Nev's One Minute Gaming - Jetpack Joyride

Hello and welcome to the first One Minute Gaming post, a new series of posts to review free ipad games in one minute or so. You can find audio versions of each post on Soundcloud.

This week,  I’ve been playing Jetpack Joyride - an endless runner platform that has you collecting coins and various vehicles and knocking down scientists whilst avoiding lasers, electric fences and missiles.

The graphics are pretty good and the touchscreen for control makes a world of difference from the old joystick days but don’t twitch at the wrong time or you’ll be dead!

There’s a spin the wheel bonus screen once you collect spin tokens and as always with free apps, there’s a shop to spend your coins in or your real life money.

So far, I haven’t been tempted to spend real cash but as it starts you from the beginning every time, I can see that buying a quick revive might prove attractive soon.

You can get 3000 free coins by following them on Twitter, Youtube and Facebook but I'm determined not to be suckered in by the need for coins - I do not need to upgrade his pants or sweatshirt! lol

There are some missions available but you complete those as you do the main endless run stuff - although they seem easy enough at these low levels, I'm sure they'll get tougher later on.

What I love is the profile stats - I’ve been zapped, toasted and exploded so far and I’ve travelled 214 metres on my face! I’ve also found 17 different vehicles - some of which I still haven’t worked out!

Overall, I’d give this game a 7 out of 10. Good graphics, fairly good gameplay but just a little bit too repetitive for truly addicting gameplay!

If you have a game you’d like to suggest, let me know here in the comments or you can poke me on Twitter @nevahaddict.

Download Jetpack Joyride for FREE now!

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New PC Has Arrived!

So last time I posted, I was waiting impatiently for my new PC to arrive. Well! What a day that was! First off, it was supposed to have arrived on the Friday but due to a mix up, I managed to get a delivery set for the Saturday morning. I set my alarm for 9am, pretty sure that would be plenty early enough not to miss the delivery guy but luckily I woke up earlier because it gave me time to brush my hair & actually get dressed before it arrived!

I was super excited, as I'm sure you can imagine so I dived straight into unpacking the giant box and finding my new baby amongst all the packing materials! I crawled under the desk, tidied up all the cables, worked out which ones I still needed and was just ready to connect the monitor when the first problem of the day surfaced! My existing old monitor has only a VGA port, the new PC has only a DVI port - argghhh!

To make matters worse, I had no idea what the ports were called either so I put an emergency tech message out on Twitter to ask what the blue port thingy was called! I have some lovely tech capable peeps on my twiiter feed and at 10am on a Saturday morning, it seems that quite a few were lurking as I had about 5 answers in under 10 minutes! Thank you guys - you saved the first bit of my sanity that day!

OK, so I had 2 options - an adaptor cable or a new monitor. Luckily, I had the cash for a new monitor, I just hadn't got around to actually buying one! So I jumped in my car and drove 10 miles to the nearest PC World and treated myself to a gorgeous 24inch widescreen monitor - that's quite an upgrade from the Dell 17inch square-ish one I was using!

screenshot from old Dell monitor

I drove home carefully and got this beautiful beast out of its' box & packing, crawled around under the desk again, sorting out yet more cables, went back to the box for the final cable and....NOOOOOO! there wasn't a DVI cable in the damn box, it was another blue thingy one! But I checked - I checked in the shop & I asked the guy 3 times if this monitor had DVI - you can imagine my frustration and it got worse as I tried to contact the store to find out the best course of action.

It seems PC World only has a central customer service phone line and their response was to take the whole thing back & get a new one! Well, apart from the fact that the stand is a push fit & won't come undone again so I couldn't get it back in the box, I really didn't see the point of taking it all back when all I needed was the correct cable - which should have been in the frickin box right???

In the end, I gave up trying to phone anyone and just jumped in the car & drove back to PC World. I found the same young salesman who'd served me originally & he recognised me, so that was good (I think!). I explained what was wrong and off he went to check it out. Unfortunately these monitors all have seals on the now and they can't be broken before selling them to customers so he couldn't check any other boxes for the correct cable. Instead he went to the cable aisle and had a look there for a DVI cable.

You won't believe the next bit - I sure as hell didn't! They didn't have any DVI cables, only the by-now dreaded VGA ones and some other kind. Honestly, I could have screamed right then but I held back as another salesman approached. He had obviously heard my story and the only suggestion he had was for me to try Maplin's in town.

Bearing in mind, this is now 3.30pm ish in the afternoon, heading into the centre of a busy shopping town was not my idea of fun but I knew I couldn't wait 2-3 more days for Amazon to send me the correct cable or to wait for PC World to get a fresh supply so I gritted my teeth, smiled & politely thanked them for their help and stalked out of the store.

screenshot from new widescreen monitor!

Needless to say, it took me almost another hour to get my hands on the correct cable and get home again but at last, I could fire up my new PC & monitor and view the internet in all its glory!

Now I could finally download that beta I wanted so desperately to try and get WoW downloaded too. All I can say is thank god for the ipad and Twitter because there wasn't anything else on my new machine to keep me occupied for the evening!

I got there in the end though and Sunday was a glorious day of gaming all day!

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Five Podcasts and a New Computer!

Oops! I knew the last few weeks had been busy and slightly weird but I didn't realise it was so long since I posted here! I got to chat with the Godmother when Marcus & I invited her to guest on the show and that turned out to be a really interesting show for all of us I think. That was the last of my days off too so I spent the Sunday getting my shit together to head back to work.

I finally went back to work on the Monday after New Year, after being deemed fit to work (post-op) by my Doctor so that was pretty good actually. It sounds great to have a month off over Xmas but when it's recuperation time and it feels like everyone else is out partying, it's kinda tough on your mental state, you know? It was especially tough as it was also my first holiday season alone, ever!

My boss was great though - she even let me finish at 3pm every day so I could come home and have a nap. I still managed to get a load of catching up done so that was a good week but busy! But the best bit was on the Saturday morning - I finally got a chance to chat to Leeta as she interviewed me for her Behind The Avatar podcast. That was great fun and I'm sure it won't be the last time Leeta & I talk for a couple of hours!

The following week was my birthday week and between baking cakes and cookies for work and being taken out to celebrate by my parents and then standing in at the last minute for Rez on EGP, I didn't get much chance to log into WoW. I could have logged in Friday evening I guess but I just sat there and kind of spaced out in front of the PC. I'm honestly not sure what I did that evening at all!

Another great Saturday morning - recording the show with Marcus Ty and that was about all I could manage that day! Sunday dawned grey and cold but it was another busy day - lunch with Mum (and getting laundry done!), afternoon chats with Cold then another first - recording Girls Gone WoW with Sil and Raven. That was great fun too & it turned out we all had a lot more in common than I expected. I've been invited back at a future date so I am looking forward to that already!

So in just about 2 weeks, I've done 3 guest spots and recorded 2 shows with Marcus, gone back to work, caught up there and had a birthday week so I guess it's not surprising that I've been a little slow posting here!

This last week has been strange too - I'm back to my regular full hours at work but I've been a bit out of it all to be honest. My Doc gave me some new medication which seems to be doing its' job but I think it's making me spacy - I actually caught myself reading Twitter the other evening and I had to remind myself to scroll! However that could also be an effect of the previous 2 weeks and lack of sleep in general, hopefully these meds will help all round and I'll be back to normal soon.

I need to be - I've done nothing productive again today and I have a huge list of things to do before I fly back to the States in a few weeks! That's given me something to look forward to as well so I'm staying as positive as I can in between sleeping at random times! I'm also expecting delivery of my new PC tomorrow - I really am struggling to wait patiently for that - my current set-up is kind of old and I'm only running 2Gb of RAM as well. Roll on tomorrow and WoW on high settings for the first time ever!

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I Wish You Enough

This is doing the rounds on Facebook at the moment and as I was writing my 2013 review on AH Addict, it came to mind. So just a short post here for my New Year's Eve post rather than repeat everything and my thanks for all your support and comments over the last year. They mean a lot to me <3 xxx

I wish you enough sun to keep your attitude bright.
I wish you enough rain to appreciate the sun more.
I wish you enough happiness to keep your spirit alive.
I wish you enough pain so that the smallest joys in life appear much bigger.
I wish you enough gain to satisfy your wanting.
I wish you enough loss to appreciate all that you possess.
I wish you enough hellos to get you through the final good-bye.

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Baby Shaman On The Move!

If you visit my main blog about gold making in WoW, Auction House Addict, you'll have seen that I have been working on a little project for the month of December. I called it my 30 Minutes a Day project and it involves spending just 15 minutes a day leveling one alt and 15 minutes a day in the Auction House on another. As I promised myself a baby Shaman for Alt Appreciation Week and never got around to it at the time, I chose a Dwarf Shaman to be my leveling alt.

Anyway, it turned out that the best laid plans of mice and men didn't take into account how hard it is to make any progress with questing for just 15 minutes a day so I changed it up a bit & decided to make it more flexible - basically a maximum of 2 hours leveling per week. I haven't reported on my leveling progress over on the other blog so I thought I'd put it here - it makes sense as my gold making readers probably aren't that interested in my leveling adventures after all!

So with a slow start and no heirlooms, no friends and no back up from other alts, my baby Shammy, Lyssara was born in Coldridge Valley. The first few days were very slow - 15 minutes really isn't very long at all to be honest and it quickly started getting boring before I even left the Valley to head to Kharanos.

Once the latest patch update hit and we could send heirlooms to other servers, I decided to see what I had available on my main server and send them over. It turns out, I didn't have any intellect leather/mail gear - I have the agility leather from leveling my Rogue and the agility leather/mail from leveling my Hunter. Luckily though, my main is in a level 25 guild with access to the guild heirlooms so I bought those and sent them over.

I looked up Icy Veins and various other sites to see what an Enhancement Shaman needed and saw that the cloth heirlooms weren't too bad for low levels so I nipped back to my main server and sent some cloth heirlooms over too, as well as the staff.

What a difference heirlooms make! I guess I've used heirlooms since my second alt four years ago so it was a rude awakening indeed. So relieved to have them available cross server now too. A lot has changed since I last leveled through Dun Morogh too - Steelgrill's Depot was always the place to find a Bronze Tube to sell for a bit of gold but now it has a fancy Ultrasafe Personnel Launcher which comes fully equipped with a VLD Parachute (Very Late Deployment). I was lucky enough to not get splatted and made it over to the next area for questing but the best bit is that I got the Going Down achievement & some great screenshots too!

I hit level 13 last night and arrived in Loch Modan ready to start my next zone but not before noticing these guys. I'm not sure I ever noticed them before but it's been so long, I may have just forgotten them! Blogger is messing with the picture colors but the night sky was super dark & the stars and clouds really stood out. I murdered my way through a whole valley of troggs before finally getting enough teeth to complete the quest and headed back to Captain Rugelfuss.

I'm enjoying her so far but then I enjoyed my Elemental Shaman who got to 50-something before being unceremoniously deleted. I can't even remember why I deleted her now but I hope I'm not tempted to delete this one after this project is over!

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My Life Right Now

If you follow me on Twitter or read my other blog AH Addict, you may have seen me mention that I'm going into hospital next week. I've had a few messages asking if I'm ok and wishing me well so I thought I'd just let y'all know what's happening.

If you don't like medical or personal stuff, you may want to skip the rest of this post - it kinda got away from me! Just know that I'm ok and not gonna stop blogging anytime soon!

If you're a relatively new reader/follower, you may not know that I had Breast Cancer last year. I was incredibly lucky not to need chemotherapy or radiation treatment but due to the possible aggressiveness of the tumour type, I did have to have a full mastectomy. That all went very smoothly and I like to think I coped well with losing a breast. My gold blogging friends were really supportive and I'm sure I'd have been more of a mess without them cheering me on.

Due to the type of tumour, I wasn't offered an immediate reconstruction, just in case they needed to go back in & fix something else. Also chemotherapy & radiation therapy can change the skin texture and affect reconstructions adversely so I was offered delayed reconstruction instead. If you watch the news, you may have seen it reported that Angelina Jolie had a double mastectomy - well yes, she did but she had immediate reconstruction too. That meant only one operation to remove the breast tissue and replace it with implants - they saved her skin & probably nipples too so she went through a lot but all in one go.

Delayed reconstruction is a whole different ball game. For starters, I have no 'spare' skin under which to put an implant so one option is to have a tiny inflatable implant inserted which is then slowly expanded over time to stretch the skin I do have. Once there is enough skin, then a normal size implant is put in place and hopefully, that would be the end of the story.

The other option is much more involved - taking a chunk of your own flesh (usually belly fat or lower back, just above bum cheeks) and using microsurgery, attach it and all the related blood vessels to your chest. If everything goes well, you can have a nipple tattooed in later. But this option is a 10 hour surgery followed by a week in an Intensive Nursing ward. Immobilised to prevent the tiny blood vessel stitches from tearing, catheterised because you can't get up for 3 days at least and special leg things to keep the blood moving and prevent blood clots!

My local Breast Care Unit are fantastic. They have a regular 'show & tell' type evening for ladies in my situation. It's all very impersonal to be told how reconstruction works but to see other ladies who have had all the various procedures and to hear their stories makes it so much more real. That was probably the most upsetting evening of the whole experience. The ladies were great but I reacted badly to the scars and as I'd already half decided to refuse reconstruction, that evening just hardened my resolve.

Not only did I refuse reconstruction, I decided I didn't want to spend the rest of my life worrying about my falsie showing through my blouses or even worse, falling out of my bra. I like to scuba dive and swim but I didn't want a falsie in a swimsuit! I started going to the gym too and I want to run. Again, can you imagine my falsie falling out onto the treadmill whilst I'm running there? It would be hysterically funny but I don't want that either!

So I opted for a second mastectomy. I've had to fight to get them to remove healthy tissue though. Apparently it's not a normal reaction so I've had some counselling and numerous Doctors asking me for my reasons and am I sure, over and over again. I finally convinced them that this is what I want so next week, I'm having a second mastectomy. It's a relatively simple 2 hour procedure and I may even be home the same day although it's more likely to be an overnight stay if I need a drain put in.

If it goes as well as last time, you probably won't even miss me! Once I was out of the recovery room and back on the ward, I paid for internet time and was back online within about 7 hours of arriving at the hospital! I came home the following day at lunchtime and was back in WoW within 2 or 3 hours of getting back!

I'm sorry if this is too much information but I have some wonderful online friends who seem to be worried about me and this is my way of letting everyone know I'm ok, really, I am. I promise :)

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IntPiPoMo #1

IntPiPoMo #1

Ok, guess who didn't find the energy to level her baby Shaman the other day? Yup, me! I got sidetracked when looking for heirlooms in my alt banks for her though so I was full of good intentions! Instead I decided to level my baby Pandaren Monk so I could get out of the starting zone, chose a faction & actually GET TO A MAILBOX! I sent a bunch of stuff to her when I started her way back at the start of Mists & I have a horrible feeling it all bounced back to my equally abandoned Druid & has probably been deleted by now.

Not having leveled any Pandaren alts yet - you can imagine my surprise when I took the quest to ride in the balloon. At first I wasn't sure what I was seeing as I have to have my settings down pretty low. But sure enough - there's the Giant Turtle straight out of the Terry Pratchett Discworld books if I remember correctly. I loved the Turtle ships in Northrend too - I may have to visit just to get some screenies to add to this collection! In fact, I've just had inspiration for a theme for my month - pretty sure I can get 50 shots too!

Be back soon - gone shooting!

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