Free games are brilliant. I don't understand people who spend a big chunk of their monthly income on new, RRP console games. They are so damn expensive. You could do all sorts with that money.
I've been playing some wonderful free games over the past few weeks, and in the next few posts, I will tell you about them. Then, after I've told you about them, you can enjoy them, and still have money for beer!
In an effort to stop myself from just blogging soppily about teenage favourites, here's last year's best single. Late to the party with Glasvegas, but I've been playing this a lot since I heard it a month or so ago. A lot, a scary amount. Look up what this song's about and check out the lyrics properly. Warning: may make you so sad that you have to listen to the song another dozen times.
Oh, and the album's pretty fantastic too. With all the stabbings and misery, they're like a Glasgow Arctic Monkeys. Except, annoyingly for a Sheffielder, obviously much better.
This past fortnight, I've been enjoying both the modern plastic-drum thrills of Rock Band 2 (career mode is fucking awful, but I don't care) and the retro wonders of Super Mario 64, - again. It's the right time, I think. The first time I completed Mario 64 (and I do mean completed - don't come to me with less than 120 stars, or I'll feed you to the Goombas) was when I first got it, a decade or so ago. Then once more, in my University days, when Tuesday afternoons stretched out lazily in front of me like red carpets. And now again, during my quarter-life-crisis, when I can afford a laptop that will run N64 emulators. It's a wonderful game, and replaying it affirmed a love for it that I'd lost. Sure, Mario Galaxy on the Wii is spectacular and has glorious space-headfuck worlds to explore, but none of them have the sheer charm of, say, Cool Cool Mountain, with its baby penguins. 64 is the best Mario game and I will take that opinion to my grave.
This particular playthrough, however, has been enriched by something else, namely my discovery of sm64.com. Apart from being a nerd-pleasing treasure trove of information, it documents world record times for getting stars on the game. And let me tell you, these are some fucking world records. Let's compare. Here, for your viewing pleasure, is me getting a star on Mario 64. It's no great feat; my little brother could get this one when he was eight or so. Still, have a look.
I'm within a minute there. Not too shabby, no real mistakes. Now, check this.
You see that? That's a man who doesn't care about silly trifles like insurmountable walls or unscalable heights. This man scoffs at gravity (although the game sort of does too, by implying that a very squat man could climb that many vertical feet that quickly without having a coronary/fatal nosebleed). The music from that video plays in his head all the time. Where other people would see a bannister, or a lamp-post, or a child's head, he sees a platform. He's a speedrunner.
Speedrunning is the practice of pushing videogames to their very limits. It takes scary amounts of skill and dedication, and an intense level of hand control. By any logical criterion, it should have a shot at being in the 2012 Olympics - after all, we're OK with archery. For me, speedruns are the 21st-Century equivalent of World's Strongest Man: we can all do the basic tasks (lift a heavy thing; play a computer game) but we can't do them to anything like the same degree. Also, the people who are best at it are applauded within a certain circle, but regarded by the rest of the world as basically freaks. And you know me: I just love watching freaks.
In the most entertaining speedruns, it's not the speed and skill that's impressive, it's the inventiveness. They take routes through games that you would never even have considered: through practice and sneaky use of game mechanic, they jump gaps you'd considered unjumpable, avoid enemies you'd thought unavoidable, and just generally invoke a gleeful reaction of omg-no-way. And because you'll only ever see their best runs, there's no stalling or failing or umming-and-aahing: they skip gaily through bomb-filled warehouses and spiky death traps as if to say "oh sorry, was there some danger? I missed that."
Speed Demos Archive houses many brilliant ones, although there are just as many dull ones, so be choosy. I mentioned SM64.com which can be very entertaining for Nintendostalgics. My favourite one ever, though, is the astonishing Half-Life Done Quick. Anyone who's played the game must remember the hours they poured into it (joyful hours too, at least until the bullshit aliens at the end). This speedrun, after a slow start, breaks it apart. I think it's been done quicker since, but this video is the one I watched one night at Uni, very very stoned, with the video volume down and Yanqui U.X.O. at full blast. Geek heaven.
I've got a blog post all ready, but Youtube has decided to hate me. Naively, I tried to upload a raw video from my camera. Once I saw that it was 170MB, I thought "ooh, there's a problem here, that's why it's taking so long". So I compressed it to a tenth of the size. No, that doesn't work either. It just stops.
Oh well. I'll try tomorrow. It's a quite nice post about videogames, and after that I may have some lovely pictures to show you.
I watch enough TV (by which I mean "download enough TV" - it's so cute that some people watch actual televisions!) that the idea of having a favourite TV person is almost inconceivable. At any point in the last couple of days, this could have been Landry from Friday Night Lights (Christian speed-metal! Ironic football referee!), or Locke (IT'S BACK!), or Charlie Brooker (the man who thousands would love to be but will never admit it). Still, I think I've settled on someone - someone who I love in a fiercely heterosexual way.
Tim Key is a "poet", by which I mean he isn't a poet. Yes, he writes poems, but they're deadpan, ironic, terrible poems, played for laughs. He's plied his verse on Charlie Brooker's shows, on Mark Watson's wonderful radio series, and most recently on Twitter. The poems themselves are always hilarious, taking the piss out of poetry itself while also somehow loving it too. Of course, he wouldn't be a good fake poet if he wasn't a good comedian: anyone who's seen Time Trumpet will remember him in the "Cilla Black autopsy" and "Eastenders green-screen" sketches, and there's this other show I'll get to in a minute. In both worlds, Key's humour comes from subtlety. Tiny turns of phrase, glances, mistakes ridden out, smiles. It's such a unique and versatile style, and it's brilliant to see in a time when great comedians seem to get a bit stuck in fashionable ruts (awkward social comedy, docudrama, "dark" sitcom, etc.).
Then there's the huge concern of We Need Answers, the Mark Watson-fronted BBC4 comedy quiz, with Key as question-master, that's doing its best to convince the bravely battling but terminally ill Shooting Stars that it can just let go ("I'm gonna be alright, dad. I can support the family. You just sleep now"). It's a sign of how fresh and fun We Need Answers is that its online sister-show is possibly even better - No More Women is a genuine revelation. It's a game invented by Key and Watson, and since seeing it for the first time I've introduced it to everyone I possibly can. Normally when I try to foist a fun activity on other people, they humour me for a while before getting bored. With No More Women, people who even overhear me tutoring a newbie insist on getting a game going. The online episodes, commentated on by WNA's technical maestro Alex Horne, are both entertaining and a rich source of gameplay tips. I may never make a stronger recommendation on this blog: get into No More Women. It will enrich your bus journeys, your drinking sessions, your country walks. It's great.
On a related note, I must mention another Tim, who's a good friend of mine and an eminently followable Tweeter. He went to see We Need Answers being filmed recently. He seemed to have fun, look!
I was considering writing a big list of the best 100 songs of the 00s ("the decade that never had a good nickname") for this blog, and got quite excited about it, because the recurring "00" is kind of nice visually. I soon realised, though, that any old twat can write a list of pieces of recorded sound first created in some arbitrary time period. It's been done to death and double-death.
You know when you're talking about music, about a song you love, and the best way you can get across to people what it means to you is by saying "It's just one of those songs"?
I know I've whacked the picture up there, but I haven't got that EP. Not even on MP3, even though I could click around for a while and have it torrented by morning. I got this track off a cover compilation from Select magazine, back when magazines made of paper existed (I believe they were "sold" in something called "smiths"). I found the tracklist online, and it confirms my memory that when I first span that CD, Face Like Summer was the standout, the one that jumped into my face like a track-in-the-box. I liked the Soulwax Prince cover and the pre-boring-period Snow Patrol song too, but I'll not digress.
Face Like Summer is quite a sad song. Not industrial-grade Merritt-sad, the sort of sad that smiles at you while it's dragging a razor across its throat, but still fairly melancholy by anyone's standards. Through my ears, though, it's heartbreaking. I don't kiss and tell (and these days, I mainly just don't kiss), but I'm sure you'll understand how a lyric like "so young in years / probably end in tears" could be a little wounding to someone who's finally developed the power of hindsight. And yet there's an upside: at the end of the song, the uneasy, stomach-sick romance of the first verses blossoms into a sun-filled, harmonious coda which seems to go on forever, and could, and I'd never press stop. With every repeat, it gives a reminder to even the most jaded and grumpy of us that all you need is one thing. It could be a face like summer, or hair like fire, or an accent, or a cute hat, or freckles or a laugh or a look of surprise. That little thing you love.
