"This is a blog. It has a range of zero units."
Jesus I'm tired. Got to bed before midnight last night, but it wasn't enough to counteract the accumulative effect of too many late nights. In a suprisingly decent mood all the same, though. Caffeine, how I love thee, but you do make me feel rather odd when you wake up some parts of me and not others.
Advance Wars:Dual Strike turned up in the post the other day. Only three weeks after ordering it from Tesco online, but it was a bargaintastic £12.99 so I won't grumble too much. The original Advance Wars was, without question, my most played game on the GBA, and I've still got a couple of games running of the home-brew web version, so I'm expecting to enjoy it quite a bit. I've only played the first couple of missions so far. The touch-screen interface is perfect for what's basically a point-and-click game anyway, and it's nicely presented, but what's frustrating is that the optional tutorial that was included in the first game has now been unskipably rolled into the campaign, so I'm having to plow through missions in which, every time I select a unit, a couple of characters pop up and have a lengthy conversation along the lines of: "Hey, what's this?" "It's a tank. It can move like this." "Cool." Yeah, they're skippable by hitting the fiddly little "start" button, but it's still a pain in the tits. I expect that once I'm past the tutorial missions that I'll start enjoying the game a lot more, but it's baffling that they didn't think to make the tutorials skippable for those of us who have played an Advance Wars title before (not to mention the lengthy series of Japan-only games that preceeded them.)
We watched The Brothers Grimm the other night, Terry Gilliam's first film after the Don Quixote debacle. Grimm got pretty horrible reviews, but, it being Gilliam, we knew that it would be enjoyable to some degree. And it was on pay-per-view so we wouldn't have to go down the video shop.
The Brothers Grimm is frustratingly ok. It feels like a great film trapped within a mediocre one. Moments are pure Gilliam, visually lush and imaginative, while others are hobbled by some extremely clunky dialog and awful CGI that wouldn't look out of place on TV. One more draft of the script and a slightly bigger budget would have worked wonders, but presumably his post-Quixote reputation is such that coming up with the cash required to adequately realise his grand designs isn't so easy nowadays. A shame, that.
I still haven't seen Tideland, however.
Labels: diary, games, links, music
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Thursday, June 29, 2006
One Week On...
.. .from getting my DS, and other than a daily ten minutes on Brain Training (Got my brain age down to 25, from an initially awful 47), and a bit of Zoo Keeper (ace, but it makes my eyes go funny, and it seems a lot harder than the flash version that used to soak up my lunchtimes), I have, predictably, been on Animal Crossing most of the time. So far, I've caught loads of fish and butterflies, wrote an angry letter to a baboon chastising him for upsetting my bear friend, and, through the miracle of wi-fi technology, gone to visit a friend in another village, and traded fruit with him.
I am thirty years old.
Today, I am listening to "It's A Wonderful Life" by Sparklehorse, thanks to someone in work who brought it in. There is a rare joy in rediscovering an album that you killed by excessive play a long time ago then never listened to again.
"Disintegration" by The Cure is still rubbish, though, no matter what the kid from South Park says.
Tonight, I have absolutely nothing on my calendar, and given that I'm going through one of my periodic busy spells that punctuate long stretches as a lonely pariah, it's actually quite welcome. I plan on doing laundry, and tackling the teetering tower of dirty plates that are in the sink before they kill someone. Get me!
Friday, June 23, 2006
No Time To Blog...
... Sorry, but I'm too busy living an exceptionally twee alternative life in a village full of anthropomorphic animals right now. Come back later.
Labels: games
link | 0 comment(s) | links to this postThursday, June 22, 2006
Gordblessyew Mister Parcelforce
Or, as I put it in my text to R earlier: "My DS arrived!!!" Since under most circumstances I consider the user of multiple exclamation marks to be a sin only marginally less serious than, say, murder, you can tell that I'm quite excited. One day before the official release, too, which is nice, considering that I mostly expected it to turn up early next week sometime.
Labels: games
link | 3 comment(s) | links to this postFriday, June 16, 2006
I Believe In Surprising Giraffes
I had what was shaping up to be quite a lengthy post on this subject, but on reading it back it came across as slightly smug and patronising, so I chucked it. The basis of it, however, was that people tend to gravitate towards religion because, asides from cultural/familial pressures, the view of the universe that it offers - one in which there is an afterlife, someone looking out for you, and a system of perfect justice whereby bad people get their just deserts one way or another - is quite comforting and makes this life a more tolerable one.
Most people would call me an atheist, and I think that's probably a fair label, but I wonder if the reason that I am attracted to a world view in which the universe is purely mechanistic and there is no unknowable intelligence pulling the strings is, perhaps, for similar reasons. I don't particularly fear death. (Or rather, not existing. The horrible pain that often preceeds it scares me shitless, but no amount of religion is going to take that away.) I do, however, find the concept of a perfect deity who watches you at all times and could step in an alleviate all suffering but chooses not to because it's all part of some grand plan to which we are not privy, but are just pawns, far less palatable than the idea that the universe is simply a dumb mechanism, and when bad things happen to you then... welll... shit happens, it's nothing personal.
Second time round for this post, and this time it sounds like an excerpt from a teenager's diary. Oh well.
Because I can no longer post without mentioning the DS Lite that I don't have yet, I should probably mention that Zoo Keeper arrived today, making a total of three games that I can't play for another week. Bah.
Labels: games, philosophy
link | 0 comment(s) | links to this postMonday, June 12, 2006
Hot Brain
Pissing it down today, but it seems only appropriate for a Monday spent at work after a lovely, hot, sunny weekend. One in which - shock! - we actually left the house and did stuff, even if it was just within the confines of Glasgow. Adding to the weekend's series of unlikely events, on Saturday night I actually went to a club, and didn't complain about it and even had a bit of a dance.
It's the sun - it does weird things to me.
Today I have been listening to "Animamima", an album by Japanese guitar-noisenik Keiji Haino and 20-piece sitaar orchestra Sitaar Tah!, which I bought on a whim in Monorail based on some nice packaging and a breathlessly excited blurb that someone who works there had slipped into the front of the cover. Not particularly great reasons to buy an album, I know, and I pretty much expected it to be two hours of unlistenable noise that I'd play once and stick on eBay, or, worse still, egregiously keep around solely for "my record collection is better than your record collection"-type bragging rights.
Man, was I wrong.
It's not particularly tuneful, but nor is it the straight-up unstructured guitar-noise that I had come to expect, and realise that I didn't much enjoy listening to, having seen Haino perform at the Instal festival a couple of years ago. Instead, it is an unexpectedly beautiful thing which builds slowly from a bare tickling of the ears to a powerful meditative thrum that made me feel quite peculiar. Listening to it in work was something of a problem, as I tended to stop an stare into space for extended periods, but I felt oddly refreshed after taking off my headphones, as though I had just undergone the aural equivalent of being driven through a car-wash.
Speaking of cleaning my head, the second part of my DS order arrived today - Brain Training. I'm not sure how much truth there is in its claims to be able to improve your memory and mental agility with just a ten-minute session each day, but I'm willing to give it a go. My memory is absolutely shocking, and getting worse (dates in particular never seem to stick), so anything that might improve the situation has to be worth a shot.
Still two weeks to go before I can actually play the thing, of course. In fact, Brain Age was something of a test of Play.com's delivery practices. It was released on Friday, but I was hopeful that they would send it out in advance so that it would arrive on the release date. Sure enough, checking my account the day before showed me that they had posted it early, but it didn't actually arrive until this morning. Since I don't trust our postman to even bother putting a card through the door, I tend to have mail-order items delivered to work instead of the flat. It looks like the weekend of the 24th is going to be an odd one, then, where I sort-of want to go back to work on Monday, if just to pick up my new toy.
(Update - just posted a re-tooled version of my Kaiji Haino/Sitaar Tah enthusings on Diskant.)
Thursday, June 08, 2006
If The Devil Is Six, Then Frank Sinatra Is Seven
Frank and others cover The Pixies.
link | 0 comment(s) | links to this postTuesday, June 06, 2006
666
You know, if this is the apocalypse, it's a lot more pleasant than I'd imagined. It's a lovely, warm, sunny day, and it seems like summer has finally got it's arse out of bed and started work for the year. It's been a long time coming, too, after a long, cold, wet, miserable winter and, well, I hesitate to use the word "spring". "After-winter" maybe? "Winter 2"?
Oddly, it's so nice it makes me want to leave the country. I've been sort-of resisting the idea of going on holiday this year. Not that I wouldn't want to go somewhere, but we could be doing with saving up some cash just now. However, I've been given a wee taste of nice weather and now I'm hungry for more. Hopefully the weather will stay nice this weekend and we can get away for a wee trip somewhere close, but the thought of going away on a proper holday is getting more and more appealing, and, hey, it's more fun than paying bills, certainly.
Of course, my desire to save hasn't prevented me from pre-ordering one of these:
I've kinda fancied a DS for a while but was able to hold off until they announced the Lite. Frustratingly, I ordered it and a few games from play.com, who ship each part of an order as soon as it becomes available. I say frustratingly, because it means that I've got Animal Crossing sitting at home (and more to come), but I can do nothing more than read the manual and marvel at how small DS carts are until the end of the month, when the DS Lite gets officially released in the UK.
Off to see The Wicker Man tonight, which is getting a showing at the GFT because of the date. Hopefully it's the full "director's cut" version, and not the hacked-up original release. It's pretty unique among horror movies, I reckon, in that by the end of the film you find yourself siding with the "bad guys". Edward Woodward's god-fearing policeman, sent to Summer Isle to uncover the mystery of a girl who has disappeared, is such a self-righteous prick that you don't really mind when bad things start happening.
I was talking about the Wicker Man with one of my colleagues earlier today, and he pointed out something that I'd never noticed before. Without wanting to spoil anything for anyone who hasn't seen it, Edward Woodward's character is set up for an unpleasant fate right from, or, in fact, before, the beginning of the film, but is effectively offered a way out well before the end. If he'd just shagged Britt Eckland when he had the chance, it could have all been so different. Hard to have much sympathy for someone who turns down that sort of opportunity. link | 0 comment(s) | links to this post