Why I don't like Facebook anymore

Just like 99% of the population of my age (not an actual estimate), I have a Facebook account which I do regularly visit. My visits are caused due to my phone which makes it so easy for me to jump on there, see what's going on with people and comment/like/etc. After being a Facebook user for years I have finally started hating it, the word 'hate' is seriously used here without intents of exaggeration. There are a few reasons I have started hating Facebook and here they are.


A lot of the people I have in my Facebook circle are from my previous high school. I have some annoying people on my Facebook, granted it wasn't a great high school but hey, no schools perfect right so you will meet weird people along the way. The reason why the people I have on Facebook link with my dislike for it is due to peoples pathetic 'schizophrenia'. That word might make you think 'what?' and well let me explain. Many people I have on Facebook are almost Schizophrenic in terms of their facebook statuses, the statuses being more frequent than the average human heart beats per minute get quite annoying. The statuses range from delusional 'love' (which is the most overused word of this generation) to the many random spurts of nothingness. The term nothingness covers just what it explains, many people post statuses about things you would never ever want to read. When I read a Facebook status, most of the times I end up regretting the 5 seconds of my life reading and 25 seconds of my life shouting in anger over it. Statuses like "I want to watch TV but cant be bothered to pick up the tv remote, its over there" make me want to punch myself repeatedly with bost fists. But hey, don't worry, we are getting to the good stuff.



The worst statuses by far, absolute worst which make me want to end many acquaintances with people are the Facebook statuses about people moaning. People in this day and age like sympathy, they are what my good friend calls "attention hookers". They have no absolute shame and will not think twice on posting a status about them being 'depressed' all the time. Now you may say "hey what if they are really sad, leave them alone", well I would agree with you however, here is where the schizophrenia kicks in. These people gather the attention from people by posting depressive statuses while simultaneously posting other Facebook statuses or comments about doing something fun. These people will be talking to you on msn about how much fun watching the x factor is whilst posting a status about depression. Gathering pathetic and undeserved empathy whilst multitasking. Oh how my blood boils at the sight of this, I feel used, abused and slapped in the face when I read something on Facebook which is trying to extract undeserved empathy/sympathy from me.

Just two paragraphs ago I mentioned the delusional love and never went too deep into it, I feel like expanding it and so lemme explain it a little bit. The teenage love, crush, sex partnership, whatever you may call it. These days there is an almost 9/10 chance of you stumbling upon a status either about 'love' or a status posting lyrics from a song about 'love'. The subject just never ceases to leave the teenager minds of today, the constant hammering of the four letter word just tattoos itself into your hippo-campus allowing itself to be permanently remembered. People just love to exaggerate, hey I just did some exaggeration a second ago. I don't understand why but liking someone can never be 'good enough'. Appreciating a person for who they are and wanting to spend time with them is never 'good enough'. People of today just love to exaggerate their love for someone, being cheesy in love is fine but being exaggerate on love which barely qualifies as a relationship is just stupid. People who either like a girl they have never spoken to or like a girl they barely date are ones swimming on the seventh cloud, dropping Facebook statuses about their loved every time the clock hits a new hour and in the process are annoying their friends list.

The "attention hookers" a term which does not only cover females, do not make that misconception please. Is a term I am using right now for all those people who take pictures of themselves inappropriately to get attention. May it be to feed their insecurity that they need to see a picture of theirs get "100 likes" because they are showing cleavage to the maximum degree or may it be to make their useless day produce something. Whether its guys in a toilet without a shirt on or women holding the camera above their head to capture their external organs, people's pictures on Facebook can get very annoying.

Moving a bit away from people and more into people with applications on Facebook, I must mention all the invitations to the stupid video games I keep receiving. Sometimes I am in a train and my phone rings to alert me, now I do not know what it is alerting me for so I will take it out of my pocket to check if its something important and what I will see is a stupid invitation to Farmville. These invitations would have been excused if they were temporary but no, they are so frequent that I had to ban all of them. But to my surprise, new games always keep popping up and always annoy me because its a new beast which I now need to ban before it drives me insane. 

Other than people annoying me, its also the different 'social pages' which never fail to make my face go red. These pages are pages with entertaining names which I ended up liking when I was an idiotic 13 year old and now they are back to haunt me. Just as Scrooge was haunted by the ghosts of his past, these pages haunt me as they post new statuses themselves every minute which I have to plummet through to find my friends (yes I do have some friends which don't annoy me). These social pages post the most out of context and stupid statuses I have ever seen, some statuses I liked about the ninja turtles manage to post a status about 'love' coming a full circle to burden me with hate. Also, it is the fact that these pages are funny little groups which people like and groups which should not be posting something to do with relationships every minute makes me mad. These statuses purpose should not be to hammer you with love stories, asking you for hearts in a 'whorified' way, no ones intention is to receive their constant statuses when they like the page and the page should stop bothering us. No matter where I go these statuses will be present to disappoint, I wish these social pages were not in the thousands so I could have easily deleted them all by now.

I will never disable my account because some people are brilliant on Facebook and it helps me keep contact with many friends, including ones thousands of miles away. However, as I pray on this fateful night, my Facebook friends circle will get clearer and clearer with times passing. The 'idiocracies' of the past will fade just as I learn to pick better friends and be a better person. With my own social growth, the dirt will almost get fertilised out of the border of friends in my account. Someday Facebook will be a better place, lets just hope I haven't raised my blood pressure high till death by then.


Hey you, your the person who actually read all of the article, its an article I had fun writing and do not think that I am a 'Scrooge' like character who is just bitter. I just had fun pointing out some things that I genuinely dislike, I hope you found this entertaining to read and I hope you can empathise with some of this.

Asura's Wrath Demo Impressions

When a legendary company like Capcom states they are making a new IP, it has to send atleast a little bit of excitement your way... 

The latest IP by Capcom is Asura's Wrath, little of its story is known but what I saw so far was interesting. AW's cutscenes were fairly enjoyable, very anime-ish and were integrated well into the combat. Speaking of combat, it was not enjoyable. AW's combat works on you fighting in a 'hack & slash' form for a few minutes before being interrupted by a cutscene which is immediately followed by a monotonous shooting gameplay mechanic. Shooting you ask, shooting is basic, you hold square and scroll over stuff to shoot. Very basic and extremely boring after the first few minutes. After the 'hack/slash' & shooting mechanics, the third and final gameplay mechanic is a 'quick time button event driven' custscene. That long word means, you press buttons in the middle of custscenes to make Asura do things such as punch a God. As exciting as punching a God sounds, its boring. 

The games main problem is that none of the gameplay mechanics are fully refined, every gameplay mechanic is weak and the game knows it. Every time you feel as if you are finally starting to play a game, the game will stop you and make you watch a custscene. I am not exaggerating, the game distracts you atleast every 3 minutes and 3 minutes is too f*ing early! It is so annoying for the game to pull you out of a mechanic every 3 minutes. It feels as if the game is holding you with a leash and is constantly pulling you through it. It is boring frustration at its best. The demo featured an interesting story which I wanted to know more about, but the gameplay bored me to tears. With a demo lasting only 30 minutes which still manages to bore you, I am worried for this game as I couldn't even imagine myself playing the whole game for 6+ hours.

I hope the demo for AW does not represent the full game as the game really looks interesting. I would love to have a fun game around the story and world Capcom have created. Also fighting Gods which are larger than Earth just sounds so cool, I want to see it done well. C'mon Capcom, you can do it, just don't mess this up!

For more video game stuff messsage follow or message me @TheGeekyPenguin on Twitter

Also be sure to check some more stuff out if you liked this, if you didn't like this then, well, I'm sorry? lol

Bethesda needs to make up to the PS3 gamers

Skyrim, I wish I could sit here and tell you how much I love the game, but I can't do that because I haven't been able to play it yet. After waiting over 2 years for this game, all I can do is sit and hear other people speak of their great play through's. Bethesda has given us PS3 players a version of Skyrim that runs on a pathetic frame rate around 20 hours into the game and becomes unplayable after around 60 hours of gameplay into the game. For a game thats supposed to be a large adventure full of hundreds of hours, its clear that PS3 gamers have been treated like sh*t.

Games coming with bugs only apparent on the PS3 version is nothing new to the gaming world. It is understandable too as the PS3 version is, in most cases, a port of the Xbox or PC copy. Skyrim stretches this line more than any game before it as the PS3 version of the game becomes unplayable after a certain point! For a game as complex as the Elder Scrolls V we can still understand and give Bethesda the benefit of the doubt that they were unable to build such a complex game without problems on the PS3. However, the new patch (v1.3) that was just released on PC and is making its way to the consoles, does not fix the PS3 lag. Why the hell would Bethesda make creation tools and extra features for pc and xbox gamers while the PS3 version does not even function properly yet! This clearly shows Bethesda's priorities with the consoles and shows their lack of care for the PS3 gamers. This pathetic handling that Bethesda has shown to us speaks in large magnitudes. Just the fact that the PS3 version of the game was not even sent to reviewers on time, speaks a lot about the way Bethesda treats its loyal customers, Bethesda hid all the buggy shit under the carpet and sold it to us. Our loyalty to their products has been shown no respect and to make up for this bitter slap, a consolation is due for us playstation players. I believe that Bethesday should:

#1 Build a patch which fixes the PS3 lag and send it to us soon! and in the meantime atleast provide us information on the patch and its release date.

Thats me when I read that patch v1.3 was not even going to fix the PS3 lag

#2 After the patch's release give us PS3 gamers something special, a gift for our patience with this pathetic serving Bethesda has dished up. Bethesda should do something like "half price on first two DLC's on PS3" or something of a similar sort. If Bethesda does do that (they won't cause they hate PS3), it would make up for the slap we have been given on our naked faces.

Right now as a PS3 gamer I feel as if the right translation for 'Fus ro dah' from Bethesda has been 'Go F*ck your self'

iPhone games of the week

Batman Arkham City Lockdown (£3.99/$5.99)

Batman Arkham City Lockdown has recently been released for a hefty price of £3.99/$5.99. The game is fun with some RPG elements thrown in and the combat is easy to use, reminiscent of Infinity Blades combat. However the repetitiveness of the missions and combat does wear on you after a few fights. The game is not a good buy at this price for even the biggest Bat lovers.

Infinity Blade II (£4.99/$9.99)

This is as close as it gets to console like gaming on the iOS devices. Infinity Blade II is fun and a nice substantial upgrade from the previous game but its just too similar to the first game. After a couple hours into the first Infinity Blade, I was getting a little tired of it and since the second game is more of the same, its not worth the admission price. Wait for a discount if you already have Infinity Blade 1. However if you don't have either or you just love this series too much, you might just instantly fall in love with the game, its new additions in weapons, enemies, hilariously bad story (thats a positive!) and similar but amazing gameplay. One last tid bit, be careful and make some space in your device, this application is almost a gigabyte big!

Sonic and Sega all stars racing (£0.69/$0.99) [Discount]

                                                  

One of the best Kart racers on the iPhone is discounted for a small amount of time, so pick it up! Its a good game with some sloppy aspects but overall overshadows its downfalls with fun and addictive gameplay, reminds me of a very dummed down mario kart which is not a bad thing for the iPhone. Heck, some of the tracks of the game are even as good as its moustached competition. Way worth the price here and should not be missed.

Grand Theft Auto 3 (£2.99/$4.99)

                                                 

The fairly recent addition to the app store has been quite infamous if I may say so, as you walk around, steal cars and kill people in one of the most influential open world games ever made, you will be amazed by the size of the world and the quantity of missions to perform. However, performing the missions might not be really fun as the games touch controls are a bit sloppy and the harder missions might make you bleed with frustration. iPad users might have an easier time playing this due to the larger screen. The game is amazing and either you want this for nostalgia, or think it just looks cool, will serve up some great fun. There is a slight chance that you might be too frustrated by its controls but for a low price like this, is a chance I recommend taking anyways. One last tid bit, be careful and make some space in your device, this application is almost a gigabyte big!

Why I like physical media

I was on amazon today ordering an album I absolutely love and when looking at the prices of the physical disc compared to the itunes download, the disc cost a lot more than the digital download. Ignoring the higher price, I bought the cd. This brought me to a memory where I refused the idea of the kindle which is a digital book which you use to read books, replacing the traditional physical books. Going further into this thought, I just realised that I have 3 free book download vouchers lying around my room which I just refuse to use. Why do I refuse or ignore to buy physical versions of media? Movies, Video Games, Music, Books.. I think I know why.

I love having physical media, when I see my books or video games in my shelf perfectly organised alphabetically, it gives me a sense of ownership. Every item I have had since my childhood bears the scars of the times I dropped it, the red stains of the ketchup I might have spilled, the bends on the pages where I might have been out of bookmarks, the little bite marks on my playstation 2 controllers reminiscent of the games which might have caused that little anger in me. Every item I have feels as if it has travelled a journey with me, and in some cases they have, I love my copy of 'five people you meet in heaven' just holding it reminds me of my time back in Pakistan where I read it. My little gameboy has travelled over 3 continents with me, supplying hours of fun and gathering memories at the same time. When I download games or music, it feels like I don't really own them. Even though they are easily accessible in the menu's of my computer, it just feels as if a companies providing me a service or product which I cant do anything to rather than enjoy in the way they please. I like the idea of being free to take my horror films to my friends house, or carrying my harry potter book in my bag for the bus ride. Replacing those items with a kindle or an iPad just does not 'feel right' to me. The physical presence of the items almost has an aura to them which is absent in their digital counterparts.


Personally, I will always try to find the physical versions of all the books, movies, music and games I buy, even when the items are in my storage gathering dust next to the sega genesis and backstreet boys albums (lol those were the days), I will someday be able to look back at them again and just physically holding them will trigger memories with them which my digital copy of 'final fantasy' on the iPhone can never reproduce.

No one knows of the future, companies might stop making physical versions of music or video games, heck even books might become a tradition of the past, when that happens I will sadly have to adapt to those 'modern' ways, but for now.. I love my media just the way it is.

inFamous Festival of Blood Review

An inFamous game on the ps store, awesome.

I like this game, there you go, no suspense, no paragraphs for you to read through to find the answer. Now heres a little something to explain why I like this game and why you should too!

inFamous Festival of Blood does not take itself seriously and thats a good thing, the game uses this heavily in its story which is quite comedic and entertaining; turns out to be more entertaining than the inFamous 1 & 2 stories. The gameplay is just like inFamous 2 but has a couple tweeks which add some vampire powers. These powers are bloody brilliant (pun intended). After playing Festival of Blood I wish I could use the bat flying power in inFamous 2, it is so fun and is exactly the type of power 'Cole' needed to give the game a fresh feel again.


The graphics are just like the previous installments in the franchise which is great as the inFamous franchise has stellar quality. Next to that Festival of blood boasts an amazing art style with the neon lights, the dark red sky and the gothic look on some scenery & people. This truly brings back the feel of old horror movies like 'the lost boys' and even slasher movies like 'A nightmare on elm street'. As a fan of horror, I was delighted as I flew, yes flew with bat powers, to the top of the tallest building and glared at the beautiful sight of the city at night.

The game adds a playstation move feature and honestly, it works really well! Of course it does not work as well as the dual shock 3 but I am sure it will be a fun add on which will run you for atleast an hour before getting boring. An hour may not sound like a lot but if you put it into context here in this small psn game, it means a lot.




The whole game being a small adventure may put some people off as it is only 1 and a half hours long if you do not do any of the side quests. This should not be a complain for a game that is £8/$10 though, if you compare 1 and a half hours of single story content with full retail games of today, you can see that festival of blood boats a good amount of play time. Other than the main story I spent around 3 hours in this game, playing user created missions, collected blood vials and just roaming this beauty Sucker Punch have created.

inFamous Festival of Blood is an amazing psn game and should definitely bought, especially when its on sales (like it is now for the 2011 christmas to late January sale)


I give inFamous Festival of Blood 9 and a half vampire teeth out of 10

9.5/10

Cirque Du Freak

Darran Shan's 'Cirque Du Freak' is a very interesting book and was one of the first books I ever borrowed from the library to read. The book although not very innovative with new ideas, still stays enjoyable. What Darren Shan creates is a very nice story with twists and turns you will not expect.. and the characters, while the main character is not anything too interesting and is purposely empty so that children and teens reading the book can project themselves into him, still gets annoying at times. However the other characters do make up for this as they are mysterious in all the right ways to keep you interested in the story.

The best thing about the book is atmosphere, Shan creates one of the most spooky and memorable atmospheres I have ever read. It is almost like reading Harry Potter for the first time and creating Hogwarts in your mind, almost that level of brilliance. I constantly have images of the towns and the cirque pop into my head months and years after I have read the book.

Conclusively the book is an amazing read, is great for re reading too and proves that the old vampires who can't super model can still be interesting. I recommend this book for children and teenagers. Any older and you might just find this too clichéd and you might just hate the main character too much.

Author: Darren Shan
Definitely buy it from Waterstones :)

Ohh and one last tid bit, DO NOT watch the movie.