elementseven/blog

While I’m waiting until tomorrow for Burnout: Paradise to finally make its way onto UK shelves (almost a week after the US release, the bastards), I’m going to do something of a retrospective review of Ubisoft’s “Assassin’s Creed” which came out just before Christmas, but whose Massive Attack-backed, relatively indescriptive trailers still litter the ad breaks.

Part of the reason for the inscrutibility lies with the major plot twist in the story; this is already twisted, however, about 4 seconds after opening the box and reading the manual. For those of you that ignore the manual and load the game straight away, that number is possibly nearer to 30, about the point where you’ve just made it past the screen that tells you that the game was developed by a team of multicultural, multifaith, shiny, hug-happy flower-children. The reasoning behind this statement seemingly that if they include it then the inevitable backlash caused by the game involving stabbing religious extremists and arabs in the face might slighly longer in coming.

To avoid fucking around too much and based on the fact that as soon as you start the game, or read the manual things will be instantly given away, I’m going to spoil the plot twist now by way of telling you that, despite what the back of box description tells you, this game does not involve you playing a 13th century assassin named Altaír. Instead, you control the 21st century descendant of said assassin, an incoherent moron of a bartender called Desmond, who has been kidnapped by a shadowy organisation and is being manipulated into reliving the genetic memories of his 13th century forefather for an unknown purpose in a nefarious conspiracy plot.

The sci-fi basis for the game serves as a plot device to avoid any inconvenient deviations from history should you cock things up and wind up skewered by a crusader or saracen, who are somewhat miffed about the fact you’ve been running around stabbing their friends. Instead of health, you instead have a “synchronisation bar”, and if your actions deviate from “true” history then you will lose synchronisation with your ancestor and have to start again from the most recent save point. Fortunately, the game is relatively good at saving after you have completed tasks and sub-missions, so there’s not too much ground to be retrodden should you “die”.

The action throughout the game takes place between three of the most important cities in the medieval holy land: Acre, Damascus and Jerusalem, as well as the castle fortress of the Assassins in Masyaf. Periodically, the game revolves around the events of the Third Crusade and features appearances (and indeed killings of) historical figures of the age. For the purposes of gameplay however, the vast plain and desert sprawl of the holy land has been somewhat condensed to that of an average sized city centre, where you’d expect to travel more by some kind of park and ride hopper bus, rather than a horse.

Horse-based travel in the game is somewhat inconvenienced by the fact that should you try to move at anything more than a slow walk, any nearby soldiers will immediately turn on you with the full intention of height-reduction by sword. This is largely more an irritation than anything else, as the Assassins seem to be the only group that posesses horses for majestic galloping across the holy land with cloaks billowing in the wind purposes, and any pursuers tend to get left behind rather quickly.

All of the games locales are universally gorgeous, making incredible use of the graphics power now capable on modern console systems, with small attentions to detail that add to the overall realism of the game; smoke rises from chimneys, washing lines are strung between rooftops, nest birds scatter as you flit across rooftops in pursuit of a target and so on.

The free-running aspect of the title has been handled in a simplistic, but effective manner. At the pull of a trigger you can switch between low and high profile states, depending on whether you’re sneaking up on someone with intent to relieve them of breathing priviledges, or making a fast escape when you manage to fuck this up. In high profile mode, Altaír will sprint, leap and grab ledges within reach to continue your forward momentum. While somewhat simplistic, it does give the movement a significantly greater degree of fluidity to look at than if all these actions were controlled in their entirety by the player.

If you approach the game, initially like I did, expecting it to draw heavily on stealth aspects to the extent of, say, the Thief series, then you may find yourself disappointed, as the game does involve a significant amount of combat. The latter third in particular - by which time most of the city guards have figured out that the guy in the cloak covered in sharp objects might not be there to take the dog for a walk or do the laundry. Enemies opt for the kung-fu movie goon approach of surrounding you in a circle and then attacking one at a time, and once you’ve worked this aspect out, then combat consists largely of parry-counter-stab in eye. Death animations are fairly visceral, but become repetitive after a while. On the plus side, however, at no poiint I can recall there being any quick-time-event button-mashing sequences.

Before you can assassinate your target, you have to undertake an investigation to learn about your next victim’s habits and wherabouts, this would be an exciting prospect, were it not that it consists of a combination of the same four minigames for each of the nine potential poppy-pusher-uppers. Meaning that each of the increasingly dramatic and risky set-piece assassinations is separated by increasingly dull menial tasks.

A further with each mission is that it invariably starts at the top of your home castle, requiring you to make all your way down to the bottom of the hill on which it’s sited, through the peasant town at the bottom, to the stables, across the holy land at 3mph or pelting it with the entire Third Crusade behind you and then into the city itself, which generally requires disguising yourself amongst some conveniently placed scholars, whose sole purpose of study seems to revolve around sneaking assassins into walled medieval cities.

Voice acting in the game is largely quite good, though there are only a few samples of dialogue for each of the guards and minor NPCs, basically consisting of arab beggar woman, english beggar woman, saracen guard, crusader guard. Overall the weakest work is from Altaír himself, whose soft American accent seems rather at odds in the holy land. I realise that you’re not technically Altaír and are his future descendant reliving the past for reasons too incomprehensible to identify, but still, it wouldn’t hurt to make him fit in a little better with the surroundings.

Once you’ve got all the slog out of the way, the game becomes genuinely tense as you negotiate your way around guards, taking out any that might hinder your entrance or escape and plotting a route to the target that avoids being noticed, prior to relieving them of any further concerns re: breathing. The guards however are not your only hinderance in this process, as the towns are also littered with lepers and lunatics, who will shove you out of the way - generally into the path of a patrolling guard - resulting in another frantic dash towards the nearest hiding spot. The other annoyance comes in the form of beggar women, who take aggressive panhandling to an entirely new level, following you across several streets bitching about their lack of money, until you get annoyed, try to dissuade them with a gentle left hook to the temple and once again find yourself running for cover.

Anyhow, the assassinations themselves gradually become increasingly dangerous as the game progresses, with you being required to strike within often a more limited timeframe from a more exposed position. While Altaír can capably handle a sword, certainly moreso than everyone’s favourite steampunk antihero Garrett was ever able to in the Thief series, being chased down by 20 or so pissed-off hired goons does narrow one’s odds for survival, requiring one to make use of rooftops, crowds, market stalls, passing groups of scholars and other means to make good your escape.

Before you can even think about making a quick exit though, after each assassination follows a good few minutes of plot exposition, as instead of a few poignant last words, your victims tend to rattle off their entire life story and motivations behind their deeds. While this does give you a chance to catch your breath after you’ve sneaked your way in for a stealthy kill and are steeling yourself for the frantic chase to follow, it does somewhat break immersion by taking place in what is, essentially, the Matrix “loading dimension”.

Inbetween all the slog of tedious sub-quests, the game does have a rather absorbing story, both in the past and current timelines, and over the course of the game, these become increasingly intertwined. While the execution is not perfect, Assassin’s Creed, like a number of recent titles, is the first part in an intended trilogy of games, so hopefully developers may take some of these concerns already mentioned by the community on board for later sequels.

Overall, while there is a certain degree of style-over-substance going on, it certainly wasn’t lacking enough to put me off finishing the game, and if you can stick through some of the more tedious side quests, there’s a lot of fun to be had with the assassinations proper and free-form rooftop clowning about. Replay value is lacking, though completionists may wish to undertake the various “collect the flag” tasks scattered across the game world. As a start to a brand new franchise, it’s not as strong as, say, Mass Effect, but is still a solid foundation for the series to build on in future.

I’m going to review two titles this week, although one is something of a mini review, due the game in question being of a somewhat casual nature. Up this week are Bioware’s retro-space-opera-action-RPG-hybrid Mass Effect on the XBox 360 and Phase on the, er, iPod.

Mass Effect

Mass Effect has been out for a little while now, enough time that you’re only unlikely to be aware of its existence if you’d been living in a cave for the past 3 years, on the moon, contained within some kind of temporal stasis field. Normally, RPGs are not my bag, but after much debating, hammering YouTube for promotional videos, hammering YouTube again for more promotional videos and finally hammering YouTube for yet more promotional videos with one hand while the other fondled my downstairs area until it was in need of some soothing cream and a course of antibiotics, I decided to put my prejudices aside and purchase Mass Effect.

Were I a rabid Bioware fan that owned the super-special awesome collectors editions of all their previous works and played them daily while the entire social fabric of my life collapsed, I neglected basic hygiene and took to crapping in a paper bag in case I missed a cutscene then the above paragraph would be somewhat unnecessary. This is not the case however, so possibly might be taken as a positive sign that it managed to break through my usual degree of cynicism regarding the genre. The other reason is that when I’m not getting inappropriately aroused by videogames then I’m having dirty thoughts about science fiction.

Being something of an archetypal nerd, it should come as no surprise that I spent my formative years watching various campy 70s and 80s sci-fi television shows and films. While the modern era of science fiction media is of a more gritty, realistic nature, I have an immense fondness for the white spaceships, bloopy lasers and terribly written dialogue of old. From playing Mass Effect it’s clear that the designers have similar fond memories of teatime gung-ho space adventuring.

Mass Effect puts you in control of your own Saturday morning space hero and, predictably, it’s down to you to save the galaxy. At the same time though, you also have the somewhat ulterior motive of proving Earth’s use to the galactic powers that be, while politicians dick around behind your back in a pointless “my spaceship is larger than yours” (somewhat literally) contest. You can play as either a male or female character, though their last name is always “Shepherd” and because this game is built on the gorgeous Unreal 3 engine, your efforts in general turn out to be something passably resembling a human being. Character classes have their own fancy names, but essentially are the ‘classic three’ soldier, mechanic or magic/psychic setups, with an option to play as a mix of any two of the above.

Exactly how you go about saving the galaxy is down to you. In a welcome change from the current run of games offering moral choices, where your basic ending options are “more evil than Hitler, Pol Pot and Simon Cowell’s evil DNA combined” or “Jesus, but with ice cream”, Mass Effect’s good versus evil scale offers marginally more shades of grey. You have two meters, one for “Paragon” points and the other for “Renegade”. These operate independently, so raising one will not lower the other and vice versa, and instead of being a good and evil dynamic, it’s more along the lines of playing the game as a goody-two-shoes-obey-the-prime-directive type, or sticking it to the man and getting things done your way, leaving the maintenance droids to scrape the bits of toasted alien off the floor.

Voice acting in the game is top notch for the most part, though in my playthough experiences, I felt the female version of Shephard was played more emotively and with just more flat-out effort behind the delivery. Party members vary in likeability, but you’d certainly be hard-pressed not to love Wrex, the big, universe-weary and battle-hardened mercenary Krogan (warlike space-lizardy-klingon things).

Aliens conform, to the most part, to classic stereotypes, either “humanoid with weird rubbery thing on their head”, or “what the fuck is that” creatures, not forgetting also the obligatory blue/green space girls who are more than willing to participate in the ancient Earth custom of getting railed by the heroic starship captain. But I was intrigued at the level to which Bioware have fleshed out the backstory of each of the major species, and given some thought to how they might have evolved and moved into space. In particular, I have rather a soft spot for the Elcor, a large, lumbering race from a high-gravity world, who have evolved to use scent, rather than gesture and intonation to convey emotion. In normal conversation with other races therefore, they have the rather endearing habit of stating prior to each sentence, the emotion and tone that should be read into it.

The game does have its fair share of frustrations; for starters, it’s incredibly hard initially to figure out what the hell you’re trying to do in combat. Second only to sequential-button-mashing quick time events (and Mass Effect doesn’t escape these fuckers either) in terms of needlessly copied gameplay dynamics are (not quite as good as) Gears of War-style cover systems. It’s essential to stay in cover and pop out to take shots for a good majority of firefights in the game, certainly before you start acquiring better guns, but attempts to do so either end up with you running fruitlessly into a wall while the camera goes a bit mental, or running round the object you wanted to hide behind into a hail of laser fire and ending up back at the last autosave.

The autosave system itself does save in a variety of odd places, frequently pages of dialogue before a boss fight; so instead of just letting you replay the combat section, you have to go through the macho dickwaving/”you’ll never get away with this” conversation options again. The game is rather terrifyingly verbose in places and I’ve been on the verge of incontinence because I needed to take a bathroom break, but didn’t want to miss the end of a cutscene that seemed several minutes off.

Due to the incomprehensible decision to market a version of the Xbox 360 without any kind of storage medium, the game has to be in a format that can run on a Core system without a hard drive (though quite why you’d want to play a 30-hour RPG epic without a hard drive to save is beyond me). This means that throughout the entirety of the game, there will be moments where action will pause abruptly for the next area to load, or you have to spend what seems like eons riding elevators that move at a speed only marginally slower than glacial ice-flows. It additionally compounds the texture “pop-in” issues with the current incarnation of the Unreal 3 engine, even in cutscenes, which takes the sheen off the glossy polish of the presentation in general.

The menu system at times can be difficult to navigate and modifying weapons, a key aspect of the game, is somewhat taxing and in extreme cases can take several minutes to equip a squad to deal with a particular enemy. Of course, such specialisation means that if another bunch of bad guys decide to join the party, then the fast-pacing of the combat gets broken up by tedious scrolling through strangely un-custom-order-able lists of similar sounding ammunition.

Other than the main game planets, the rest of the galaxy is a barren wilderness, with sometimes one of 3 different prefab bases dumped somewhere on it’s surface. The exploration element of Mass Effect was much touted in previews, but essentially, there’s very little difference between the non-story environments, leaving it down to you if you want to drive around in the MB-lawsuit-baiting buggy (seriously, it’s a fucking BigTrak) in a snowy wasteland, a lava wasteland or a muddy wasteland.

Despite niggles and glitches, Mass Effect on the whole is a good bit of old-school sci-fi fun to play. The story, if not original, at least provides an engaging backdrop with which to live out your childhood fantasies of saving civilisation from extinction and getting the (possibly blue) girl (or guy). While not wanting to dwell on the subject of THAT sex scene, I’ll put it this way: It’s about as unnecessary, but ultimately more pleasant viewing, than THAT OTHER one in The Matrix: Reloaded.

Ultimately, if you’re like me and a big fat greasy nerd who stayed in watching Star Trek and built spaceships out of Lego, while all the other boys that didn’t wheeze when they ran more than 5 yards were playing football and becoming functional, normal members of society, I’d heartily recommend Mass Effect.

Bonus Mini Review!: Phase

My long-suffering iPod finally went to robot hell in September of last year and I’d been waiting for relatives to foolishly give me money at Christmas in order to replace it. In the intervening 3 years since I got my original white plastic brick of personal auditory damage of course the iPod’s functionality and processing power has expanded somewhat. In addition to playing video, the rather rudimentary “breakout” clones on the older ipods have been replaced with a wealth of other casual games with which one can ruin their social life and thumbs.

Phase is a rhythm game for 5th Gen iPod, iPod Nano and the new iPod Classic, produced by Harmonix, the people responsible for the hugely successful Guitar Hero/Rock Band games, and to a certain extent, bears more than a passing resemblance to both titles. You use the left, select and right clickwheel buttons to hit markers on corresponding lines in time to the beat, and also scroll on the clickwheel to pick up short or long sweeps. The more successful hits you chain together the higher you score. As you score you build up stars, your aim being to meet a particular star count at checkpoints throughout the song. If you miss beats or fail to meet a star count, you lose one or more hearts (lose all 4 and it’s Game Over).

The real joy of Phase lies in the fact that, outside of the pre-supplied tracks, you can import up to 1000 songs from your library via a special playlist in iTunes, the game then converts these into maps to play along to in game.

Maps, or “journeys” in game, can be played either as one-off tracks, or a marathon of 5 together with increasingly complex patterns and higher star requirements per checkpoint. Completing on one difficulty unlocks further ones.

Putting you in control of the playlist takes the longevity of this game well into the “everlasting” category. Gameplay is simple to pick up, but incredibly challenging on higher difficulty levels. Sometimes it’s difficult to gauge ahead of time how taxing a particular track will be, and my recommendation would be not to ever import anything by System of a Down if you want to avoid a serious thumb injury.

Final word: If you have an iPod capable of running it, don’t mind not sleeping for the next 6 years and have a bag of frozen peas on hand, it’s about the best £4 you’ll spend on iTunes.

“ProStreet” is the latest incarnation of EA’s Need for Speed series, and follows in the tyre smoke of the over-the-top mediocrity of “Carbon” and its ridiculous, yet thoroughly entertaining, cops and ricers older brother, “Most Wanted”. I started with the series at the time of the second of the “Underground” games and most of the comments at the time were very much of the mind that removing police chases from the game and focussing on semi-to-legal street racing was somewhat dull.

Never one to miss out on a fad, EA set its sights with the Underground series on the “2 Fast 2 Furious” demographic of morons with shitty cars, who have nothing better to do with their time than cover them in stickers and gaudy neon. Most Wanted was by far and away the jewel in the crown of this era, with high speed cop chases returning and maintaining a fair amount of tongue-in-cheek charm by way of its overacted cutscenes and cars weighed down by wings proportional to those of a moderately-sized airliner.

Unfortunately for EA, by the time Carbon was released last year, it was in the wake of the equally mediocre third Fast and the Furious movie, and with modified Honda Civics no longer the pinnacle of street cool, they obviously decided it was time to rethink their game.

Or, at least, half of them did. The other half still carried on incessantly pimping their rides until the chavs came home.

Those in the first camp clearly decided that the current market seemed to be in favour of sims such as the Gran Turismo-topping Forza 2, or at least “sim-lite” experiences, along the lines of the Project Gotham Racing series. While those in the other insisted that, despite this, every car had to be plastered in more vinyl than present in Jimmy Saville’s record collection. Partly due to this somewhat conflicting design ideology, there are several deep flaws with the game.

In this year’s title, you take the role of Ryan Cooper, a former illegal street racer (nudge-nudge wink-wink) who’s decided to go straight and play nice after presumably some bad experiences in federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison. You never see your character’s face, as even out of the car he remains in a racing helmet, despite sporting a shirt with a popped collar and horribly fashionable chinos, making him look like a fratboy dick version of The Stig. Your quest to the top is inspired by the current champion incoherently saying something about you not being very good, but I could be wrong because they apparently hired a timid, mumbling idiot as a voice actor and I couldn’t make out a damn word he said. This year’s obligatory tits are provided by some girl off Australian Big Brother and a generic Japanese “idol” who looks about 12.

Racing itself is broken down into Grip (normal track racing), Drag (tedious minigames where wins are largely random events), Drift (sideways festival of screaming tyres and annoying crashes) and Speed (white-knuckle open street events faintly reminiscent of Outrun but with bigger crashes). The races are structured around ordered race days, each of which contains a different mix of challenges. While each set of race days has a different visual theme and irritating commentator, essentially they’re just there to break the monotony of the other game menus and contain different adverts.

The cars largely handle like a big mess of understeer and poo, except in drift events, where they end up backwards and in pieces faster than I can consume a pint of lager when it’s 4 milliseconds to closing time. While in earlier games there was a certain amount of unnecessary powersliding going on (mainly to impress dickheads whose fibreglass-encrusted Corsas can’t get sideways except when they’re mercifully T-boned by a van), the designers decided to introduce “realistic” handling. Unfortunately, it seems that team idiot was charged with this task, and accomplished it by turning the car left or right by only 5 degrees per year when the joystick is waggled in the appropriate direction.

This rather neatly links me to talking about the damage modelling, which is clearly where 80% of the budget was spent, with another 10% in the particle physics model for in-game tyre smoke. For the first time in the recent games, crashing your car will generate damage beyond a couple of cracks in the windscreen, in fact, crashing it badly will create spectacles not unlike the Burnout series. Fortunately, if you’re the sort of freak that likes to see horrendous car crashes, then the aforementioned understeer will happily see you sailing into all manner of solid objects at high speed.

Returning to the subject of adverts, I don’t think I’ve ever encountered quite as much in-game advertising as is present in ProStreet. EA has a reputation for ludicrous amounts of product placement in its titles, but ProStreet has set a new benchmark for the company. There’s rarely a square foot of open space that isn’t occupied by some form of billboard advertising soft drinks or batteries or car insurance or god knows what. Vast blimps with flashing billboards hover menacingly in the sky, along with giant anime-style hot air balloons. These were last seen in future-racing skillfest Wip3out, and only serve to remind me I’m not playing a better racing game, where my ending up in a wall is testament to a lack of skill and not because I dared to try and move in something other than a straight line.

The game does do some things well, the car models are some of the most detailed seen in current generation racing titles and the inclusion of the Lancer Evo X and Nissan GTR certainly is enough to make every fan of Japanese sports cars cream their anime-print boxer shorts. Essex chavs and rally fans get a Ford Escort Cosworth to play with and tedious Initial-D obsessives get to spend hours replicating tofu-delivery touge-mobile Toyota Corollas.

It’s clear what the designers were trying to do here, and I salute their attempt to take the series in a new thematic direction, but overall, it’s weakened the title as it cannot compete with Forza 2 and the like in providing a realistic experience. At the same time, the lack of overall fun aspects with regards to the handling kills it for the arcade racing junkies. The cars look great, the damage modelling is superb and I think if they combined that with the high-speed tension and pile-ups of Most Wanted’s chase sequences it would make for a thrilling title.

Maybe next year, eh.

Despite defecting from the Windows PC market some 2 years ago, it seems that I can’t stop coming back to suck Microsoft’s big, veiny, disease-ridden cock and proceed to fellate it while it’s swollen belly repeatedly slaps against my forehead. Convinced by a finance deal in a high street videogame store and the prospect of finally having a use for my HDTV I bought myself an XBox 360.

I’d missed out on the previous generation of Xbox, partly due to it’s expense and something of a “I blame Microsoft for all world evils” point of view. However, this was not to stop me gaily pouring money into Sony and Nintendo’s pockets with the sort of abandon usually reserved for a motorway service station piss after 6 hours on the road.

Microsoft’s entry into the current generation of consoles is at least more aesthetically pleasing than it’s predecessor, which was infamously described as a “coffee table”. While vast compared to Nintendo’s simple and compact Wii, the Xbox 360 is less monolithic than the PS3, and probably more in the designer end-table league now. The games, however, seem to be squarely aimed at men (and by “men” I mean big, strapping, burly men, fawned over by girls everywhere, or arrogant, self-assured pricks to the rest of us) featuring at least one of the following:

1. Guns
2. Tits
3. Cars
4. Explosions
5. Aliens with shit foreheads
6. Halo

Still, having spent most of the last few weeks being either off my tits on prescription painkillers waiting for my mouth to return to a normal shape or cocking about in my flat as the result of a shortage of patients, and with a £500 boost to my paycheque, I have had some time to invest… Well, waste, by playing some of the newer glut of titles on the console market in oooh-shiny-HD-o-vision, which I intend to review for your displeasure.

At present my face largely resembles that of some kind of hibernating rodent frantically preparing for winter. Dental surgery is something I’ve endeavoured to avoid over the years, the prospect of high-pitched drills inside my face being enough to ensure twice-daily brushing with the sort of fervour usually reserved for acts of religious extremism. Unfortunately however, my body decided that it would prevent any such activity being optional in this regard by deciding to erupt a wisdom tooth in a hilarious perpendicular fashion, right into an unsuspecting, unwise and indeed, somewhat credulous, molar.

After several months, during which it seemed I’d indirectly deforested an area roughly the size of Luxembourg due to the sheer volume of toothpicks required to extract all manner of irritatingly lodged food items, I’d had enough and reluctantly consulted a dentist. The end result of this process was half an hour of drilling, prodding and yanking, which mercifully 5mg of IV Midazolam meant I played no conscious part in witnessing.

Sadly, I couldn’t persuade the dental surgeons to prescribe enough to keep me in a relative state of unconsciousness until things had nicely settled down. Having been advised to stay away from work until next week to avoid any infection, I’m stuck back in everyone’s favourite monotonous commuter town being proffered endless cups of hot tea, which are less than pleasant under the circumstances. Rather than being an empire-building hot beverage, it’s more an instant pain device that sends me scurrying to the cupboard to hurriedly ingest some more codeine-based analgesia.

I’m presently occupying myself with video games and shouting at the news on television. Although the saga of the canoeist-death-fakery has certainly proved an interesting diversion. There is also the irritation of missing-presumed-violently-raped-and-dead Madeline McCann still being on the fucking news, to the extent that the Daily Express is very soon going to have to offer readers a choice of front pages every morning, depending on whether its reactionary fuckwipe readership demand feverishly inaccurate reports on the lack of developments in the Madeline McCann case or similar lack of developments in the Princess Diana inquest that morning.

Still lingering in a few comment pages is discussion about whether or not an English teacher should have named a teddy bear Mohammed. While the situation was unfortunate, I feel there were likely failings on the part of both the agency - in terms of properly briefing staff - but also a failing of Mrs Gibbons’ common sense. My ill-informed, nonsensical and likely blasphemous solution is the proposal to replace all nouns with “Mohammed”, as in “I’ll have three Mohammeds, one with Mohammed, one on brown Mohammed and one wrapped to take out, so I can eat it later while settling down on the Mohammed to watch something on the Mohammed having just washed my Mohammed.”

Granted, it’s not the most mature of stances, but then it’s about time we globally decided to chill out and not get our Mohammeds in a twist.

But I do now drive this:

Even easier when cheesecake doesn’t have to be! Hurrah!

So, this blog once again gets to enjoy another Lazarus moment, although now things aren’t quite so stressful in my personal life, I might actually manage to keep it updated slightly more often.

Anyhow, first things first (a particularly meaningless phrase if one takes the time to think about it, but anyway) some idiot has finally granted me a medical degree. The wisdom of this decision has yet to be tested in any real sense, but I’m sure the natives of Bromley will make ideal test subjects come August 1st when I’m let loose onto the wards.

In the meantime however, I’m still waiting for things to sink in, I’ve been, rather excruciatingly, going around changing any and all personal data to match my new title letters. Though there is something undeniably satisfying, after 7 years of university, in owning a credit card and book of cheques that read Dr. T.R. Bowers on them. So frankly, fuck anyone that thinks I’m blowing my own trumpet too hard, at this point, I don’t care because it’s been not so much an uphill struggle, more an educational North Face of the Eiger, also, I’ve tried it in the past and only narrowly avoided several weeks in traction.

So while I wait to begin inflicting my negligence I am occupying myself by playing an awful lot of video games, visiting strange places and planning visits to stranger ones and enjoying the lovely withdrawal effects of prescription antidepressants. I am also trying my hand at being one of those ghastly healthy people, though as with most of my previous attempts, this will last for a very short period of time before I go out, get ludicrously inebriated and wake myself up with about 9 gallons of grease and saturated fat poured over some eggs and a variety of non-descript meat products (I think it’s a testament to my general geekishness that any “Pork Farms” products I see in the corner shop bring to mind the fictitious evil interplanetary meat empire of RuptureFarms in the Oddworld games).

Stay tuned for some aforementioned strange day out pictures from Kelvedon Hatch “Secret” Nuclear Bunker, and some less strange ones from Brands Hatch Historic Masters Festival…

So, having got my hands on a Nintendo Wii (whose brilliance in gameplay terms is only matched by the stupidity of it’s name) I set about getting very bored last night and drank too much cheap, knock-off Red Bull from Aldi. Using the Mii Channel, one can create any number of little avatars for use in games like Wii Sports and produce some quite passable celebrity likenesses. I wondered if one could recreate the high-octane antics of Top Gear in this environment. I mean, how hard could it be?

Down in Hastings for GP rotation. Been a little down this week as I’m staying in the place I would have been living had I not failed my exams this summer, though I’m down here with a decent enough bunch of people so that’s taken the edge off slightly.

I’m feeling a bit more positive about the actual medicine side of things, the GP tutor I have here has been pretty organised, so at least I know what I’m doing for the next few weeks. Spent most of Tuesday lunchtime doing flu jabs for the local old folks, which was pretty good practice, it’s also not often you get to meet almost all the patients in a practice, even in 8 weeks.

Unfortunately, one of the perks of repeating this year is that I have to apply for a job all over again. Given the hassle of last year, this is not something I relish the prospect of having to do. I’ve had a brief glance at the application form, which at one point asks me to list my academic achievements, of which I’m not sure I actually have any. Will have to waffle and try to cover up my 3rd Class BSc in Imaging Science.

In between clinical sessions I’ve been rediscovering the joy of The Adam & Joe Show. I got hold of the ‘best of’ DVD not long ago in the HMV sale, but it’s a pretty poor substitute for the real thing, though of course thanks to the miracle of bittorrent this is of course easily remedied.

Next week sees the long-awaited (well, I’ve been long awaiting it) release of House Season 2 on DVD. So I’m sure next week is going to involve a marathon of that. The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift also comes out too. While not a particularly intellectual effort, it’s 2 hours of mindless entertainment and sideways cars, so you really can’t go wrong and indeed, given that there’s Need for Speed: Carbon out imminently, I can’t think of anything better to get one in the mood for car ridiculousness and hammy overacting (this applies to both TOKYO DOOOORIFTUUUUU and the game).

Lead lined is clearly going to be the fashion this (nuclear) winter.

Song for the day: “Christmas at Ground Zero” - Weird Al Yankovic

I was at my grans place a couple of weeks back, and she keeps a marvelous collection of old books and pamphlets and such, some of which date back a fair while. This was apparently given to her by her mother, though I suspect that even at this point, it was already a hand-me-down. Sadly, a few of the later pages have been torn, but it’s still readable for the most part.

The pamphlet in question is part advertisement, part medical advice for first-time mothers on a variety of common ailments. I’m trying to track down when this was published, as I’ve had no luck finding a date contained within, though going by some of the references, I’m guessing mid-19th century. I have established that it’s the second edition and will be taking it to my hospital museum next week to have a chat with the curator there and see if they can shed any more light on it.

Anyway, I’ve scanned the thing in it’s entirety for everyone. I figure that someone else might be interested in this old medical stuff, which is fantastic fun to read. Some of the author’s rather bizzare theories on physiology and pathology are amusing, for example:

An infant’s pulse beats about 120 to 130 times a minute, yours from 70 to 80 and an aged persons only from 50 to 60 times; so that an infant’s pulse is 3 times as quick as an aged person’s and therefore the blood is three times more irritable and three times more predisposed for fever.

My personal favourite condition described is “Watery Brain”, which sounds like meningitis from the symptoms described. However, the author is convinced that it is the result of a child’s brain being overstimulated by too much education, causing the blood vessels of the brain to swell.

As this is partly an advertisment for the author’s own remedies, in particular the classic Fennings Fever Curer, which can apparently treat a diverse range of illness successfully, including influenza, dysentery, TB, asthmas etc.

Anyhow, for your perusal and entertainment, I present “Every Mother’s Book, or, The Child’s Best Doctor” by Alfred Fennings:

The rest is HERE, enjoy.

I do have a further book I’m scanning in, which is a rather intriguing handwritten recipe notebook, written by a cook from an old stately home sometime in the 19th century, and additionally by my own great-grandmother, who also worked there for a short time. Highlights include Christmas Pudding for 500 and a cough medicine that doesn’t skimp on narcotics.

In April, I decided to buy a new computer. I’d been considering switching to a Mac for some time, just on the grounds of better data security and I liked working within the OSX environment, plus, with the implementation of Boot Camp, I could install XP and use that as a games platform.

In the 6 months I have owned the machine, it has spent a total of a month in repairs. Initially, a thunderbug had managed to crawl inside the LCD screen and die right in the middle, which was extremely annoying. I took the machine in to see if this would be repaired under warranty (thank god I bought Applecare), fortunately, this was possible and so 2 weeks later, my machine came back from the repair centre with a shiny new LCD screen and I went away happy.

The happiness lasted for about 4 days, at which point I realised the machine was no longer entering standby mode when the lid was closed. This turned out not to be a software issue, but as I was informed when I took the machine back to the Apple Store, a result of an improperly performed screen replacement. I was assured that this repair would be fast-tracked.

Three weeks of hearing nothing but the annoyingly nebulous “repair in progress” and one very annoyed letter to Apple’s corporate office later, I got my machine back. Everything appeared to be in order, finally.
Of course, this couldn’t last for long, and so as I was updating OSX last night, the machine hung in the middle of the operation with the hard drive chugging. I’m not an expert with OSX, so I left it to one side, went to play some playstation and watch TV for an hour or so, then came back to it, hoping that it was just on a bit of a slow bit. Unfortunately it was still chugging and not responding. I rebooted it, MacOS would no longer start. So I bit the bullet, reformatted the drive and reinstalled OSX from scratch, hoping it was a one-off error. Sadly however, on attempting to copy some data to it from my external drive, it licked up and chugged again. Cue me driving back to Bluewater again to the genius bar. Having to prove to them that no, I wasn’t a complete idiot, yes I’d run Disk Utility and done a complete format and reinstall, and finally demonstrating the error in front of 2 people they believed me that it might just be a hard drive problem.

I am sick of the unreliability of my MacBook Pro. Despite my love for OSX as a working environment, I’m honestly debating whether, when the time comes for replacement, if I’m going to bother going down the Mac route again. This machine has been less reliable than the previous two desktops I’ve owned, and I built those myself. Given that I’m a less than intelligent, somewhat cack-handed, mongoloid ape-man who only has a vague idea about the technical intricacies of electronic equipment, I seriously question who is building Apple’s computers. Perhaps next time they should try employing Chinese slave labourers that haven’t yet lost all their extremities in industrial accidents, at least then they might be able to assemble a working product.

I have been assured that this repair will be done within a week. I sincerely hope this is true.

So, on Monday, I start my final resit year. I’m not sure how I feel about this, but not too positive on the whole, mostly aprehension. This is my last chance to get it right, to make the 7 years I will have spent at medical school to actually be worth something at the end.

My summer has been, in a word, shit. Following the disappointing news of my exam results, I subsequently broke up with Jen, who I cared about far more than I think I ever let on and during the first week back at work, was involved in a car accident that wrote off my Escort. I still haven’t got any insurance payout for this, just to add to the stress levels.

Summer work was awful. I had been anticipating a dull summer of the usual secretarial temping. Instead, I was trying, and failing, to manage a particularly busy office with months of paperwork backlogged and a neverending stream of annoyed patients on the phone. So, I did what any normal, sensible person did would do: I had a bit of a breakdown, resulting in my current somewhat hazy mental state thanks to SSRI medication. Though it is nice to know that while I’m no longer wanting to stick knives through my head, I’m fortunately not a blissfully happy, corpse-eyed puppet person, though this is possibly an indicator that I need to increase the dosage.

I’m going to make an effort to update this thing over the course of the next year, just as a bit of a vent space. Got some odd bits and pieces to post up from the summer too. However, right now, I have to cook some steaks…

Well, results came out today.

I failed, spectacularly. So I’ll be repeating the final year with my last chance to pass this time next year. I’m feeling ok about the whole thing given the circumstances, but it’s just dragging it out for another year that’s the kicker.

Can’t believe I’m such an idiot, but these things happen. Sod’s law that the one exam I fail at university is the final one. Just have to knuckle down and make sure I don’t fail next year, it’s going to be hard, but hopefully I’ll make it.

Well, tomorrow is my last exam. I had the two written papers last week, which were… ok I guess. This is the biggie though, the practical exam to test clinical competance. If I fuck it up then I have to wait until November to get my one shot at a resit.

If all goes well, next Friday I should get a pass and I’ll be off to Hastings in August to start work.

If it doesn’t, you might very well find me moving at terminal velocity in a downwardly vertical direction in the vicinity of the Natwest tower.

Also, I wish I had £15,000: Mmmmm Skyline

Go Finland!

Exams in 3 weeks. Really, really fucking nervous. Not convinced I’m going to pass.

I bought a MacBook Pro, so with that and my iPod my transition to trendwhore iFag is complete.

It is very shiny and lovely though

Japanese TV has long been regarded as just being completely batshit insane, mainly through the efforts of shos such as Endurance and Superhuman Coliseum. What also does crop up from time to time are fits of sheer genius, the old “Matrix Ping Pong” skit that was performed on a light entertainment show a few years back did the rounds online and was incredibly innovative.

I’d like to add to this list the following video sent to me by a friend the other day, it’s a compilation of eyecatches from a show called Pythagoras Switch, broadcast on NHK in Japan and features several amazing Rube Goldberg devices created from household materials. Check it out