26.point.1

Beowulf

// November 27th, 2007 // No Comments » // Reviews

Like a feature length edition of the darkest CBeebies cartoon you’ll ever see. Or Shrek without the donkey - and worse visuals. I was lucky enough to see this on digital screening (not quite the IMAX that other people have been lucky enough to see this on) and so the clarity was amazing. The film in itself was not. Yes, there is blood. Yes, there are guts. Yes, there are HUGE monsters and dragons and demons and ugly Danish brutes. And for all this, and all the fighting, and all the … what should be brilliant … the film actually manages to be very dull. The visuals flit between being brilliant and being very mediocre - some of the horse scenes are painful, some of the warrior characters look to be carbon copied for full scenes (need 12 people in helmets? Let’s use the same model over and over again…) and to add to all this the story pace cycles rapidly through full on speed to turtle crawl and back again every 10 minutes. Near the only thing that I liked about the entire film was the way that it made Angelina Jolie vaguely attractive again (probably the first time since Hackers) - as a demon she has the cutest little nose. 4/10

Shrooms

// November 23rd, 2007 // No Comments » // Reviews

Tonight I saw Shrooms. I always thought it would be on the wrong side of ‘good’ and didn’t really want to go in the first place - except there was little to do after work, and decided to ‘take it in’ with a workmate. So to say I was surprised by this movie is very much something. Of course, it’s not that I was surprised that it was ‘brilliant’ or even ‘good’ - I was surprised at just had abysmally BAD this movie is. With a plot straight out of something a 12 year old might write for a GCSE English assignment, with laughable characters who I literally laughed at over and over til the end of the 90 minutes, with a ‘twist’ that was guessed after only 30 minutes. From the first minute the film exudes crapness - yes, the movie is called shrooms, that probably means you don’t need to squeeze the word into the first 5 minutes of the movie about 94 times - and until the credits roll there isn’t a redeeming moment. Along the way, this movie takes even single Horror genre ‘idiot move’ and throws them at the unwilling watcher like they were nuggets of gold that can’t be lived without. The movie left me dizzy and exhausted, scared at how bad movies can actually be, and feeling that I’ve seen the worst movie I’ll see until the day I die. 0/10

Assassin’s Creed

// November 17th, 2007 // No Comments » // Reviews

There are already many reviews out there which detail how mediocre Assassin’s Creed is, so it seems totally stupid to me that I’d write another one - so instead I’ll write one which airs more on the side of the games graces, than it’s slightly gaping holes. For the younger people out there who come to games like Assassin’s Creed after games such as Splinter Cell, Tomb Raider or Hitman you will never understand the leap that this game represents. As someone who has now breached 30 years old I can remember when Prince of Persia was released on the Commodore 64 - it represented a mammoth step forwards in the way that games behaved and looked. From titles such as Blagger and New Zealand Story, the platform genre suddenly became “grown up” - they stopped using sprites which essentially had three or four states, and they became “fluid” - or at least as fluid as 1983 could handle. For me, seeing and playing Assassin’s Creed is akin to going back to that day, those days, with Prince of Persia. It is a truly emotional experience that takes me back almost 25 years ago. Now, the game itself is amazingly beautiful - the most beautiful game that I’ve ever seen! Unfortunately, the game is a little bit samey - with missions pretty much being the same from one to the next. The story is a little predictable (even with the wierd subplot - you’re not actually an assassin during the crusades it seems…), and the end a little quick to come - but this game was always going to be about the graphics, the way that Altair throws himself around these middle age cities with ease and looks amazing doing so. It’s simple to make him do it too, simple key combinations result in the most complex of manouvres - and to see the quite brilliantly fluid “counter attacks” that Altair can wield out have left me speechless more than once. We need Ubi or someone else to take the visuals and control of Assassin’s Creed and then apply it to a game with a little more life-span, and a bit more complexity - then the platform genre that started it’s evolution so long ago with Prince of Persia will truly have evolved into something special. 7/10

“If I watch for it, it will come”

// November 9th, 2007 // No Comments » // Random Stuff

As a child I remember quite vividly how I would wait at bus stops with my mum and gran and get bored that there was no bus coming. What I would do is run to the corner with the hopes of seeing a bus and then when one came into sight would run breathlessly back to the bus stop where my elders would be making the bus driver wait for me - slow runner even back then. Well, today I saw the strangest sight - a 40 year old woman doing exactly the same thing. She left her daugher and grand daughter at the bus stop and walked casually to the corner that the bus should have roared around 10 minutes earlier, and once perched there she proceeded to wait. All I can think is that she thought that if she patiently kept watch at the corner the bus driver would somehow know this and drive faster. That, or if she could relay news of the busses imminent arrival to her younglings then they would become less irate at having to wait. It was really just a strange moment that reminded me how retarded the general populous of Hull really are.

My iPod is going back

// November 9th, 2007 // No Comments » // Random Stuff, Reviews

After the crappy iPod Touch I got on release day miraculously repaired itself (mostly) I was pleasantly surprised 2 weeks ago when Apple delivered a second device to my office. Perplexed by this as I’d told TNT not to send me a new one I tucked the box into my bottom drawer and forgot completely about it - vowing to sell it if I’d not heard anything back from Apple or TNT by December. Well, yesterday I lost the ’sell’ opertunity as TNT have realised that they’ve given me 2 and not collected one and they want it back. Big Booooo-ness. Mind, I’m actually really happy now that I’ve opened my new iPod as it seems totally more responsive, and the headphone jack works properly too (my old one has started cutting out audio). So, all in all a good day - with another new iPod (my 7th in 4 years), just a shame that I can’t sell something to recoup the astronomical fee that it cost to buy it.

The Orange Box

// November 9th, 2007 // No Comments » // Reviews

Having returned my copy of Halo 3 to Zavvi (the new crap name for Virgin Megastore), I was told that they would not refund me for the game being shit (their prerogative I guess) but would give me an exchange. So, I plumbed for The ‘Orange Box’, which contains ‘HalfLife 2′ - a game which is about 3 years old along with a few new ‘add-ons’ to enhance the game play of what must be an awful game if it was made so long ago. Now, I played Half Life 2 once upon a time ago, on a crappy old PC which didn’t really make the best of the game - and so now to come to it on the XBox 360 I was expecting quite a bit. And it delivers, the graphics are amazing, the sound is atmospheric and the music moving and always just right to let you know what horrendous situation is waiting for you around the corner. The game play is stunning, with a great balance of ’shooting the shit’ out of everything, and also some nice puzzle play too - all with a great storyline which really helps move the game along. So, it’s EVERYTHING which Halo 3 isn’t. Along with HL2 in ‘The Orange Box’ is a game called portal, which is 19 levels of crazy puzzle play which sees you as a cyborg trying to complete a series of tests before realising that you’re going to die at the end and then overthrowing the controller - again, this is absolutely brilliant, and although I finished it in 5 hours on Normal, it’s an extra game, not a full blown affair like Halo 3 - and it’s better than Halo 3 too, with an amazing end sequence complete with brilliant musical ’sign out’ by the big bad. The final game in ‘The Orange Box’ is Team Fortress 2, which is a stunningly great multi player shooter which takes the conventions of first person shooters and adds comedy and classes to it - choose if you want to be a spy, a big gun, an engineer, and then run around and kill the opposing side - it’s truly brilliant. All in all, ‘The Orange Box’ only puts one foot wrong - the graphics are so slick that it gives me motion sickness - and any game that can do that is truly immersive and deserves as many stars as it is possible to give. Everyone should go out and buy this box, it’s Orange. 10/10

Let’s organise us some religion…

// November 4th, 2007 // No Comments » // Random Stuff

Who hates Organised Religion? I hate Organised Religion. Especially when then don’t practice what they preach… God forgives everyone who asks I thought?

Then why are the church, who are gods top peeps on Earth, so unwilling to turn the other cheek?

It’s GOD’S Car Park and £50 seems awful steep!

The day after Halloween

// November 2nd, 2007 // No Comments » // Random Stuff

Last night was Dave Crawford’s (He’s my now Ex Deputy MD) leaving do - I hijacked it for my birthday for the sake of not having to drag people out twice in the same week.

I went to bed at 6am this morning. I’m 31 on Tuesday and really way too old to be going to bed at 6am in the morning.

I got stamped, I got braceleted, I got stamped some more, and I danced with a transvestite. All before being totally unamazed with my first experience of a “Gentleman’s Lounge”. Hopefully it will be my last such experience. The glint of greed/’fear for her life from some 28 stone, hard as nails, sex-trafficking pimp’ in the young eastern European girls eyes as she asked “Sho, do you von’t a dansch?” is something that could make me hate women forever.

I altogether preferred dancing with the transvestite.

Maybe this says something about me…