Shadow of the Colossus

Remember the “Double Life” ad for the Playstation? A marvellous ad, full of the kind of lyrical braggadocio Sony brought to the word of videogames. In that one ad, I believe Sony did more for raising mainstream understanding of the appeal of videogames than all of Nintendo’s efforts throughout the previous ten years.

But the ad never really rang true for me. The creepy-cute kid with the lisp telling us how he’d “conequered worlds” seemed like a bit of a lie. The worlds I had conquered had been superficial, cartoon worlds. Even the largest maps in Command & Conquer never really struck me as anything more than an extended game of Cannon Fodder. A loose bit of fun that, ultimately, never made me feel even the least bit heroic. Certainly not as heroic as the games that creepy-cute kid seemed to be playing.

Shadow of the Colossus is the first game that has made me feel like I could be a part of that ad. I feel like I’m finally able to say, with no small amount of pride, that I have defeated giants. Armed with nothing more than a sword, a bow, and an unlimited supply of arrows (ahem), I have beaten… no, I have slain impossible goliaths. Did you hear that? I’ve actually slain something.

The sense of scale in this game is unbelievable. One level in God of War had you climbing a giant temple carried on the back of Kronos, the last titan. The scale of that one level sealed it for me - God of War was presenting familiar things in a way I had never experienced them and, as such, was one of the best games I’d ever played. Shadow of the Colossus does the same thing, over and over again. Each level (16 in all) has a different colossus, with a different way of defeating them. Some are more obvious than others. Some require more skill and/or dexterity and/or luck than others. But each one has a scope beyond any other videogame I’ve ever played. Quite simply, it’s staggering.

The Colossi themselves are strewn across a huge, empty game world. This in itself is a courageous move by the developers. Given the games relative brevity (in 3 hours, I had defeated 7 Colossi, almost half the total amount), it would have been easy to put incidental challenges in your way - the occasional enemy that will pop up out of nowhere and take 10 minutes to defeat (Hello Zelda: Wind Waker!) - thus artificially lengthening the game. Instead, they kept it barren, which only adds to the epic nature of the game.

(Incidentally, I’ve also noticed that the developers have thrown in cool little spot-details, like an ancient campfire near where you battle a colossus. Not entirely necessary, but adds the overall atmosphere of the game.)

After Shadow of the Colossus, I still don’t feel like I’ve conquered worlds. But I’ve conquered giants. And that’s close enough.

R-Point

I’m convinced there’s a good war-themed horror out there somewhere. What started out as a general disappointment with Michael Mann’s The Keep has taken me through The Bunker (awful) and Deathwatch (starts out promising, quickly turns awful). From reading IMDB’s message boards, I thought Kong Su-Chang’s R-Point would answer my prayers.

It tells the story of a squad of Korean soldiers in the Vietnam war sent to investigate radio transmissions coming from a group of soldiers thought to have been killed six months previously. Which is the same setup as Deathwatch. And that’s the problem. Using the plot of Deathwatch as a foundation, R-Point tries to blend a mixture of Platoon, Apocalypse Now, The Blair Witch Project and The Shining, even going so far as to visually name-check some of these films. And among all these heavyweights, the few original things the filmmakers bring seem quite tame and undercooked.

On paper, it’s a recipe for magic: war-themed horror mixed with the nerve-shattering tension that Asian filmmakers seem able to tap into so well. In reality, R-Point is a disappointing anti-climax. Oh well, i still have high hopes for Worst Case Scenario

Good Night, and Good Luck

For me, Good Night, and Good Luck fell squarely into the same genre as Downfall: an important movie, but not necessarily a good movie. It ticks a lot of boxes and zipped along at a fair pace but never really engaged me any better than a documentary on the same subject could have. In fact, the chapter about the Murrow/McCarthy feud in John S. Friedman’s The Secret Histories did a better job of providing a context for the broadcasts than Clooney’s film and remains, for me, more entertaining.

Although perhaps that’s because I wasn’t being forced to chew down some paper-thin character development for paper-thin characters. I don’t know.

We Love Katamari

The Gardai have called in a specialist to help clean up the mess on O’Connell Street after the riots on Saturday.

The Prince of All Cosmos!

Fuck.

P1000850

Originally uploaded by THRILLHO.

I spent 24 hours eating pizza, playing videogames and watching really, really bad movies. Around 2pm, I decideded to take a trip outside the house. Get some air (and some more really, really bad movies). At about 3, I got a text from my girlfriend to tell me about rioting and looting on O’Connell Street. So I took a look for myself.

Dublin is fucked.

Update (22.05) First song the in-house band plays on Tubridy Tonight? “I Predict a Riot.” Surely I’m not alone in thinking that’s in poor taste?

Walk the Line

As a promotional tool to shift a boadload of Johnny Cash albums, it’s fantastic.

As a way of giving casual fans a context to the songs they’re listening to (even if that context is clearly exaggerated), it’s pretty good.

As an entertaining movie, it’s a load of my hole.

Soft-modded Xbox Media Centre!

Remember a few days ago, I wrote about the TV shows I love? Well. apart from Grand Designs and the Channel 4-led shame-fest of Supernanny, Brat Camp and It’s Me or the Dog, I don’t tend to watch much TV on er… TV. The ease of availability of just about any show I want to watch (thank you Uknova and Mininova) means that I find it easier to just download the shows I want to watch. If I wanted to be fancy, I could call this “time-shifting” or something, but let’s just call a spade a spade and say “laziness.”

This generally means watching them on my computer in work (during lunch, honestly!). I’m not particularly delighted with this. A dodgy CRT with a crappy set of speakers can’t really compete with my setup at home. And it also adds another layer of hassle with shows that my girlfriend also wants to watch, like Lost. In these cases, I’ve got a DVD player that will play DivXs, but is extremely fussy about what kinds of DivXs it wants to play. So I end up

• Downloading the file

• Using FfmpegX to convert the file (even on my dual G5, this takes 20 minutes)

• Burn it to a CD

• Bring it homeAnd this doesn’t take into account the loss of sync between the audio and visuals that FfmpegX tends to helpfully drop into its newly-converted files. Nor the amount of hassle involved in doing this for multiple episodes. It also means that once I’ve watched the episode, I’m left with a lovely new CD coaster taking up space on our already-overflowing shelves (visual evidence of overflowing shelves).

What I needed was a media centre. Something that would let me download episodes, bring them home on my iPod and watch them on my TV. Originally, I had planned to use a G4 Powermac with Front Row at home for the media centre but lack of a graphics card with decent TV-out put an end to this idea. I thought about buying myself a mod chip for my Xbox and installing Xbox Media Center (XBMC), but even this struck me as too much work (and in the couple of weeks it would take for my mod chip to arrive, I would probably be bored of this idea already).

Luckily, I stumbled across a bunch of articles last week about soft-modding the Xbox. This meant I could install XBMC without a chip. So on Friday, I gave it a go.

I used a hacked save game for Splinter Cell which, when launched from within the game, ran a program from within Linux that did all of the hard work for me. Once I installed the softmod, installing XBMC was simple. Now, I can stream movies (I tried it against .avi, .mov, .wmv - all worked) off that same G4 Powermac and still play Xbox games - even play on-line with Live! And the cherry on top of all this is that these movies look absolutely beautiful on the TV. Way, way better than my converted DivXs ever did.

The total cost to me for doing all this was the princely sum of… nattin. I had all the tools lying around (Xbox, memory card, usb/memory card convertor, media server) and it only took a few minutes to complete. Next up: putting a new hard drive in the Xbox. Let’s see if that’s as easy.

Funniest thing overheard coming out of "Final Destination 3" last night

Well, I thought that was very predictable.

We are gathered here today to get through this thing called "life"

When I was younger, I had such a major crush on Wendy Melvoin, Prince’s guitarist in The Revolution. And depending on when you catch me, Purple Rain could be my favourite album and movie of all time, but never anything less than “incredible” to me. Watching the Brit awards, on comes Prince to perform some songs. Random snippets of our conversation here.

“Do you think Prince should reinvent himself? He’s been playing the same music for years.”
“He’s probably had a ton of work done.”
“This song is okay. I could do without the Pan Pipes though.”
“Hey, isn’t that his guitarist from Purple Rain?”

Wendy and Lisa were back! Looking a little older, sure. Minus their bad-ass hugh hairstyles, sure. But my crush kicked right back in immediately. Oh boy.

Oh, and after the Purple Rain medley: “No. Prince shouldn’t change his music. He should just keep playing this forever.”

ps - fuck the Kaiser Chiefs, Kasabien and Hard-Fi in their stupid fucking asses.

TV recommendations - February 2006 edition

TV Shows I love

Life on Mars

I’ll admit that I’ve never been drawn to 70s British police dramas. Then again, I don’t know that I’ve ever actually seen a full episode of any of them. But Life on Mars is just fantastic. This and Doctor Who have renewed my faith in BBC drama.

Prison Break

When I’m about to head off to bed after a hard day’s TV watching, I tend to go for one last flick through the channels. I remember crying whenever I’d stumble across CSI at midnight because it meant I was stuck for another hour without any way of wrenching myself away from the telly. Televisual crack. I was addicted.

I get the same thing with Prison Break, the TV show with the most idiotic setup I’ve ever seen. It makes me think of that episode of the X-Files where Mulder discovers the TV networks are putting subliminal messages between the frames of TV shows. I don’t know why else I can’t pull myself away from these breathtakingly stupid shows.

Lost

Actually, I don’t love Lost any more. I watched the entire first season over the course of a weekend and was completely hooked but since then, I think I mostly watch it out of some hope that they’ll finally start dishing out some answers. So far, they haven’t. And now there’s talk of dragging this into four seasons, with a feature film finale. I think it’s time I cut myself free.

Anything involving people being chastised for being bad parents/children/pet-owners

Yes, they might be lowest-common-denominator TV, but these shows have saved my life on more than one occasion. However, this does not extend to anything presented by Gillian McKeith. She is the devil. A bitter, hump-backed devil

Grand Designs

This has been mentioned before, but I still can’t get enough of it. I love everything about it, from the creepy Harry Potter-esque theme music to Kevin McCloud’s shameless baiting of the absolute cocks he’s showcasing. I wish it had its own channel.

The IT Crowd

Apparently, this isn’t being as well received as I would have expected, which is a shame because I think it’s one of the best-written, best-acted comedies on TV today (or at least since Black Books went shit). The fact that it’s about a bunch of socially inept geeks - thus mirroring my own existence - only makes me love it more.

TV Shows I just can’t get into

Battlestar Galactica

I’ve tried and I’ve tried and I’ve tried, but I just can’t get into this show. I think this means I have to hand in my nerd badge or something.

Veronica Mars

It’s nice to have a female-led teen-oriented drama show that doesn’t involve someone being a superhero or a total fucking flake. But I just couldn’t care less about this show.

ER

I used to love this show, but I’ve come to realise this was mostly down to my hetero boner for Noah Wyle. Now, not even John Leguizamo can save it.