January 2012
35 posts
Anonymous asked: Someone clearly didn't get many luvs on bebo.
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When streaming services go to war, nobody wins
Netflix has been on the scene for about a month now - for £5.99 a month, you’re given unlimited access to a frankly mahoosive array of TV shows and movies. I’ve been using it religiously lately, and the fact that it’s unlimited is a massive advantage. Contrast that with LOVEFiLM, a company I’ve been using for a couple of years now, who give me four hours of viewing time...
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Rest in peace Bebo, you egregious pile of shit
Hello there. Good to meet you all. We are gathered here today to remember our dear friend Bebo, who has passed into the ether as we know it, accessible only from the Internet Archive forever more. Many of us will remember it dearly, some of us less fondly - but crucially, all the same, we will remember it. Bebo, you were a beautiful animal. You were created as “a very good version of...
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Film Review: The Descendants (5/5)
The Descendants isn’t, despite its initial pushing of the ancestry of Hawaii resident and 25,000 acre land trustee Matt King (George Clooney), a film about one’s family past. Rather, it is about King examining his current and present situation, and making amends for his until-now lacklustre attempts at being a father and a husband in order to prepare for the future. The catalyst in...
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Hitting the occasional wall
After leaving the Global Game Jam last night, I found myself feeling a little hollow and a little purposeless. Attending last year’s Jam was a voyage of great purpose, very little sleep and paranoia, delusions, anger, sadness and unbridled joy - simply because I was there to sketch out a 20,000 word script which would, over the coming months, become a completed and published book. This...
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A lost pilgrim in an unknown land
Arriving at this year’s Scottish Game Jam was a more surreal experience than I may have expected. 2012’s Jam is, for me, a serving of salad rather than a full fat roast. There’s no book to write today, just a passive pair of eyes with which to observe. The Global Game Jam began in 2009 and is a driving creative force in the developing games development market - especially...
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Note To Self: Remember To Not Procrastinate
I can’t think of anything to write today. This evening, I’ve prepared a couple of articles, reviews, what have you for the sites I’m writing for at the moment, and have been awake since 1pm after getting home at 3.30am this morning. I have spent the entire day sat on my ass playing Soul Calibur V. To some, this is living, and for today, it was - braindead, soulless,...
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Advice For The Aspiring Games Writer: Get a Day...
I’ve been writing about games for about four years - and by “writing about games”, I don’t mean on a professional, reliable basis. I’m not a powerful voice in the community, nor am I the most formidable of writers around - but I still find myself writing whenever I can about them, because I love them to bits. I’m not sure what I’d do outside of writing...
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Film Review: Coriolanus (4/5)
Coriolanus, a modernised adaptation of the Shakespearean tragedy, marks Ralph Fiennes’ debut cinematic foray into classical dramatics and his first shot at sitting in the director’s chair. Taking charge as the lead, a great and commanding Roman general initially named Martius but later adopting the honorary title lent to the film, Fiennes makes well on both acting and directing...
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It's 2012. Why am I still playing Gran Turismo 5...
I’ve been noticing something in my gaming habits lately. Despite having an unplayed gaming pile of shame the width of Calcutta and more spare time than a watch 11 hours slow, I always seem to find an hour or so in my day - if not more - for a spot of Gran Turismo 5. A game more than a year old, forever drowned in multi-hundred megabyte patch downloads and about as current and as popular as...
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Film Review: Goon (3/5)
For all of its team spirit, brandishing of sticks and puck-smashing, Patrick Dowse’s Goon is not a film about ice hockey. It’s a film about “enforcers”, the biggest, burliest, meanest players on a team, who live to take and throw punches in the sport’s popularised mid-game punch-ups - rather than ever aim for what some might consider real glory. In particular,...
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Tiny Tower: A checklist of how to suck at...
It’s finally happened; I’m free! I’ve been too-long under the curse of digital tower-building crack, snorting the freebies and smoking the complimentary slow-burn dope up to the point that I’ve decided I just don’t want to ride the rollercoaster anymore. I’ve uninstalled Tiny Tower. Like all bad trips, Tiny Tower is a lesson in mediocrity that starts out...
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Film Review: Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows...
Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows is a well-endowed, expertly crafted and savvy action flick, twice the film of its original brother. Taking place across a pan-European array of settings and dazzling set-pieces, it betters upon everything Guy Ritchie’s original had to offer and throws in a more formidable and enjoyable bad guy for equal measure. A year has passed since the events of...
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Film Review: Shame (5/5)
Director Steve McQueen and Michael Fassbender reunited last year for their second joint project since 2008’s Hunger. Their new collaboration, Shame, is an intense and unapologetically graphic examination of a sex addict and his insatiable obsession with his habit. Fassbender plays Brandon, a man carefully maintaining and cultivating his straight-laced work image in order to disguise...
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Flow: The perfect state of mind, detrimental to...
There’s a moment of alcohol intoxication in which your brain hits its prime, in which everything becomes concentrated into the single moment in which it occurs and everything, at that exact second, is precise, certain and solid. It’s referred to in the programming world as the “Ballmer Peak”, an exact moment in a precise curve at which a computer programmer is able to code...
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Film Review: Haywire (3/5)
Haywire is an effortlessly stylish and fast-paced espionage thriller straight from the mind of Steven Soderbergh (Ocean’s Eleven, Che). The famously versatile director has lent his weight to an action film that is equal parts smooth spy work and down-and-dirty Bourne-esque fisticuffs, and handles both halves with equal aplomb. The less said about the messy and incoherent plot that...
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Sabotage, stamps and after-school telly: The Truth...
If you didn’t know by now, I work in a toy shop. When you work in a toy shop, as with any shop, you soon learn a lot about everything you sell. If you’re creative enough, you might even be able to deduce things you weren’t sure you would’ve known otherwise. Things like the fact that Bob the Builder, Fireman Sam and Postman Pat are all CONMEN. Ripoff merchants....
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Film Review: War Horse (2/5)
[[posterous-content:pid___0]] War Horse is a two and a half hour schmaltzy jaunt through World War I from the point of view of Joey, a thoroughbred horse bought on a hunch from a farmyard auction by Ted Narracott, a boozing old farmer with a bad leg (Peter Mullan). His son, and star of the film for the first hour and final 30 minutes, Albert (Jeremy Irvine) takes to the horse and it takes to him....
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Film Review: War Horse (2/5)
[[posterous-content:pid___0]] War Horse is a two and a half hour schmaltzy jaunt through World War I from the point of view of Joey, a thoroughbred horse bought on a hunch from a farmyard auction by Ted Narracott, a boozing old farmer with a bad leg (Peter Mullan). His son, and star of the film for the first hour and final 30 minutes, Albert (Jeremy Irvine) takes to the horse and it takes to him....
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How do you convert a technophobic to Blu-ray?
Yesterday, I tried to convert my girlfriend to Blu-ray. Not literally convert her into a disc-based format, obviously, but just turn her to the side of super shiny, deep-colour, razor-sharp movie goodness. Naturally, it didn’t work. With my laptop on her knees and a TV in front of her, I simulcast Transformers (it was the first thing to hand) on DVD and Blu-ray, having her look at...
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Why Monopoly Is The Ultimate Psychological Test
There are many ways for a modern day, 21st century psychologist to determine a patient’s psyche: the classic Rorschach inkblot test, personality tests and self-assessment tests like the Beck Depression Inventory (which, as far as I can surmise, does not involve listening to Beck for as long as one can take it before falling into a deep, incurable sadness). Each of these methods is robust,...
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Ode to a Yoghurt Pot: A Poem
Oh dear, oh dear, poor yoghurt pot, What have they done to you? Abandoned here on this here train, With nary a thing to do. Whilst travelling on my commute so, From the cinema to my home, I stumbled on your empty shell, All eaten and alone. What happened to you, poor yoghurt pot, On what journey do you go? At which stop do you disembark, And does your future glow? ...
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Just another day in Skyrim for the Ladies Air...
VIDEO0105.3gp Watch on Posterous It’s fantastic that, when I finally come across a bug in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, it’s hilarious, so perfect, and neither maddening nor game-ruinous. Presenting: the Ladies Air Swimmers.
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Film Review: Hugo (4/5)
Hugo, Martin Scorsese’s latest film, is a family adventure, a tribute to the invention and art of cinema itself and a wonderful adaption of a novel based on a true story all rolled into one. It feels like a film Scorsese, a man known for his love of preserving the art of cinema, was born to make, and yet it is unlike any other film he has produced. It stars Asa Butterfield, (The Boy...
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Year of Cinema: Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol...
As far as openers go, the first film in my Year of Cinema couldn’t have offered more bang for my buck. Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol wastes no time in delivering a bombastic presentation of set piece upon set piece, assaulting your eyes and ears to the best of its ability in the space of two hours. Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) has been banged up in a high-security Moscow prison for a...
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Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and why I'll never be an...
Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has been doing the rounds lately, appearing everywhere from gaming blogs to YouTube to Twitter and, y’know, everywhere on the internet ever. I’ve been playing through it too, but not so I can hear town guards tell me they’ve taken an arrow to the knee, or so I can post funny pictures of dragons flying backwards. Frankly, I’ve...
18 tags
Global Game Jam 2012 is approaching: my book is...
As is now tradition every January, the IGDA-organised Global Game Jam development marathon is fast approaching. GGJ 2012 takes place from the evening of Friday 27th through to the evening of Sunday 29th and in the 48 hours in between programmers, artists, designers and more will band together to create some goddamn amazing videogames based on similar themes, allowing for some serious...
6 tags
In Borgen, the Danes have showed us all how to...
It’s been a while since I’ve sat down and dedicated myself to a thoughtful and well-produced television series but in Borgen, a Danish political drama produced by the same company behind The Killing (a thoughtful and well-produced television series I haven’t sat down and dedicated myself to yet), I think I’ve finally found a gripping series I’ll find myself going...
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Passing time waiting for the bus? Try Bus Stop...
All over the country, every single day, people in Britain are presented with a common problem: how does one pass time waiting for the bus? Tapping your foot and glancing at your watch are properly old-skool and, as it turns out, don’t really help; headphones are tiresome; playing a game of Angry Birds on your phone is a waste of time as the bus will take 10 million hours to arrive by which...
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My 2012 Year of Cinema Reviews wants your input
With 2012 now in full swing, it’s high time I start making well on my resolutions. Highest priority of all is the promise I made to myself to write more, and to aid myself with this I’m declaring 2012 a personal year of cinema. For every movie I go to see - and I refuse to be choosy - I’ll be writing up a full-length review of a few hundred words, if not more. Fulfilling a year...
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Society isn't dead, at least on the underground
Back in December, I debated the so-called “Christmas Effect” - a social pattern which turned the joys of Christmas into a quality which turned us all talkative and friendly towards fellow strangers. It turns out alcohol does this too. Surprise surprise! On the Underground home from a night spent in a bar with beer and a Knob Creek or two, there was an Eastern European couple...
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I Don't Know About You But WipEout Quantum Seems...
The internet’s a fantastic place, full of all sorts of amazing discoveries made by scientists and other folk alike - there’s Rube Goldberg machines, some amazing things done with magnets and now, there’s, um, WipEout Quantum, from the “Japan Institute of Science and Technology”. They’ve purported to have perfected anti-gravity technology on a minute scale using...
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Making The Most of Today's Windy Weather
It’s a cold, wet, fierce and blustery day out there in Britain today. Should one dare to forage out into the world, you’ll be met with annihilation at the hands of wayward tree branches, wheelie bins and probably a flying child or two. Most people are very aware of this and so have chosen to remain inside while waiting the worst of it out - but those people will be wasting time on...
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Broken headphones are a bit like being able to...
This past New Year’s Eve, I experienced a most unexpected of epiphanies as merry partygoers made their way through streets and stations, arriving at an ultimate destination unknown fuelled by considerable consumptions of wines, spirits and beers. I wasn’t to be one of them, opting for the quiet night in (one would hope, as I write this on the eve of New Year itself, so whether or not I...
1 tag
New Year's Resolutions, as generic as they come
As 2012 rolls in amidst hangovers, scratched heads and the etchings of permanent marker on each other’s faces, there’s usually a moment of quiet contemplation or two a lot of us take to set our personal affairs in order - that ritual we call New Year’s Resolutions. As I’m an ordinary human being and not, unfortunately, an all-powerful superman and God, I’ve set some...
