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, 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?)

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)

So, another year, another bunch of entries.

Now, who could possibly forget last year, when Lordi took the title?

Personally I'm not a fan of Eurovision, never have been, and never will be. But last year, well, that was just pure entertainment - a bunch of latex-covered metal merchants playing what is generally a twee and pompous affair and they won!

So, all things considered, you would think that what happened last year, would be taken into account by all countries which participate in Eurovision this year.

You'd think that, but no. What the UK has put forward is frankly, a bloody joke.

Witness…Scooch.

Riiiight.

That's really representative of what the country produces in musical terms isn't it?

Why can't the people who work these things out actually approach some normal, hardworking bands and ask them to write a song?

I suppose the reason is that anyone with even a degree of musical talent, or one iota of self-esteem, isn't going to want to make a fool of themselves in this competition.

I suspect Lordi did it just for laughs, I really do. 

What is it with support lines thesedays?

Recently, I upgraded my 'net connection, except upgrade really couldn't be further from the truth.

Anyone really want a 'broadband' connection that's actually slower than a bloody dial-up modem? I know damned well I don't.

So, I'm left with little choice but to call our friends at BT support. Which is all fine & dandy except as is the current trend, I'm shuttled down the magic phone lines to a call center in India.

Now, whilst I have nothing against our good friends in other parts of the world, I find it somewhat perplexing that we have to deal with a call center in a completely different geographical location.

Yes, I understand that there's savings to be made, but it's plainly obvious that it's a corporate decision to cut costs, and get the cheapest solution possible. And sod the fact that they're not massively effective.

Anyway, that's deviating from my rant a little.

My beef is thus:-

Why can't large firms set up a support line where the people you speak to actually have a degree of sense, and not just go through a check list of complaints and solutions?

I'm sure that there actually are employees in such places, that get immensely frustrated by the fact that they know damned well how to solve a problem, but are unable to do so right away due to the inflexibility of the support scripts these firms put in place.

Now, speaking as a person who deals with the great unwashed when it comes to IT issues, and is (sometimes) fortunate enough to not be restricted by these guidelines. I really do honestly reckon that if current support line trends are scrapped, and replaced by people who actually know what they're doing. The world would be a damned better place.

Sure, the multi-nationals would have to spend more money, but the upshot of it would be more satisfied customers, and in the long run, cheaper support costs as those issues would be solved a damn sight quicker. 

Look at this. Saw this poster liberally slapped around town the other week.

Surely there's got to be some kind of law prohibiting the placing of disturbing images like this in public where anyone can see it?

Let alone covering half a large city in it?

I mean, really, there's no call for that is there? Look at that face.

Clowns are not right at the best of times, but that? That's just fecking freakish - that's not a smile or a laugh for a start, that's a scream.

A high pitched, insistent, bloodthirsty scream. He doesn't look like he's about to stab you in the gut, he looks like he already has and is now twisting the knife. And then the screaming starts, your face flecked with his spittle as he screams his long constant shriek, his stinking damp breath in your face never seeming to run out, screaming and screaming at you from only inches away, his furious howling just increasing in pitch and volume as the burning pain in your gut gets worse and worse as he plunges the blade into your stomach and chest again and again and again…

Don't get me wrong, I'm not someone who has an irrational fear of clowns, but that guy's not right.

Whoever decided he was a good way to advertise their circus is obviously not thinking too clearly. And the same goes for whoever said it was ok to paste this poster all over town. And also all the shop owners who put the posters up in their shop windows. I think Mr Shrieky-Stab the clown possibly visited them all…

Suffice to say, I shall not be patronising this circus at any foreseeable point in the future.