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These days people just seem to get excited for the latest graphics when combined with a gun and as much as I see an appeal I don't indulge in that longing. There are two main types of game that really hit the spot for me; racing and strategy games. Oh and Zombie Highway and Paper Toss on the iPhone. But looking through the older parts of my game collection I stumbled across two which brought back enough nostalgia to install and play. Those two game were Age of Empires 3 and Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle Earth 2. Or for the latter more specifically (take a deep breath); The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle Earth 2 - The Rise of the Witchking expansion pack. Possibly the smallest font I've ever seen on the side of a games box.
For anyone that hasn't heard of the Age of Empires series, it was a third person strategy game where a player starts a new colony and works their way through the ages through development and battles. At the time the graphics were pretty jaw dropping and as far an I'm concerned it still has one of the best damage models of any game ever. Possible exception being Empire Total War which is a similar game just which improved graphics. For me, it's the right combination of fun, simplicity and variability. The sheer range of different styles of gameplay and strategies you can use means that it never gets boring, and that's just in single player skirmishes and the extensive campaign mode. Once you start playing this with other people, especially over LAN, that's where the fun really begins. Not only because when they get things wrong you can just shout at them but because when you screw things up there is the power of another brain to make sure that you don't lose.
So take that game and throw in The Lord of the Rings theming into it and I'm in the palm of your hand. I managed to get it working just a few days ago after patching and tweaking in order for it to play nice with Windows 7 and fell in love with it all over again. Remembering that once you have fully upgraded elvish archers you cannot lose I chose a map against the goblins and got going. This time building walls across the bridges so they only had on method to attack further down the river. The battles which followed were the most fun I've had in a long time, with my triple wall defense and arrow towers everywhere. Completely immersed in the world for a few hours whilst the Apocalypse, not being able to make it's previous schedule of Friday the 14th of October, was surrounding me.
For years the frankly brilliant piece of Sunday night fun coming to from BBC2, Top Gear, has been brightening up the time you spend before going to bed knowing that when you wake up your back to the work of the daily grind. The combination of the trio's cliche'd personalities makes for excellent 'good time' viewing. The show has been shown all around the world and dubbed and subbed into many different languages but now the format has been sold so countries can start making their own. If the american version is anything to go by, this was a colossal mistake.
As I'm writing I'm watching the first episode of the american show and although it has all the right ingredients there's just something about it that doesn't seem genuine. Maybe this is purely because I don't like formats being sold to America because it's never as good as the original. Or maybe it's that the presenters seem like their heart isn't into what their doing, despite the opening video being a Dodge Viper being chased around a town by a helicopter, similar to what British Top Gear did a couple of times a few years back. I don't mind that their copying, they kind of have to, I mean what else is there left to do? But it's lacking the fun element of it. Maybe I've just got this all wrong and the British trio are just better actors.
I think to sum it up I'll say this; it's doesn't seem quite as well polish or it has a smaller budget that the original. But it's kind of like watching a series of the original Top Gear and then watching a series of Fifth Gear. Both very good in themselves but you know which ones better.
Well it's that time of the week, all be it one day later than usual, where I have a bit of a moan to the rest of the world befoe retiring back to my cacoon. It's been an odd kind of week with different job possibilities coming and going, trying new things and genrally getting through a lot of Stella Artios....but she doesn't mind.
Lateness has been a theme today as prooved by myself and my train, now trains, to work this morning. As there are "improvemnt works" currently in action, making everything later than usual so that when they go bac to normal then can claim it's an improvement, so my train was twenty minutes late. That's not a huge deal in itself, after all who's really that anxious to get to work. The problem came after boarding when, once we were a few stations down the line, I got a text messege to which I replied and look up to see the sign flying past fo my station. To which my reaction was not to explode, it was more of an "oh, that's odd". Of course it's not so bad, one station further, I can just walk back to work from there but unfortunatly the train didn't want me to do that and carried on to the next station whre it eventually stopped. The pistons laughly evily at me. What they were fogetting was that the train that goes back down the line was only five minute away, although I did have a niggling theory that it wouldnt stop at my station for no apparent reason. Anyway, after my tour Croydon, lucky me, I got into work 45 minutes late, not that anyone really noticed and got on with my day.
Now onto what is fast becoming a classic topic, driving lessons. Not going to be a long rant today because I did parrelel parking for the first time. So after 15 minutes of trying to find an appropriate spot or, as some women I know like to call it, a shoe shopping space, we pulled up and went through it. To my suprise, I actually completed it boths times perfectly which begs th question; why (using a steriotype) are women so bad at it? I can answer that. They're too busy making sure they look good for when they step out of the car...or looking at the sale sign in the shop window...or perhaps thinking what it would be like to be a princess. Ok I know the latter doesn't actually sound all that realistic just you'd be suprised.
Finally, there's always something that says the world is going to end on a given day. Well it may aswell be Friday the 14th of October because everything else is. I have my driving theory test at 8am, then was invited for an interview at 9am (which I've managed to purspone)then working as usual, Ed Byrne in the evening, software upgrades, oher deadlines around work such as payment for the Christmas doo and finally and most importantly, Forza 4 is being delivered for some love making with my Xbox. If your reading this on that day then it must not be quie so busy for you. I don't know, maybe it's just me, but everything seems to be happening tomorrow so I'm afriad appocolypse will have to wat, I'm far too busy.
I try not to right about how the week has been in a whole but I may as well just give it a go this once. So here we go; I worked a lot, went to the pub, didn't get laid and went to sleep again.
Thanks for reading!
OK, so I did a little more than that. For example yesterday I completed another driving lesson. For the first time the clutch control was good, did some emergency braking and some maneuvers. Long since are the days where if a child appears all of a sudden in front of you, and you know you will probably hit it, you slam on the brakes and pray that you only mildly injure...I mean that you don't hit it. Well chances are it was the kid who let down your tires last week and shot peas at your cat. No, now if lil Lucifer walks into the road you have to check all your mirrors then quickly start applying more braking break until the car starts to skid, or not if you have ABS (yes, that's right, its now a fact that if you have bulging muscles your car won't skid). Making sure not to stall, then put the handbrake on and put the gear into neutral. After all that, you again have to check your mirrors, you get out and see how much damage a kid bouncing off your bonnet actually causes and then walk 50 feet back up the road to where a battered and broken Lucifer lays.
So emergency braking covered we moved onto a quiet road to do a three point turn for the first time. After being talked through it I was just about to start the maneuver when I noticed something. 100 feet up the road there was a learner performing an interesting insight into how to do reverse parallel parking and 100 feet behind there was another reversing left round the corner. With me in the middle doing a three point turn it could have looked like an Olympic sport in practice for London 2012 games next year; Synchronized Learner Maneuvers. To be honest, that might actually happen because everyone in Britain thinks the Games next year are going to be a bit of let down even if they do well. A learner driving onto the running track and then trying to do a three point turn to get out again probably wouldn't raise to many surprised eyebrows.
Finally, we decided to try and do a left hand corner reverse maneuver so we went on search for an eligible junction. I kid you not, I was driving for 15 minutes before we eventually found the only learner-driver-free-corner in the UK. But unfortunately half way through the process we had to abort because a learner driver appeared at the road I was reversing in to and wanted to turn left. Bloody learner drivers... . The people of this country are always talking about teenagers hanging around on street corners. Well now they're doing it in cars with older people. OK, that doesn't sound quite how I meant it but you can all blame yourselves for having dirty minds.
It would be wrong of me, somehow, to not mention the death of one of the greatest innovators and business leaders of the past 50 years; Steve Jobs. The former co-founder and, until August, CEO of Apple died yesterday at the age of only 56 after suffering from cancer for 8 years. The world will sorely miss Steve Jobs, even those who aren't particular fans of Apple. Without him the Macintosh all-in-one computer would exist which has saved many market analysts' jobs and upper working class families try to progress to full on middle class. More importantly, for me, we wouldn't have the iPod, which for me would be the invention of the decade, especially my 4th gen purple nano. Simple, small, sexy, long lasting and does exactly what you want. Rest in peace Steve, enjoy chatting with god, there's an app for that you know.
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