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.
Nice mashup job here from JasonSly on YouTube of the trailer for the Hollywood remake of the classic horror film The Wicker Man as a light hearted comedy.
Ok so just when I thought that the naughty party boy (a.k.a Corey Worthington/Delaney) saga was over, his name has popped up once more and made me realise that I have a dream I'd never known of before.
To be used as a clumsy pop-culture analogy in Parliament.
Federal Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner has compared the Coalition's attitude to inflation to the Victorian teenager Corey Worthington's views on parties.
The comparison came as Mr Tanner announced more than $600 million worth of cuts to programs promised by the Coalition during the election campaign.
Corey Worthington came to national attention in January when he refused to apologise when a party he organised grew out of control. He also became known for distinctive yellow sunglasses.
Mr Tanner says the Coalition has taken an irresponsible attitude to inflation.
"Like teenagers whose party just keeps getting longer and longer and bigger and bigger and ignoring the consequences, they've ignored 20 Reserve Bank warnings on inflation, 10 successive interest rate increases and they just kept partying," he said.
"Brendan Nelson and Malcolm Turnbull are still looking at the Australian economy through those big yellow shades."
Yep, more American election stuff - today (yesterday - whatever, it's a timezone/dateline thing) is the day that voters in 24 states around the U.S vote for delegates to the Democratic and Republican national conventions which choose the candidates for the Presidential elections in November.
The delegates are tied to the existing candidates, so by default it's a vote for who the states want to be the candidate. The Democrats use proportional representation in their voting, so most of the votes are likely to be split down the middle (between Obama and Clinton) but the Republicans tend to have more of a first across the line gets all the goodies process. (Similar to their respective politics I guess)
Voting is still going on and the counting continues - the only news is that the Gomer Pyle looking Republican mo-fo Mike Huckabee has won West Virginia, grabbing 18 delegates. Um, whoo - or should I say, well gollleeeeee.
Updates to come.
There was a pretty interesting story on Hillary on Foreign Correspondent on the ABC last night - even though I have issues with her support for the Iraq war and moralistic objections to video games, I'm feeling better about her now as a Barack alternative. (Particularly in the way she infuriates the conservatives like few others have done before)
Shane put me onto some highly amusing YouTube videos that were put together by someone called Buffalax and I've been having a good old chuckle ever since.
It doesn't sound as funny when you describe it, suffice to say that he/she has taken music videos from around the world - Bollywood, Japanese tv, German pop - and added English subtitles of what the songs sound like in English.
This means that you get a string of nonsense lyrics such as "my loony bun is fine benny lava" and "I'd love to see you pee on us tonight".
Seven seasons of The West Wing (and a general interest in the world around us) have given me a strong interest in the American political system (imperial masters and all :) and so the current race is a particular treat.
On the Democratic side of the aisle (Bush is a Republican), we have a pearler of a contest between Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama to be the candidate for the Presidential election in November. (And given Bush's efforts to root the world over the last 8 years, the likelihood of a Democrat winning is pretty impressive).
As much as I thought Bill Clinton was a living legend, Hillary has impressed me a lot less in her time in the Senate and Barack Obama has consistently offered hope for a truly inspirational shift in power.
He seems smart, sincere, decent and determined to do the right thing, with an awareness of the fact that America (and the world) seriously needs a dramatic new approach to deal with the major problems of our day.
A bunch of musicians and other celebs put this song together recently, taken from the words of a speech Obama gave after the New Hampshire Primary earlier this year. It has choked me up almost every time I've listened to it.
(If you want to see the original, higher quality version, check out www.dipdive.com
I think this song has replaced Still Alive from Portal as my most awesome song of the year at the moment. It's so full of hope it's hard not to get carried away.
I came across this tool this morning and have been wiling away more time than I probably should but it's all a bit of fun.
It allows you to nominate a web URL and it then overlays a range of animations that virtually deface the site. I've particularly been enjoying playing with this pic of former Prime Minister Howard and Dubya.
David Mamet has been writing superbly sharp and smart plays,movies and tv shows for more than 30 years including The Verdict, the Pulitzer prize winning Glengarry Glen Ross (play and movie), Speed the plow, Ronin, State and Main, Wag the Dog and a whole bunch more.
Glengarry Glen Ross has always been a particular favourite for it's astounding timing and use of language (and particularly use of swearing) - there is no wasted talent in the film version of this either, every actor (Jack Lemmon, Al Pacino, Kevin Spacey, Ed Harris, Alan Arkin, Johnathon Pryce and Alec Baldwin) absolutely owning their scenes.
Anyway - I was going to talk about his new play - November. All I know is what I've read but what I've read looks good.
November takes aspects of the Bush Administration — a love of God, and suspicion of foreign nations and homosexuals — and created a farce in which the president's annual ritual of pardoning a Thanksgiving turkey is compromised by the threat of avian flu and a same-sex wedding in the White House.
This creates energetic and enjoyable comedy. There's also the hint of a large and serious charge underneath: Smith's attempt to remodel the entire Thanksgiving holiday (replacing turkey with another food) can be taken as a metaphor for what Bush's enemies see as a contempt for American history. But Mamet's main satirical point is the form he has chosen: his Bush-era play is a farce with a laughing stock at its heart.
Now sure, making jokes about Bush is like shooting oil in a barrel but given Mamet's extraordinary talents, I still think he'll be able to find 20 new ways of doing it.
I've mentioned Portal a few times now here (well, it's awesome, what am I supposed to do) so I'll spare you a repeat performance of the gushing about the smart, darkly humourous writing and innovative gameplay - and the great closing song - and just show you this video I found the other day.
It's a tiny bit juvenile at some points but has some funny moments - it's a tale of a day at work for two of the robotic machine gun turrets.
Mass Attack is a simple game sitting neatly in the casual games genre - games that anyone can just dip into for a quick 10 minutes of mental refreshment.
It's beautifully simple - you just click (and hold) on the other side of the scales to produce weights (balls) that balance out with those on the other side. As long as you can get them (you get 3 chances) within 3 units of each other (i.e virtually balanced), you can proceed.
Not a bad start to the day hey - the local game design school here in The Can' - the Academy of Interactive Entertainment - has an email newsletter that they put out and a few months ago they mentioned that if you go to their website and forward the email to other people (ok, it's like spam but - uh, not) then one lucky person could win a shiny shiny PSP.
And I'll be buttered and burnt on both sides if it wasn't me.
Yay.
It's an upgrade from the original model, sleeker and able to handle the upcoming Skype connectivity that is due to be released soon. Got it hooked up to our broadband testing account as well - so I can sit and my desk and - uh - access - uh - the internets. (Hmm, that's probably less beneficial than I thought :)
Their sponsors even threw in a couple of games, which was nice.
G'day. My memories of Peter Russell Clark are of a slightly dorky, highly cheerful, slightly cheesy bloke who had these 5 minute filler mini-cooking shows on the ABC (the national broadcaster) in the 80s. He also did a range of ads on commercial telly for cheese, most famously including his catchphrase - where's the cheese?
Then he kind of just faded into obscurity - until (for me) yesterday, when I came across this awesome series of blooper clips from those ads and shows that demonstrate what a top bloke (crass, funny and seemingly genuinely decent) he really is.
Be mindful that there is a fair bit of swearing in here. (Click here to view video)
What really demonstrated his top-blokeness was a followup interview he did on JJJ a few days ago, where he's really not at all phased that the clips have made it online and manages to pull out a few more classic lines.
Continuing the naughty party boy story, this image came through the email this morning - some nice work indeed. I had one small issue with it though - the original version had the guy with a Crown Lager tucked into his waistband when I felt that a Vodka Cruiser might be more appropriate.
