Hiatus

Been a bit busy for various tiresome reasons, hence lack of posts. One thing worth perhaps brief comment is that last week, for the second time, I bought a second hand copy of a game I'd already traded in. The first was the underappreciated Gun, this time it was Orange Box. It's an odd thing to do but it's symptomatic of the sort of slow-burn interest that can happen with video-games. Sometimes, for no apparent reason, I'll have the urge to pick up a game I've not played in years and will obsess over it. No clever insight here - the same happens with books, films and music - but I thought it worth pointing out what a bloody idiot I am to pay for a game twice.

Love films, hate pretension

When confronted with Lovefilm's rental queue I get all self-conscious and feel the need to stuff the list with films I feel I should see, even if I'm not really interested. This reached a peak when the Martin Scorsese Cape Fear turned up in the mail. Haven't seen it, have no interest in it, it wasn't even the Robert Mitchum original (which I shamefully also haven't seen) and I'm never going to watch it but, at some point in the past, I seem to have decided that I should. This has been happening for a while now so last week I took executive action, purged the list of all half-thought out foreign film titles and stacked the top priority of the queue with utter trash such as JCVD and Death Race. I'm reaping the whirlwind now as Hitman turned up in the post yesterday, but at least there's a certain honesty in the titles I've selected.

Lovefilm seems to be more a searching psychological evaluation mechanism than a DVD rental service. I had perceived it as a way of catching up on a backlog of classic movies that I hadn't seen. However it seems that rather than a conscientious cinephile I am actually a lowest-common-denominator consumer of trash (anyone with access to my cinema visits over the last two years would have long suspected this). I'm not entirely happy with this new self-knowledge but at least I might watch some of the films I get sent.

Can't we all just get along?

Left 4 Dead Survival expansion is live! My usual partner in crime is unforgiveably on honeymoon this week, so I was forced back into the jungle of Xbox live random matches. I initially wasn't too unhappy about this. Back when the game had first come out I had a pretty good experience with just jumping into games - more so than I expected given the reputation of Xbox live players. In fact I made a few friends on L4D who I still meet up with now and again.

I played one round of survival and the potential is great - it's been a while since I played anything with such an arcade-y "hi-score" feel. However, my main interest was in the new versus maps so I jumped into a random game on Dead Air. No voice chat, I bumbled through a level (admittedly with little approaching competence) then a vote to kick me from the game. Vote failed but, taking the hint, I ducked out and tried another game. This time I was kicked before I could even spawn. Third time was better, but still the atmosphere was chilly and I quit again. In the last ten minutes I found a game with some pretty decent people but by then I was a bit sick of it all (and in any case was off to the pub).

This is a rambling whinge by a third-rate player I grant you, and it may just have been that I got unlucky. That said it seems a pretty silly state of affairs when a video game is rendered devoid of fun by the hostility of the human participants. It's a game with literally no repercussions - in a random match you're unlikely to ever see the other players again, and there are no permanent scoreboards or any other record.

There's a grim cynical edge to play at this level - abandon the slower players to their fate, rush to the safe-house, grind the game for any glitches to secure an advantage, no matter how joyless this renders the experience. Any error is greeted with abuse. Any perceived failure is unacceptable and means banishment. The fact that someone, at some point, has decided that this particular game should be open to everyone of any ability (by making it a "public" game) doesn't factor into it.

Maybe I'm naive (and also rubbish at video-games) but If having a choice between "friend" and "public" games isn't enough, perhaps there should be the option to label the game "assholes only" meaning no danger of useless players such as myself (who may be foolish enough to want to have some fun) interrupting the meaningless pissing contests that seem rife.

Humiliation

It's the only word to describe the vicious cruelty that is the only conceivable motivation behind Wii Fit. My girlfriend picked up a copy as a joint Easter present on one of its infrequent appearances in UK stores and we ripped into the box, myself eager to get the closest to a ski slope I've been in several years through the balance games.

However, to get to these games the player must run the gauntlet of registration for, like Brain Training, Wii fit isn't a game so much as a way of life. You can't just jump onto the slopes, or into a hula-hoop (or indeed jump at all - the game will fail you from whatever activity you're embarked on if feet leave balance board) - the Wii will first measure you and, likely, find you wanting. Let me be clear, I have no illusions about my physical condition, but to see my Mii steadily inflate as the game racked up my weight was perhaps my most depressing gaming moment to date. The poor fellow was left waddling around the screen as the wretched software imparted the wisdom that I might want to consider eating less (I had also been asked, after failing a balance exercise, whether I often fell over while walking).

When you get past the hateful initiation, some of the mini-games (this is Wii software after all) are quite fun - the skiing especially is reasonably well done. The 'real' exercise stuff is pretty useless. There's a heavy emphasis on yoga and the like and its difficult to see the benefit in much of the rest of the stuff. Oddly the thing which comes closest to exertion doesn't even involve the balance board - by putting a wii-mote in your pocket and running on the spot the Wii measures your pace and tracks it onto a virtual jogging course. It's surprisingly enjoyable.

Curious to see whether there's life for the board beyond Wii Fit (unlike the under-used Mario Kart wheels and light gun apparatus) or whether it's existence will be primarily to cause me misery and self-loathing.

Important thoughts

I was going to write a piece about 24 (to be titled, amusingly, "Twenty-snore") but decided to dress it up a bit for Shinyshelf, so instead here is an authoritative guide to which is the best season of The Wire:

Ascending order of objective best-ness:

5, 3, 2, 1, 4


Ascending order of what I like most:

5, 4, 3, 1, 2

That is all.

Cockney Vader

About the funniest thing I've seen in ages. Incredibly sweary though:

One thing that's exciting, one thing that's terrifying

ITEM! Every Roger Moore-era Bond film on the big screen at the NFT

ITEM! The Big Sisters in Bioshock 2

Oops

Sorry, got grabbed by a prehistoric crocodile thing shortly before finishing yesterday's post and only just escaped through an anomaly (or something). If it's any consolation I had long run out of anything interesting to say.

Prime Evil

Sometimes I bring it on myself - for unknown reasons will become so stuck into something of such little merit, whether artistic, political or entertainment, that I feel compelled to defend it to the hilt against all-comers, however valid their complaints.

Which brings me neatly on to Primeval. It's still difficult to believe that this has made it to three seasons given its quite breathtaking one-two punch of looking very cheap while no doubt costing a packet and its cast, a very byword for mediocrity - one S-clubber, Douglas Henshall and a succession of identikit female villains/love-interests/enigmatic government agents that make following the pretty straightforward stories surprisingly difficult.

It's tricky to pick out anything directly in its favour, but perhaps the thing that appeals to me is a sense of development at its core that comes close to intelligence. Though several light-years behind Dr Who there is at least an attempt at story-telling in a longer term sense and plot arc development which, though woefully anticlimactic last season (the big bad of which was an acne-ridden junior civil servant as far as I could make out) is, on the basis of season 3's opener, once again teasing with potential. Either that or the fact that they have really cool guns in it.

Christ, I honestly don't know why I'm getting so worked up about such a hollow, underwhelming show. The sad thing is its