In the 99p store, situated where the 2-pound shop was:

Highlander Crisps you say?

In packs of 8 you say?

But…but surely…

There can be only one?

Right, that's that off my chest finally. Why I didn't buy any I guess I'll never know.

Oh yes, maybe it was because I'd spent so long trying to get a clear photo of the bloody things with people barging past all the time I figured a hasty retreat was the best option once done.

And it's amazing how self-conscious you feel getting your mobile out to take a photo in the 99p store…although in my case I wasn't likely to be mugged for it, more likely just pointed and laughed at for having such an old phone…

Actually, Whilst I'm thinking of wrongness I've noticed in shops (and I still have my mobile connected) I might as well upload this product too…

No. Just no. Taste the Goodness indeed.

Maybe I've got a filthy mind (ok, yes I know, there shouldn't be a maybe back there) but please, someone tell me I'm not the only one to think that that's not right…

Spoiler alert.

I'm going to be talking about things which some people may construe as spoilers.

Butch and Sundance die at the end.

There, don't say I didn't warn you.

What a bloody evil little game Braid is. Evil wolf in cutesy platform game clothing, pure and simple.

Don't think even Pikmin was this bad. This goes back as far as the babel fish puzzle, I'm sure. And it does it repeatedly too.

Oooh, My poor brainses, it's not used to such stresses.

And then there's the intellectual side of things everyone's raving about. Can't really comment on that yet as 'only' completed world five, still got world six and the attic (which I'm assuming (along with the house the worlds are in) would be world 1, seeing as there's no sign of that otherwise. Fingers crossed there's no attic bug like in Jet Set Willy.

But from all the signs so far it's certainly interesting enough, think the last time a game had me thinking about philosphical issues not directly linked to the game it was Frankie goes to Hollywood on the c64 or Deus ex Machina (again, on the 64). Oh, and Bioshock. Keep forgetting that since trading it it. Maybe I should pick it up on the cheap again now there's extra content available.

Strangely enough, Alter Ego on the c64? Entertaining enough but not quit to the same level as Frankie or Deus (pretentious though they both were)

But anyway, what a bloody evil little game it is….need to open 2 doors with 1 (1-use) key? Open the first door, rewind to before the key was used and use it again to open the second door. Nice. Like your thinking.

Then try that a 2nd time and find the puzzle's different in such a way you can't use that technique. Ooooh, you tricky bugger, going to play it like that are you? Right…

Master that and then find out you have the use the key and then the sodding shadow of the key…jeeeez. It's like going through Portal on hard having to relearn everything all over again.

Actually, there's a good example. I hope it all ends as well as portal did, right down to a lovely little song that I'm still humming to myself months later. Although, with this trying to be, for all intents and purposes, P4 (Proust-Plus-Platform-Puzzle), I'm suspecting it ain't going to be a happy ending…

Ah well, having had the mother in law visit for the week and having to put up with saturday night itv karaoke horror, I'm sure my brain needs the mental stimulation. Although I also suspect my brain's not quite sure what's hit it, having the workout that braid/P4's given it before being subjected to the horrors of some fat bint who looks like she's been dipped in bisto bellowing along to celine dion/amy winehouse, while <cough> allegedly <cough> a computer called sam listens in and rates their perfomance based on a few key words. That's why howling bisto woman won herself enough to pay for her caravan and the (ok, I admit it, fairly cute) semi-professional backing singer got diddly-squat. I thought it strange how they mentioned the winning one's 'friend in the audience' was actually one of their professional singers paid to be there.

I didn't just faze out and dream that bit did I?

Tis quite possible, the state my brain's in now…maybe now's the ideal time for a session on Space Giraffe.

And don't get me started on that game. An article on Kotaku mentioned reasoning behind pricing braid so high was "to avoid the space giraffe problem". There was no space giraffe problem. Unfortunately for the Yak, there was a space giraffe bloody bargain, combined with a space giraffe dearth of people with any feckin taste. It's xbox live, it's full of teenagers, Halo 3 rednecks and teenage Halo 3 rednecks. There's only a small cadre of us who like stuff like Space Giraffe and Katamari. And, it would appear, very few of us read kotaku. I certainly wasn't going to start arguing against people on there.

Google "arguing internet special olympics" for good reason why.

Me? I've loved Yaks work since the fourth game I ever owned, Attack of the Mutant Camels.

(1st=Depthcharge, 2nd-JSW, 3rd=BMX racers. Although, thinking back, maybe AMC was 2nd, as I had that for xmas, whereas JSW and BMX racers were bought after with ten quids worth of xmas cash…)

When AMC/RMC, Gridrunner/Matrix/Voidrunner, Laser Zone and Sheep in Space appear on live, fully brought up to date with all the trippy power of the 360, priced at 1600 points each, I'll be honour bound to buy them there and then. And then I won't just be remembering lost times, I'll be reliving them over and over again…

(in HD, with 5.1 dolby digital surround sound and full rumble (including shake your fillings loose aura interactor backpack)

Who needs a konix multisystem anyway?;)

And in the unlikely event of Yak happening to be reading this, here's a picture of my parents newest neighbours as part payment ;)

Teh Fleffeh!

So, it seems it's been over a year since I posted on here.

Am I too grumpy to even use a blog I helped to create?

Possibly. However, It's probably more likely I've got grumpy-block….

Hmmm, not much to say about this, as not actually live yet but if this actually works as they're advertising then I won't mind the fact they got the domain www.gog.com. Of course, they're saying it stands for good old games rather than grumpy old geeks but hey, I like old games, I like cheap games, what's not to like?

Think I might reinstall Fallout 2 tonight tho. Or maybe Shogo:MAD ;)

The one problem with the plan I suspect, is that people like myself and Psybernoid are probably their target market and we've already played most of the good old games (and in psybernoids case, they're prolly all still in boxes in a certain bedroom cupboard) but maybe it'll mean I actually get round to finally playing Giants: Citizen Kabuto or Beyond Good and Evil sometime…

Actually, who am I trying to kid? I've had both of them on disk for how many years and still not even got round to installing them…

So, the normally socially inadequate me actually went out on Friday night.

With people from work, to celebrate a few combined birthdays.

Went to a few trendy bars and drank fairly large amounts of cider

(well, fairly large for me, lightweight that I am)

And even though it was all horribly normal and trendy, good fun was had. And photos were taken.

(But not by me for once since my lomo bit the dust and hasn't been replaced yet. )

So, come monday morning, chatting with folks about the fun that had been had, ask about who was taking pics and where they may have uploaded them?

Facebook.

Sodding facebook. Great. Marvellous.

"Super. Smashing. Lovely. Great." I might say, if I were a sarcastic Jim Bowen.

So, you're saying you went to all the 'trouble' of taking pics, downloading them from your camera/phone, cropping/cleaning them, and uploading them to the net, only to fail miserably in the last step by uploading them to somewhere that only allows people to view them if they're a member? FFS what has the internet turned into? Whatever hapened to "Information longs to be free"? I thought these sodding walled gardens went out of fashion in the 90's?

It's the internet, it's designed for the easy sharing of information (and pr0n, obviously) - you want to send me a message you can email me. You could IM me if I bothered with messaging systems these days. You could send me a message on my mobile or my 360.

Or, hey, here's an old fashioned thought, I also have a phone number you can ring or -heaven forbid- an actual address you could write to…

Now, with these fairly accepted methods of communication I get a fair amount of spam and junk mail already. Nothing I can't deal with at present but I'm happy enough with that amount and don't want more. You want me to sign up to something that then gives anyother way for spam to get to me? No thanks, I already read everybody elses at work, I don't want to see it all again.

You want to show me some pics, stick em up on a website or if that's too tricky, use flickr or fotopic or one of the multitude of image hosting sites. Don't stick them up on somewhere like facebook, that's just bloody annoying. You've gone through all that trouble of uploading your pics so you can do what with them? Show them to people on facebook and only facebook? Bravo. At least if you upload pics to an open site you can use them elsewhere, but facebook? Gaaaah.

And hey, let's not forget the whole point of facebook, the social networking side of things - now I can sign up for yet another way for people who I may not want to be in touch with to get in touch with me. I've already got friendsreunited for that - That gets me all the messages from Ex's and people I knew from uni that I need, thanks. I don't really want to go through the rigmarole of signing up to yet another service so I can show people that I know:

a) Some of my own relatives

b) My boss, and quite probably my boss's boss's boss.

c) People I know from work but wouldn't necessarily call 'friends'

d) People I knew at School/University/previous jobs but haven't seen or spoken to in 10-20 years

e) A few people from such-and-such mailing list/forum/clan

This all has, of course, nothing to do with the prospect of only having 5 'friends' and everyone else in the world having eleventy billion. If I cared about that then this site would be up on blogger or some such popular site, wouldn't it? Somewhere were it might gather some hits rather than sulking in this quiet little corner of the internet by itself…

Having said all that, I think Virb looks a bit more interesting than most, if only because it's got last.fm style music tracking.

Unfortunately, at a glance, it only appears to be for iTunes and I'm still a staunch Winamp/Media Player Classic user…and I'm already on last.fm anyway, so what's the point?

Bah. I'm going back to being a hermit again, it's easier and just generally less wanky.

If I DO go out again, I shall just have to get my lomo fixed beforehand and then not show anyone the pics. That'll teach em.

So many months, so few posts, and now…what on earth could drag me back to the keyboard to rant after so many other things have been and gone and been left uncommented?

How about Hayden Christensen being mooted as playing Case in the film version of Neuromancer? 

No.

Please no.

He didn't single-handedly ruin the star wars prequels he was in but he certainly didn't help matters.

Jumper looks like it could've been an interesting film (and I was looking forward to plenty of poor B3ta spinoffs like Cardigan or Sweater) but I've not yet seen a single good review of that. I've certainly not seen anything that would give the impression he's a good actor let down by a poor film, so I'm assuming he's as bad in that as he was in Star Wars. Anyone who knows me will know that that doesn't necessarily mean I won't watch Jumper anyway though - There's many a bad film I actually enjoy, and it might be the good kind of bad - i.e. Mortal Kombat 1 rather than Mortal Kombat 2. Resident Evil rather than Resident Evil Apocalypse. And getting back to the William Gibson/Sprawl side of things, I'll include Johnny Mnemonic in my list of poor films that I "don't actually mind".

Did I just admit that to the net? Hmmm. Ok, I'm sorry. I know it's shockingly awful and dated and corny and every criticism you may throw at it is probably entirely correct and justified but still…it's Johnny Mnemonic! It's almost there! /Izzard "In my miiiiiind!"

And Keanu, ok so he's just a great big dumb plank in the film but I could live with that, I could see Johnny being like that.

Something in my mind keeps telling me "Just imagine how kickass it would be if it was good!" and I keep watching…

But Hayden Christensen as Case? No. Just no. Please somebody stop this sick joke now. I'd rather they didn't make the film at all. I'd rather it stayed as a dream in my head, rather it remained only as a book, a series of mp3s for long car journeys and a dated old game on my c64 I'll never play again.

Neuromancer > Blade Runner in my mind and casting this charisma-bypass of an 'actor' in the lead role is just absolute heresy.

It'd be like Blade Runner remade as an action movie starring Vin Diesel, retiring replicants left right and centre.

It'd be like a Hanna-Barbera or Filmation version of Ghost in the Shell

It'd be like taking a classic Asimov book and turning it into a Will Smith action movie complete with kickass motorbike chase sequence.

Oh, wait.

Oh Frak.

Poorly updated sites? How annoying is it when you go to a site and it's still exactly the same as the last time you went there? And what's even worse is you don't even go there that often. T'choh, I dunno, buncha bloody losers running that place.

Oh yeah. And forgetfulness, that's feckin' annoying too isn't it? Keep meaning to write a post and then when you finally get the time to write it,you can't remember what you were going to write. At all. On the flipside, most things seem new and exciting when you're forgetful, as as far as you're concerned, whenever you hear/see somethin, it's the first you've heard of it/first time you've ever seen it. I'm suprised I don't wander around the place with a permanent expression of amazement plastered across my big dumb face.

Actually, thinking of which, I had that expression when I saw this clip just now - I think it was the bit about 'do the puppet master!' that did it for me…It's a bit different to how Heinlein envisaged the puppet masters I'm sure…

I'm reminded of seeing Jeremy Irons doing Playschool/Playaway, and also why Elijah Wood shouldn't be allowed any more Sunny Delight. Kia-ora, that's one thing (the whole set looks to me like 'it's too orangey for crows'), but Sunny D obviously does very very bad things to hobbitsss…

(was Kia-Ora a gateway drug to harder 'soft' drinks like Sunny D I wonder?)

Ok, so there I was, ambling along down the high street of a local town and what did I see?

Yup, a Moscow State Circus poster.

Seems this clown is hell-bent on being a repressed memory to every child nationwide. 

Firstly, take note of this word:

Voi·là

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/voila

It's a nice enough word, isn't it? Does the job, nice and short, ends in a nice flourish. You can see why we appropriated it from the French.

(Notice we left them with:

a) "Bof" (the audible shrug) and

b) "Hon-hi-hon-hi-hon"

(the audible "Why look at me, I am zee epitomy of France! I wear a stripy top and beret, carry zee onions round my neck and am loving zat crazee guy Jerry Lewis"))

Rampant xenophobia of the French aside, let us consider now this word, often used in its place

Vi·o·la

Pronunciation [vee-oh-luh]
noun 

 http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/viola

Right. Now that's done, and you can see that they're two quite different words, no-one ever need mix them up again, need they?

(although to be honest, I've never heard or seen anyone accidentally calling a stringed instrument of the violin family a 'Voila', I've only ever seen it done t'other way round…Can you tell it's been narking me off?)

Maybe at a later date, we can cover the correct usage of the phrase "Could have", possibly with an advanced course on how to abbreviate the phrase with an apostrophe. Actually, don't get me started on those, misuse of apostrophes has been covered already (i.e. done to death) by people far more intelligent/boring than I…

(quick hint = "Could of" is meaningless, knuckle-dragging drivel, branding you an utter dribbling moron if you say or type it)

Well, as we suspected, that was a bloody shambles wasn't it?

Fairly suprised by the end result tho, found the mix of music this year quite varied but hadn't rated Serbias entry at all. Nothing really jumped out at me as being the winner, there were just differing levels of awfulness.

Nice to see some countries had taken note of Lordi winning last year though, so we at least had a few songs that were more guitar-heavy than usual, even if they did sound like Evanescance b-sides. And there was still plenty of variety with blues, jazz and even 70's Glam-rock (wtf!?) represented alongside the usual borat-sings-ricky-martin efforts.

Even with the extra variety livening things up however, I didn't think the quality of the singing was up to much, in particular;

Bulgaria (nice entry, and sung ok, but I think her vocal range needed to be a bit (?) longer? wider? taller? not sure of the correct terminology, but it just seemed a bit flat)

and Ireland (who only just stopped short of dressing as drunken, Guinness-swigging Leprechauns, kissing the blarney stone and singing about their lucky charms. Ah begorrah.)

Speaking of which, Terry's commentary was top class as usual, like a favourite uncle half-cut on cheap sherry - I dread to think who they'll get in to replace him when he finally decides to hand the gig over to someone else. Eddie Izzard or Bill Bailey would be good, but I'm scared they'll get some irritating twunt like Graham Norton to do it instead…Still, only criticism I can give poor old Tel would be about him constantly harping on about the rampant block-voting that goes on - He didn't seem to complain when Ireland and Malta gave us points, and they certainly weren't for the quality of our song was it?

(12 points Malta? Are you all on crack or what? We you listening to the same song as the rest of us?)

Unfortunately, due to these sympathy votes, we actually end up with 19 ill-gotten points, rather than the nul points we so obviously deserved for foisting Scooch upon Europe. So, now europe has something else to add to their list of the dross to come from Britain - a lack of mixer taps, football hooligans, (supposedly) awful cuisine and now music in Eurovision so bad it relys on sympathy votes to be rated equal to France (who haven't won since '77 fact fans)…

And what was with the smutty remarks about 'salted nuts sir?' and 'something to suck on for landing, sir?' during the song? Was that honestly meant to be funny? If it was at least funny it would have been something but it was as painful to watch as the mad Finnish bint dressed in pink trying to pretend she'd won the chance to present and that's why her presenting skills were so godawful.

And speaking of godawful (but wanting to not carry on about scooch), Lets have a quick reminder of the Ukraine's entry.

Right. Well, ok, that's to be expected each year at Eurovision really isn't it?

But, 2nd place? You what?

Have to admit though, that one really did throw a spanner in the works of my thinking how it was going to work this year. There I was, quite logically (I assumed), thinking that we'd have some credible music this year, and it'd should show the idots who gave scooch the job that decent artists and decent music was the way to go rather than the usual tacky eurotrash-end-credits rejects. And then ukraines entry romped up the scoreboard and came second…so much for my theory.

What're the odds we'll put forward the same old tat again next year, the logic being that if the Ukraine could do it, so can we? Ignoring the fact that

a) The Ukraine didn't actually win, it was an odd looking woman singing a rather dull song, and

b) We've done shit music the past few years and have failed miserably every time…time for a change methinks.