Gamez

Todays shame: I am not really a "gamer".

I do like playing computer games, but it's never been a regular hobby of mine, and the last "console" that I "owned" was the Sega Megadrive. Pretty sure Bunny has that now.

That's not to say that I'm a complete video gaming naif, I've often played on other people's machines and there are a few games that I've played to death over the years (looking at you Street Fighter 2 & Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3). But even after I found out Yuki had a bunch of games for the PS2 I didn't really play it regularly.

So, it was clear I needed to "level up" (see what I did there? I wanted to use l33t, but wasn't sure how to spell it and refused to look it up on principle). Partly because I have more time, and partly because Andy was here and we played a couple of games that I wanted to see through to the end, I've played three games for the first time recently and they're all good for one reason or another.


Turns out Yuki has both Silent Hill 2 & 4, and since they were strongly recommended to me by a friend I thought I owed it to her to give them a bash. I'm some way through #2 at the moment and it is pretty fun, if deeply flawed. The music and audio is, as everyone will tell you, amazing. But the actual controls are clunky, especially when you're trying to kill beasties, and every now and then there are puzzles or areas of the game that require you to just walk around a lot, and I have very little patience for that kind of stuff. They do their best to keep the tension high, but when I had to run a mile up the fucking road to find a map that told me to run all the way back again I wasn't too amused. So I spend a lot of the time shouting at the engine and the game itself, but I'm still looking forward to beating it and trying #4.


I don't know when I got the Neverhood, or where I got it from, but it's been on my computer for ages and I finally got it to work... kinda. The "video" bits still don't run well on Vista, but the other bits work just great and it's an amazing, surreal game. Which of course is to be expected since Doug TenNaple is a genius.

The last one I started was みんなのテニス which I believe is called Hotshots Tennis in the West. It's a simple, cartoony tennis game that I'm using for two reasons: 1) to overcome a loathing of tennis games that was instilled in me by having my ass handed to me so many times by Chris, Owen and Alyn and 2) to sate my appetite for unlocking things. The game has like a million characters, but you only start off with 2. Juicy.

Now that I think about it, I've still got quite a way to go before I'm a real "gamer" though. After all, these games all came out years ago. I like Penny Arcade! Do I get points for that?

Movie Review: [rec]

[REC] is a simple, well-executed, Spanish zombie movie that works with a concept so catchy that an ultra-faithful American remake followed less than a year after the original. It's not at all original, borrowing heavily from any number of other movies, but it is very well done, so much so that before long you're not really comparing it to anything.

I especially liked the pacing. It's a very short movie, the cut that I saw was only and hour and fifteen minutes, which is perfect. My pet hate in almost any art form is bad editing, and people who let things run on for no good reason. Which is nothing like saying I don't like long books, movies, albums or songs; I love lengthy pieces of work when that serves the art, it's just that so often I finish a movie thinking "well, that could have been twenty minutes shorter and twice as good". The pacing in [REC] is awesome, it starts slowly, then ups the stakes with a big burst of violence, then cranks the tension, then cranks the tension some more, then cranks the tension some more, then lets it all go in a final act that seems to get faster and faster and faster before it hits the final scene like a needle hitting the run-out groove. Perfect.

Oh man, I could rant about things being too long until the cows come home. Pretty much my whole problem with Harry Potter probably comes from reading the fourth book and wondering why it couldn't have been like a whole third shorter. After that, there was no way I could've sat through another one. There's creating your world, there's adding subplots to make the structure more interesting and engage your reader, and then there's telling us a whole load of crap that we don't need to know, and describing things that you have no need to describe.

Anyway, [REC]. THUMP! That was my stamp of approval hammering down on it, so check it out.