Wisetechie Blog : Ctrl your Tech Life

So finally I got a chance to play my review copy of GI JOE generously sent to the Wisetechie team by EA and RocketXL. I have fond memories of having so many action figures and vehicles of GI JOE and also watching the cartoon every Saturday and Sunday morning with great zeal and vigour. So naturally when I came to know that EA was releasing the GIJOE game along-with the cinematic release of the GIJOE movie, I was thrilled.

Hits :

The game hits at quite a few places, firstly the whole GIJOE franchisee is reason enough to take the game.  JOE fans will love the game with its array of characters and so many levels and stuff to unlock. You can also play with Storm Shadow after unlocking the character and claiming his dog tags.

You also get to drive the classic GIJOE vehicles . Voice and music too are well researched and blend in well with the game.

The gameplay comes across as a normal shooter, nothing too special, but ok.

But sadly thats all the Hits.

Misses :

The game does disappoint at a lot of places. First and foremost are the graphics. The game does not make full use of the capabilities of modern day consoles, the graphics are blotchy at places and seem to be from a 2001 game rather than a 2009 game.

The game also loses out on camera angles and the so called auto-aim feature. The auto-aim is hard to use and plain irritating at times. The auto aim usually selects the foe you don’t want to kill and couple that with the camera problems and you have got a recipe for disaster.

Verdict :

At its current price, GIJOE doesn’t seem like a very good deal, if you are a true blue GIJOE fan and would absolutely want to play it, I would suggest wait for a price drop or festive pricing before taking the plunge.

Rating:

God of war : Chains of Olympus  was one of the first UMDs I played on my new PSP which I had recently bought in the US and I can safely say that its one of the best strategy/action games available on the Portable PSP platform.

In God of War Kratos is back and he has to fight bigger and badder foes than ever before. The gameplay is very intuitive and doesnt take a lot to get used to for the pro gamer, although when I tried to teach my dad to play this game, it was another story. The ghost of Sparta is forced to journey to the underworld and try to save the ancient world from the Gods that wish to take over it.

The storyline is compelling and its very hard to put the unit down one you start playing. This is also a bad thing, since the game is pretty short, you do get over with it very very quickly. But no doubt this is one of the best PSP games ever made and if you have a PSP, you must play this game.

Rating:

The game is unsuitable for a minor audience though, its M for mature

Update : By working with Ferns N Petals customer care, we have been able to bring this issue to resolution

Regular readers may remember a previous post on Ferns and Petals. This is in continuation to that, I will give a short recap anyway. So here goes, I had sent a bouquet of flowers to my dad on his birthday via Ferns and Petals‘s official website fnp.in. And it turned out to be one of the worst decisions of my life.

The flowers were decayed and browning, the buds hadn’t opened in a number of flowers, they weren’t fresh and to rub salt to our wounds, the design was different from what was on the website. So going ahead, I wrote an email to these guys asking them to replace the flowers, got no response.

Then I filed a Paypal dispute against these thieves, I got a reply after a few days :

We have received a complaint from your side for the below order.

Please advice what will be the best way to correct the mistake done from our vendor side.

Awaiting for your reply.

Thanks and Regards

Amit

This had travelled a large way inside their company , anyway I asked them to send a gift of the same value as the flowers to my dad as compensation and to set things right so that I use their services in the future as well.

But by now they probably realized that Paypal disputes for Significantly not as Described aren’t handled unless they happened via Ebay, so I never got a reply .

New Update

They replied to me after I sent this link saying that they had never received my earlier mail, they sent my dad a gift of the same value as the flowers I has purchased earlier, my parents confirmed its of good quality. Hence all’s well that ends well , maybe I will give them another try later on as eventually the customer care did come through even if it was after many days.

Early last month we were on a mission, since most of us were becoming busy with our professional lives, wisetechie.com was lying a little neglected. Apart from the customer care debacles we post, there really wasnt much activity. The reviews were drying up.

So we will brainstorming as to what should be the next product/service we review. So we looked into the past. We saw that one of our most popular posts (apart from the 100 or so comments Iphone ones) were the Snapfish and ZoomIn reviews. So we thought of reviewing the Indian online merchandise industry which quite frankly has always interested me a lot.

Online gifting has come a long way, from the flowers and chocolates from shitty websites like Ferns and Petals (never use them, more about Ferns and Petals and their low level of customer service and satisfaction  in the next post). I remember Cafepress used to be THE site for customised merchandise, and even then Indians couldnt actually order economically from them.

But we have come a  long way since those times. Online print merchandise seems to be the next big thing as far as startups and new businesses go. A lot of companies like Itasveer, DilseBol, Tshirts.in, ZoomIn etc. seem to be redefining the way business if done online. So the next time you have to send a gift to anyone, forget the flowers, and use one of these services. We will be reviewing many of these sites in the coming time. So keep a look out for them.

Tata Indicom clearly is the most idiotic company to have existed in the world. If disconnecting my wireline internet wasnt enough, if having a stupid login page for all prepaid customers wasn’t enough, their new Photon + service also gave away today.

These guys always pick the wrong guy to mess with, I break their incompetence publicly and that just embarrasses them.

I have been using the photon+ service for over a month now. Today suddenly my photon+ stopped working. I promptly emailed the customer care with the error I was getting. In the afternoon I get a call that some papers are missing in my application thats why the internet is now working. Sure enough I called the dealer with whom I had deposited everything, all papers had been sent to Tata Indicom.

Then later I got another call from these morons. They claim that I am on a 2GB plan and have accrued a bill of 8000 rupees and hence my Internet is disconnected. My current month’s usage is around 4277MB BTW. What the Tata Indicom billing system does is that is charges 2 rupees for every MB will your bill is generated. After that it deducts 10GB of usage from the chargeable amount and presents the bill. So the amount keeps on accumulating till the bill is generated. But their own customer care cant understand that. Moreover the number from which I had received the call is now switched off.

God Bless Them, sending them this link too.

Apparently to them 10240MB is equal to 2GB or 4277>10240 , either case maths lessons are needed by TATA.

Our good friends at RocketXL and EA just informed us that the much awaited platform game G.I. JOE : Rise of the Cobra has been released. The launch is done to coincide with the releases of the movie. The game was officially released on 4th August 2009.

The game’s storyline begins where the movie’s storyline ends. You can choose the G.I. Joe of your liking as your main player, there is also a single player co-op mode so you can play with your friend.

The game is made by Electronic Arts. We are waiting for our review copy currently. But if you are a G.I. Joe fan, go grab your copy. Needless to say the storyline and game-play look awesome, but the graphics look a little sketchy (probably due to the Youtube scaling effect).

Official Website of the game: http://gijoe.ea.com

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/GI-Joe-The-Rise-of-Cobra-The-Game/92822101502

Console(s) : PS3, PSP, XBox 360, Nintendo DS,Nintendo Wii, Playstation 2

Lined up for Review : PSP games, Lots of them !