Full of win

PlayTV could totally be the PS3's killer app.

If only he had a voice. Well, pen. And some paper.

Dear Dr. Breen,

I am writing to you to complain about my recent trip to City 17. I had been led to believe that the city is the closest thing there is to a capital city these days, but I must inform you that what I encountered fell severely short of my expectations.

Given the general demeanour of the citizen, I can only assume that you have been contacted regarding the somewhat strident approach to security by many of your staff. I must give praise to one Officer Calhoun who made the time to assist someone who was clearly not a local when my other requests for assistance were met with derision and, more often than not, gunfire. Even my attempts at a leisurely boating excursion were hampered not only by your employees excitable trigger-fingers but also artillery fire and air attack support.

I would also like to draw your attention to the frankly appalling levels of civic cleanliness around the streets of City 17. I could not turn a corner without being confronted by headcrabs, zombies or next-to-impassable toxic waste. And that is without even mentioning the barnacles.

Don't even get me started on the barnacles.

All in all, I am bitterly disappointed with the experience I had in City 17. I plan to spend the next leg of my vacation in Ravenholm and I do not intend to return to City 17. If I do, you may expect to feel the full force of my disappointment.

Yours,

Dr. Gordon Freeman.

PS: Good luck with the new bosses, Wallace!

Flickrdump: Another day at the office

I'm not 100% sure I actually took these pictures. Funny story, that.

It's like a cheap knock-off of Out Of Africa. Or is that Salvador?

You, the largely hypothetical reader of this weblog, may recall my recent attempts to procure a bottle of Bacardi-produced Havana Club rum while in the States. Thanks to the wonderful guys at Bramble, I finally got to taste the elusive spirit in the UK.



It's quite nasty. One of the other bartenders present said it smelled of "something someone who's not very good at cooking has burnt". One of our hosts - who has some Cuban heritage - couldn't get beyond gestures to illustrate her distaste.

The Bacardi-produced Havana Club isn't on sale in the UK. Thankfully.

New Year's End: 07 Edition

New Year's End is something I've done in my head every year. It's a collection of things that stood out for me in the past year, though not necessarily things that were created or released in that year. This year, it is also staggeringly limited given that I've genuinely been living in work.

Videogame characters I actually cared about in Uncharted
Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy
Wayne Curtis' And A Bottle of Rum: a history of the New World in ten cocktails
The first chapter of Don DeLilo's Underworld
Chuck Klosterman
The West Wing DVD marathons
Assassin's Creed's free-running mechanic
Getting caught in a nuclear explosion in Call of Duty 4
Rock, Paper, Shotgun, even though I don't do PC gaming
Vanilla & Passionfruit Cosmopolitans (thanks SJ)
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End in HD
TF2's sentry guns
And, of course, Weighted Companion Cube

Update: the hangover

There's always a problem with working in a bar over Christmas - everybody else in the whole world is on holiday, and wants to get drunk. This, fairly obviously, leads to a large number of broken bartenders and waiters come January whose employers in our specific case reward by giving them an effectively free bar for a night.

I woke up at 5 o'clock. At night. And thought it was the morning. Yesterday.

I = triumph

There was a disappointing lack of a drum roll. There were no masses waiting in hushed anticipation. There was no post-final interview with Ant and Dec, no follow ups on the talk show circuit and, crushingly, no thumbs up from Chuck Norris*. But all of these things are but follies, because I - living the work + no play = dull boy dream - have managed to complete a videogame for the first time in actual years.

Hey, Call of Duty 4! Not looking so tough now, are ya?

It's not been through lack of trying - I would have completed Halo if my iBook didn't start having seizures whenever more than, say, two enemies appeared on screen. KotOR would be in the books if the aforementioned iBook hadn't literally screamed when an entirely superfluous flying whale appeared on the Jedi Academy planet.

It's at that point that I realised that a three year-old iBook G4 probably wasn't the best choice as a gaming platform.

There are, of course, others.New Super Mario Brothers remains unfinished because I suck at Mario games, Phantom Hourglass would be seeing progress during my commute, if I didn't walk to work, Heavenly Sword would be done if there was actually a game I wanted to play in between the cutscenes.

So I managed to find the time, over the past week or so, to complete COD4's singleplayer (stop laughing at the back). It took me a while to reacquaint myself with a console FPS - after playing a lot of Fifa 08 and Okami and not a lot inbetween - but soon enough I was pop'n'shooting with the best of them. At which point I got executed.

And then killed in a nuclear explosion.

This was after completing the missions. What happens if you fail? You die? Where's my damn carrot?

What was genuinely weird about the experience was the vague guilt I felt when storming ahead of the rest of my squad into room full of enemies, even if it was what I was supposed to do. That, and spending three quarters of the game being called Soap by my CO.

But now it's over, and I am full of win. Just not online - I am truly horrific at multiplayer...

* What is it Mike Huckabee has that I don't, exactly?