The man who planted trees

For Cat's 30th I got tickets for a few plays from York theatre royal's Takeover 09.On Tuesday we saw the first of the plays, The Man Who Planted Trees.

At first I was a little apprehensive, I knew this was a family play (hell it involved puppets), but the crowd was decidedly... young.

I shouldn't have been worried! The play was utterly beautiful, a wonderful little ecological tale performed brilliantly by the actors/puppeteers involved. They had a fantastic combination of a lovely tale and plenty of silly comedy to keep even the attention of even the shortest of attention spans (I'm talking about the kids', not mine).

Young or old, I definately think you should go see this, especially if you can take some young kids with you. :D

The stuff of nightmares

Teletubbies and left 4 dead mashup.

So very very wrong

Balloon pictures

Photo of one of the first balloons to go up.

Unfortunately ours didn't go up quite so gracefully. the woman in front of us on our side of the basket really struggled to get over the edge of the basket and took ages to climb in. I'd only just climbed in when the pilot shouted for everyone to sit down and grab the handles and it tipped over! It then righted itself briefly, before tipping over again. Felt a little squashed with two people on top of me! At this point poor Cat had had to get clear and was worried it was going to take off without her! Luckily the pilot got in control and everyone else got in, and the balloon behaved itself after that!

Fantastic view of York including the minster

We saw quite a lot we recognised. We flew east from York, and spotted York's maize maze which was fun as we'd only just visited that a month or two ago. Could confirm that yup, it really is shaped like an astronaut. Schools are especially fun to spot as you get to see all the patterns in the playground. Oh and there was a football pitch at one point with lots of tiny dots chasing a tinier one :D

More of the view

The most stunning thing about flying in a balloon is the absolute silence (other than the roar of the burners every couple of minutes or so). It really is peaceful.

All the fields looked like a fantastic patchwork :D

Our less than graceful landing :)

The landing was fun, didn't realise they came in at quite as high a horizontal speed as they do! slid along the stubble field we landed in for quite a while before gently tipping over :D

Definitely recommend taking a balloon flight! It's a fantastic experience.

Ballooning adventure :)

Had an ace trip on a balloon this afternoon / evening!

Will fill in the blanks tomorrow, as am a bit tired this evening, but for now I will just say: scary take off, blissful journey, comical landing, tasty champagne :)

Okay I give up.

From now on I'm not even going to try working out which way t-shirts and things go on, it always ends up in failure and the time spent deciding is a waste.

From now on they're going straight on and I'lll swivel it round if necessary!

(image from http://store.xkcd.com/reddit/#Jawsbackwardstshirt)

Classic knock-off console :)

Saw this in a shop in Scarborough a few weeks back.

What I particularly liked about it, was the maker's audacity in not pretending that this was the next console in the series, but the next NEXT one.

Overall though I hate knock-offs like this. Not because someone out there is making a living off of some other persons brand, but because you know there's some poor kid out there that's the only one with a Wiii 3 instead of a Wii in his class.

Dusting off the CCGs

CCGs (Collectible Card Games) are something that I sunk a whole lot of time and money into at various points in the past.

• From 1995->1998 it was Vampire : The Eternal Struggle
• In 2001 it was Lord of the Rings and a bit of Harry Potter for something a bit lighter :)
  

They are horrible horrible evil things. I cannot stress this enough. Do not get involved with them! The amount of money you put into them is absolutely insane for the amount you play them. Don't even buy a starter deck. That's like a crack dealer giving you your first hit free.

Seriously, it's like if someone tried to sell you a car, but in order to get the most out of it you had to buy individually boxed extra parts, but you can only buy parts in identical looking sealed boxes containing a random part, and the best part can only be found in a few random garages in the UK... You'd just tell them to bugger off in that case, but for some reason in the shape of a CCG the concept is somehow really appealing.

Despite all this I found myself getting them out of the cupboard. At first the Vampire cards as there's talk of a few of the guys from Garforth Tabletop Gaming getting together for a game or two. Then I thought it would be fun to get the Potter cards out for a couple of games with Cat. They originally got put away around 2002/2003 when Cat developed an unbeatable Hermione deck and I got in a strop ;) . Luckily with my new gaming experience I managed to put together a better deck, and we're currently at 1 game each this time (plus I'm a much better loser now :D).

But still, I stand by my original opinion. I'm never buying another card again. These things are pure evil and should never be bought. There's so many great games out there that will cost you far less than getting into these things, there's really no justification for them! For those that really do love building decks try Dominion instead.

Back to work

Got some contract work this week, and I have to say I'm enjoying it. I think the break from work was really beneficial, as I'm feeling a new enthusiasm for the stuff that I was previously feeling fed-up and frustred with.

Been a little too efficient and have almost finished the project I was brought on to do in around half the estimated time, but luckily they've decided that it's worth keeping me on for the rest of the week to help out with some other projects. :)

I'm also hopefully going to be in again next week for another project, so that should help with my funds. I can probably consider going to Essen this year now... very tempting!

A few things I would really like to see dropped from JRPGs

Items / Endings / Areas that can only be found from following strategy guides from the start of the game.

E.g. The god damn Zodiac Spear in Final Fantasy 12. This item could only be got if you avoided opening 4 chests early on in the game, which had no marking, clues, or warnings to differentiate them from any of the other thousand identical chests. Nice.

Also see: Some of the missable quests in Last Remnant. I have to go back to a distant area and talk to a guy before and after each of 6 connected missions in order for a quest to open afterwards or it's missed forever?!?!? WTF.

No further explanation needed :)

70 hour+ game times.

Long gone are the days where good games were few and far between, or I just couldn't afford more than one game every 3 months. Nowadays I don't need my games artificially stretched out. Once I've seen every game mechanic around 100 times, and you've not got anything new in the
gameplay to surprise me, it's time to wrap up the plot and show me the credits.

Again, The last Remnant is a hideous offender in this respect. It's main way of stretching things out is unskippable extra long battle animations for any action (even swinging a damn sword). I've taken to reading a book whilst letting the battles play out, stopping occasionally to issue orders.

Personna 3 is an absolutely brilliant game in most respects, but suffers badly from this. I've been playing it on and off for around a year now, because the battle sides of it do get horribly repetitive until the boss shows up :| Does that freaky tower really need that many floors?

Unskippable, slow moving battle animations.

Already mentioned this above a little regarding The Last Remnant's (Seems like I'm picking on it, but honestly there is a lot to like about that game) gameplay being extended by the long winded battle animations . Final Fantasy is a well known offender for this as well (Knights of the Round being a move taking 1 minute 21 seconds to execute).

Yes we love eye candy, but is there really any reason to force it upon us the 10th time if we want to skip it?

Disgaea showed the world how it's done. You can turn all animations off! Now this may seem like it's taking the fun out of it, but when you're just fighting through an item world to level up you're glad of any time saving device the developers give you!

Alchemy

Oh how I hate alchemy in JRPGs. Some people might love the idea of alchemy in RPGS, but to me they're yet another mechanic to sell the strategy guides and prolong the game.

They're never intuitive, combinations being either trial and error, or done to fixed recipes you have to find in the world. Not that having a bloody recipe helps, because it's never obvious which is the only place in the whole frigging world you're going to find that piece of necrotic metal.

Even once you have all the ingredients, you usually don't dare make the ruddy thing. You never know if that ingredient you're using to build that slightly better sword is the only one of it's kind, and it might be the core ingredient of the even better (but only slightly so) betterer sword you'll get the recipe for in the next part of the game.

Seriously, what is alchemy bringing to the game? Sending me off to the other side of the world (via a strategy guide) for a piece of item that only drops from monster X if I have item B and have killed 300 of them. THAT'S NOT FUN. Give me shops with gradually improving stock and nice item rewards for doing side quests. IT WAS LIKE THAT FOR A REASON.



Got any pet JRPG hates of your own? Comment!

Image Credit : "Moogle" by Christina L. Frazer

Miracle berries? More like curiosity berries....

This week we finally got round to having cat's Miracle berry tablets. They're the ones that affect your taste buds for about an hour, making sour & bitter things taste sweet instead.

We tried a range of different things:

• Lemon & Lime - I loved these, tasted nice and sweet to me, but they were still a bit sharp flavoured for some of us.
• Goats Cheese -tasted a lot lighter and creamier
• Guinness - didn't taste like chocolate milkshake like advertised, but definitely took on a sweet almost milky taste. Very nice :)
• Banana bread beer - win win win! So tasty, the sweet banana flavour really took over and made for a lovely drink.
• Salt & Vinegar crisps - tasty good, not sure how to describe the flavour, kinda like a sweet peppery sort of flavour I think.
• Pickled onions - I love pickled onions anyways, but the tablets really brought out the sweetness and gave them a very moreish quality.
  

Overall it was fun, but hardly mind blowing. I think whoever named them miracle fruits needs to get out and see the world a little more :D

Limited Connectivity :(

Struggling to do a post this evening as I can't seem to connect to half the Internets :(

Something's blocking my tubes, so I'll try again tomorrow.

Brought kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

I finally upgraded my phone.

I'm not talking my usual upgrade, i.e. whatever's free if I stay on my small-usage, off-peak, same network contract. I'm talking proper UPGRADE.

This was mainly driven by the fact that I'm supposed to be a techie web developer by trade, and it was getting a bit silly that I had never used mobile Internet, let alone developed for it! Luckily there wasn't as many choices as their might have been, as many of my friends were singing the praises of the new Google Android powered phones. That pretty much narrowed it down to 3 choices, and I eventually opted for the HTC Magic.

It's absolutely blown me away. I can't believe how far mobile technology has come. I'm now constantly connected and am finding it so convenient. How did I manage before? Will definitely have to try and make a web app that's designed for a mobile device as a learning experience.

Only niggle I have is it doesn't seem to like my home wi-fi network. When I have it connected to the Internet by wi-fi it can be very very slow. Any tips Android users? Before anyone says anything yes this problem was the same BEFORE I managed to drop it in my rum & coke. Amazingly the thing seems to have been totally unaffected by that experience (I don't recommend anyone repeating this with theirs though). Sturdy little bugger.

A fight between logic and love - dealing with insects

I'm generally a very logical sort of bloke. I don't let sentimentality or superstition get the better of me. However when it comes to dealing with insects I have been conditioned by my girlfriend to rescue them and gently escort them out of the house. I find myself doing this even when she's not in, or when I'm at other peoples homes.

I guess it's not a bad thing. I definitely think the principle "First, do no harm." is a very good one to live by, but I know that insects are just efficient little impulse driven little robots. They don't have feelings. In fact I completely ruined ants for Cat one day by telling her how I learnt that most ants spend a huge percentage of their lives doing absolutely nothing. Literally nothing. Not even moving. Which if they really are self-aware, terrifies the living bejesus out of me.

Was reminded of this last night after a daddy longlegs spent most of the evening annoying me by flying between our two sets of lights like a maniac. Impossible to catch until it tired itself out and landed on a nearby wall (several hours after it's appearance), I was struck by how utterly ridiculous it was that I didn't just bash it with something nearby, as I'm probably more than entitled to given my much larger brain.

Still rescued the little sod though didn't I.

All you need is love (and a lot of plastic instruments)

Should I buy it.. Shouldn't I buy it? It was a massive dilemma considering my current situation. I'd already turned down Batman : Arkham Asylum this month despite a very impressive demo and it getting great rave reviews. Did I really need another Rock Band?

I was mainly undecided because it seemed to go against everything I liked about the Rock Band concept: you buy the software once (okay maybe twice - Rock Band 2 was a pretty upgrade), and then all you buy after that is songs you want. Alarm bells sounded when they buggered it up with the AC:DC branded version, whereby they provided a severely crippled version of Rock Band, which even if you export the tracks to Rock Band / Rock Band 2 worked out much more expensive than a track pack would have been. Then I head the bad news that the Beatles version would go a step further and not allow you to export the songs, or play any non-Beatles DLC.

Not good. I decided I wasn't going to buy it. Then the trailers hit and I realised this wasn't going to be a crippled version of Rock Band, but an entirely rebranded, re-worked game. It showed a proper story mode. Lots of unlockable photos and videos and stuff. Plus: It's the frigging Beatles.

Combine this with a sudden discovery of a cache of Tesco Clubcard vouchers and of course I caved.

Do I regret it? Not at all! I have to say this is the slickest version of Rock Band so far, the presentation is gorgeous and there's lots of neat interface tweaks, for example a difficulty display on the screen where you choose between Guitar & Bass which is a huge help for avoiding tedious bass lines / obscenely tricky guitar tracks. So far we've only played a little way through the Story mode (Cat's still suffering with post-viral fatigue, we have to take things easy) and browsed the track listings but we've really enjoyed it. In fact I practically had to wrestle the controller off her last night and use the classic parenting line "It'll still be here tomorrow" ;).

The bonus content really is something special. We've only unlocked a little, but so far the photos and accompanying text are very interesting and we've learnt quite a few suprising things already. An impressive "prize" extra we unlocked today was the content of a very limited edition Christmas record that was sent out to Beatles fan club members in... 63 I think? Was very silly but incredibly fun to hear, the quality of the recording was outstanding!

Need to have a gathering at some point and see if we can get enough xbox microphones to try out these 3-part harmonies some of the tracks support. Then again I think most of me and my friends struggle to find the right pitch when solo :D

But is this going to happen? I honestly don't know. Even with 45 greatly varying tracks, I don't know how this would go down with my Rock Band buddies. The only couple of friends I know that are definitely Beatles fans don't normally touch Rock Band, and the friends I have really into Rock Band definitely aren't Beatles fans. Perhaps this isn't a match made in heaven?

For me and Cat though it's going to be a fantastic experience, and that's all we need.