found it quite fun, as bizarre as it sounds.

Arguably though, the biggest aspect of the gameplay added to Fable II is the addition of the dog. For the most part of the game, you have no choice on whether you have a dog or not. If you don’t want it, you can let it get injured in a fight and just leave it, but it’ll follow you everywhere no matter what. That’s plain cruel though, and even if you don’t want to the dog as a companion, you can still use him as a tool. He’ll bark when close to a treasure chest, and he’ll bark and try to make you follow you if he’s found a spot to dig up some treasure. I personally found it hard not to love the dog, simply because it seems so real. The animations are spot on, and the way it acts in general is how a real dog acts. People in the towns will come up to you and pet the dog, and he’ll wag his tail in delight as he chases the rubber ball you’ve thrown for him. At one point you’re running through a graveyard with some misty areas with an overall creepy feel about it. The dog will have his ears down, walk a bit slower and have his tail between his legs, and he’ll let out an occasional yelp to tell you he needs a bit of reassurance. It’s the subtle details in the dog that really make you want him around, so it seems odd when the dog occasionally glitches up and goes missing, only to arrive onscreen out of the blue.

As much as I’ve praised the game though, it eventually gets to the point in the review where I have to mention my complaints, and unfortunately, there are a few. To start, and perhaps a surprising complaint, I expected to see a lot more content than was actually present. I’d finished the main storyline, done all quests that weren’t simply to buy a property or destroy some gargoyles, and maxed out my combat stats in roughly 25 hours. That’s by no means short, but for an RPG with such great production values potential to have much more than it did, I ended up being a bit disappointed at the end of it. The only thing left to do now is to collect some silver keys, destroy a few gargoyles and get my real estate value up to 2.5 million gold. To me, none of those are particularly “fun”, and they only seem to artificially extend the life of the game by exploring environments repeatedly until you find that one key. Slow menus get a bit annoying at the start, but you’ll soon get used to it. One thing I found slightly bizarre though is the lacklustre range of clothing for your character. It may seem an odd thing to complain about, but the one move taken by the design team was that they wanted every character to look unique, so they decided to take out armour from the game so that everyone didn’t end up just buying the best stuff and leaving it at that. On the flip side though, the range of customisation in terms of clothes is quite small, thus rendering the whole idea pointless. I only found one set of clothes that made me look remotely like a warrior, with everything else making me look like a strange citizen of the town, or a nobleman; neither of which I would consider appropriate for a warrior.

Co-op play was touted to be a key part of the design process in Fable II, and while it’s a great feature in theory, in practice it falls flat on its face. To start, the camera is infuriating. The sheer fact that neither of the two participants in the game have any control over the camera whatsoever is ludicrous. One particular situation had me and a good friend playing through one of the game’s caves. When we reached the end, we had to fight a troll, and the camera managed to position itself in such a way that our two characters were facing out towards the screen and we couldn’t actually see the troll that we were supposedly killing. It was literally just our two characters shooting at something and a dog running around in circles. We then spent the best part of a minute just running around trying to make the camera move into a decent place so we could actually see what was going on. Running around in buildings is even more of a nightmare, simply because the camera can’t zoom out particularly far to try and get a good view of the scene, something which luckily it manages to do fairly well in outside environments. Secondly, despite the fuss that was made about every character being unique and being able to show it off to your friends, which only works for the host of the game. If you join someone else’s world in Fable II, you have to play as one of 6 preset henchmen, and while they may have all of your stats, the fact that you’re not actually playing as your own hero is stupid. To top it all off, the fact that the camera doesn’t move also means the distance that you can move away from each other isn’t very large at all, this makes trying to take out a group of enemies from two sides practically impossible.

One side of the game that’s all positives though is the technical aspect. Aside from the lip-syncing being a tad off (which to be fair isn’t really an issue because the camera is never close enough to character’s faces to really notice), and the odd sound not playing, the technical performance of the game is very good. During online and offline play the frame rate issues are generally stable, and I only encountered one glitch in which some text appeared as I moved to another area but didn’t disappear when I got there. This was simply remedied by moving to another area. The only other issue I had was that when in caves and tunnels, the textures on the dog can tend to change colour and/or disappear. Hardly game-breaking though to be honest, but it’s still there. Reports have been going around of lots of other bugs and glitches though, so while I didn’t personally encounter many glitches, that doesn’t necessarily mean there aren’t any.

Fable II is a fantastic game, and while I may have my issues with it, they are greatly outweighed by the positives. The fantastic art style, enchanting soundtrack and rewarding gameplay make for a brilliant gaming experience. The sheer amount of manpower and effort that has gone into the game is clearly evident, and it’s things like that that make you really appreciate what you’re experiencing. The dog brings a lease of life into the game that’s hard to describe, and it’s only when it isn’t there when you realise how different it is without it. It’s one of those games that doesn’t come around very often, and while it may not be perfect, it’s definitely one of the best at what it does.

Score: 4/5