Yahtzee is a very funny, very sharp and very fast talking games reviewer (and game maker) who has rapidly developed a cult following on The Escapist website.
He uses simple graphical animations to illustrate his fast rant reviews and claims the great Charlie Brooker (who I've mentioned here before) as a stylistic influence.
A couple of random quotes might start to give you a sense of his style:
Japanese RPGs and me have this little understanding: I don't play them and they can suck as much as they like somewhere far away from me.
# It's kinda like if Tim Schafer knocked up David Lynch in Willy Wonka's chocolate factory and he did meth right up until the birth
The day I fork out seventy bucks for an expansion pack is the day I swallow razor wire, pull the end out of my arse and floss myself to death!
This week he looked at Sim City Societies, skewering it mercilessly and pointing out that it makes it easy to see how simple it would be to set up totalitarian societies.
He has also previously done great reviews of The Orange Box (including my fave game Portal), Guitar Hero III and Halo 3, among others.
Not living in Victoria at the moment, I watched the new Channel 9 Melbourne gangland wars drama Underbelly on tv last night. (It's currently banned from broadcast in Victoria at the moment by Supreme Court order - for fear of prejudicing an upcoming murder trial. Evidently the legal system isn't familiar with satellite receivers or internet download)
Having seen it, I'm not entirely sure that the court didn't slap a ban on the show for more aesthetic reasons - in spite of the interesting subject matter (and prevalence of gratuitous breasts), it's a bit of a pedestrian and slightly dull affair.
Having lived in Melbourne during most of the time this "war" was going on, it was good to see familiar locations on screen and to get some insight into the back story of the news stories and names I vaguely recognised - though who knows how accurate this show actually is. (I'm not sure if I was telling the story of a bunch of people who seem prone to whacking one another whether I'd be as accurate as possible or as flattering as possible.)
Channel Nine has gone the absolute hack in promoting their new flagship show (and are no doubt loving the court injunction sick for the notoriety it offers) and you can see that in the above trailer. Shame that all of their splash quotes (one helluva show, landmark drama, showcases Australia's best talent) really don't say anything much in particular. (And two of those come from Melbourne's newspaper of the lowest common denominator, the Herald Sun)
Aside from a few (admittedly talented) key names - Vince (Lantana) Collosimo (already killed), Marcus (Good guys, Bad guys) Graham and Simon (Phoenix) Westaway and Frankie (every channel 9 shit-com in the last 2 decades) J Holden, the majority of the cast for me was a who's-he rather than a who's-who.
But that's neither here nor there really as the proof is in the pudding - sadly, with relatively cliched writing and plotlines, the best a good actor can do is not look like a complete goose. The story is pulled together with occasional scene-setting voice-overs but if you are going to use voice-overs to tell your story (generally a lazy strategy), they need to be smart and punchy.
Gyton Grantley put in the best consistent performance of the show with his slightly unsettling, slightly dopey seeming and fairly chilling Carl Williams, creating a real sense of someone who will get darker and more interesting as the show progresses.
Vince Colosimo did the best with what he had to work with , Frankie J played a template harried cop and the women were almost entirely in the background.
I've just noticed on the Underbelly "the biggest all-star cast on Australian tv" photo page - which doesn't actually offer bios of any of the "stars" that Dan Wyllie (below) is in the cast, which gives me some hope - he's done a lot of interesting work, though generally always as a petty crim.
The Sopranos or Phoenix (gritty Melbourne 90s cop show) it ain't - it might bear some comparison to Blue Murder over time and in fairness, it's usually a good idea to give shows a few weeks to get settled so I guess I'll keep watching.
Interestingly, one of the stories in The Age today mentioned that hundreds of Victorians were skirting the Supreme Court ban by hitting the file-sharing sites but some had found downloading slow because so many people were trying to access the files at the same time. (Not quite appreciating that the more people downloading the file at the same time, the faster the downloads are due to the shared distribution nature of these sites)
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd just finished apologising to the Stolen Generations - a symbolic event that has been a long time coming.
It's hard to go into a lot of detail - both his speech and the reply from Brendan Nelson (leader of the opposition) were lengthy - but here are some impressions.
Overall, a beautiful, powerful and worthy speech from Rudd that teared me up a little when the "sorry" words actually came out. He didn't dance around the subject or quibble with the matter, just copped it on the chin on behalf of parliaments and governments past and set forward to make a new and better path.
Rudd generally kept things statesmanlike, just occasionally aiming the odd jab here and there at the former Howard Government's refusal to apologise and on the odd occasion he tried throwing in a little, relatively irrelevant humour when he talked about the way the post-reformation Christian issues were resolved in the way Aboriginal children were assigned churches on the basis of which line they were in.
Brendan Nelson on the other hand started well but then had a total mishmash of a speech which seemed a little laden with dog-whistle politics and slightly lessened the whole day and its focus. He made telling points about how wrong and damaging the child removals were and how important it was to make things right but then insisted on throwing in a series of qualifiers about how the people doing it thought they were doing it for the right reasons and that children were being removed from lives of squalor.
He then went on to imply that many of the problems are their own due to alcohol, language issues, corruption, nepotism and choosing to sit outside the economic mainstream. He also banged out about how we shouldn't condemn the white folk of this age because many of them went to fight in the war?!? Rather missing the point of the whole thing. Throw in a hearty, heavily political defence of the Howard NT intervention and a call for the PM to continue that and you have something that the more you think about it sounds less and less like an apology as you go on.
Chunt.
Oddly enough though, his last line sounded almost like he was putting forward an apology not just on behalf of himself but on behalf of all Australians, so who knows what he's on about.
NPR (National Public Radio) in the U.S has a nifty multimedia project up on their website at the moment where they have asked 26 notable cultural figures to put an image of themselves together with 6 words to sum up their lives.
I'm a little embarrassed to admit that the only person I had heard of was Harvey Pekar (cartoonist/author of American Splendor)
Some of the people they used though - fortunately for me - didn't really register with Google either. Of the 10 entries for Carletta Perkins, 5 of them were referencing this page with the quote about cake. (Great way to be remembered :)
Guitar Rising claims to be the next step up from the wildly popular (and super-fun) Guitar Hero series of games. It's PC based software that allows you to plug in your actual electric guitar to your computer and use a Guitar Hero-esque interface to measure your success in playing a range of different songs.
A big question is obviously - which songs. If you take a quick look at the song-list in this promo video, there's nothing that I've even remotely heard of but the website does mention that they are currently working on deals for song titles, so it could well just be the working list.
If it lives up to its promise, this could be a very exciting development in learning guitar. At the moment, its scheduled for release later in the year.
