Free Games.

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!

Everyone wins. Sorry I've not been updating...

Limmy's Show.

-immy's show!

One Of Those Songs.

#2. Glasvegas - Flowers and Football Tops (click for video)

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.

Speed Runnings.

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.

FuckYouYouTube.

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.

Sorry about this.

Two Tims.

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!

Hello, Tim!

Those Songs, #1

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"?

These are my those songs.

Gorky's Zygotic Mynci - Face Like Summer (The Blue Trees EP, 2000)

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.

And I know that's where it begins.

Bellamy's People & Down The Line.

Here's a puzzle for you, in the style of Only Connect (more of which later). Points if you can name the connection between these four things.

Goodness Gracious Me; The Mighty Boosh; Little Britain; That Mitchell and Webb Look.

Obviously, it's not that they're all funny. Little Britain has never been funny. No, it's that they all successfully made the now-traditional trek from BBC Radio to BBC TV. And there's a new one come to join them, but it's got it all wrong. And yet also right, possibly.

Bellamy's People (Thursdays, 10pm, BBC2) is the TV extension of the truly wonderful Down The Line, a spoof Radio 4 phone-in show which first broadcast in 2006. In the radio show, Rhys Thomas plays Gary Bellamy, the host who's two parts slick'n'cheesy to one part hopeless'n'embarrassing. Many of his "callers" are voiced by dependable Fast Show alumni Higson and Whitehouse, and the rest of the cast are often even better, portraying a menagerie of absurd but just-believable characters, ad-libbing hilariously in an attempt to make the host lose his composure. You can often hear him corpse, and it's twice as funny as that is on telly. I was lucky enough to first hear it like it was intended, as an almost-real show that quickly dawns on you as a send-up. Fantastic.

And now it's made the leap to telly. "But how?", I hear you (i.e. me) say. "It's a phone-in show, that can't work!". Well, shut up, you (i.e. me). The BBC are clever, obviously. So, the show's format is that Bellamy is stepping out of the studio to meet his "public". He drives around in a Union Flag-painted oldster car (a nod to the radio show, where Bellamy can't quite ever keep his mild racism under the hood), visits his favourite callers, and engages in the familiar awkward banter with them, only this time face-to-face.

I'll say this now: it's not as funny as Down The Line. It couldn't really hope to be, seeing as that show made the most of a perfect format. However, it is very good, and utterly worth a watch. Highlights of the first episode were Early D, the Harlesden wideboy, who reacts badly to being told that his panther statue is not actually a "black lion", and Bellamy's biggest fan Trisha, a ditzy obsessive who giggles all over Gary while her strangely compliant husband smiles terrifyingly into the camera. Some characters don't quite work as well as on the wireless, but there are certainly more hits than misses.

Still, I'm a bit baffled as to why this series was made in the first place. The cast is superb, and it'll have an willing audience from the radio series, but the premise just seems weird if imagined as a first-time viewer. Never mind: at the very least, it should get a few more people enjoying Down The Line, and that's no bad thing.

Endless Migration.

Is there anything more awe-inspiring than seeing a flock of migrating birds, flying to their warm winter home beyond the ocean, peacefully and magnificently, in formation across the sky?

Well yes, obviously. It's a beautiful spectacle, for sure, but you'll see it for about twenty seconds and then it's gone. Plus, it's rarer than you've convinced yourself. Come on, be honest, how often have you seen one of those perfect V-shaped avian platoons in flight over your head? And in real life mind, not on the telly. Rarely, at best. Overrated, that's what I'm saying.

Not overrated: Endless Migration.

This is a game that pushes just about every single one of my joy buttons.

Firstly, it's an original idea: you are a goose. A Canada goose, migrating. In an era where the main selling point of most videogames seems to be either "his gun can shoot snakes" or "her tits grow in proportion to her magic level", I'm really heartened that someone sat down and thought, "You know what? I'm going to design a goose-em-up". There's more to it than that, of course, but crucially - not much more. When you meet other geese, they fly with you too. You have to avoid aeroplanes and the like. It's the life of a goose, only stylised, and stylised ever so well.

It's simple, too. I love simple games. The mouse is your only control, and your success depends entirely on dragging your leader-goose around the screen quickly enough to avoid becoming a big red stain on a 747's windscreen. One go lasts a few minutes maximum, because once you're doing well it fucking hurls aeroplanes at you, and helicopters and all sorts. It gets pretty fucking hectic and very, very exciting.

The clincher, though, is the progress mechanic. This is my biggest joy button, and it's so big that it has three separate sub-buttons, all of which are smothered comfortably by this simple online game, while one big-budget console game after the next misses them and fumbles around on the dashboard, sweating and cursing. These are they:

Progress can be made through skill, perseverance, or both

Time spent is never wasted

All challenges are achievable with patience and practice

Endless Migration has an "upgrade" menu: between goes, you can buy things that make your glorious goose faster, stronger, and smarter. You earn the points to buy these either by attaining in-game achievements (which are witty, varied and fun), or by simply having another go and getting a few more points. A limber-wristed wizard can burn through the upgrades within a few games, and a ham-fisted donkey can slowly get them all by simply playing for a while. Each upgrade gives a bit of help, lets you improve that high score a little. They don't get taken away if you fuck up. It's a short game (I managed all the achievements over a hugely enjoyable 45 minutes) but I wish more full, proper-release games would adopt Endless Migration's approach to player progress. The word "game" implies fun: why do so many games insist on punishing players by withholding parts that they're not good enough to unlock?

I know many folks like a bit of "hardcore", but it should be an option. I've been burned before - I bought Viewtiful Joe, was enchanted by its design, but even on Easy (named in the game, balls-out-dismissively, as "Kids") it demanded a level of study and revision that removed most of the fun from the equation. Fuck that bullshit.

As a perfect, shining example of this particular gaming virtue, I cite Blast Corps. But then, I cite Blast Corps as perfect in most ways. I really like Blast Corps. I also really like Endless Migration.

About.

This is a blog about telly, music, radio, films, videogames - anything audiovisual, y'know. Anything that goes in through your eyes and ears. I suppose I could add "fingers" to that too, for the games, but that's less catchy.

I'm not sure yet if it'll be reviews and things, or just observations. I like the idea of reviews, because I like grades and scores and stats, but reviews of all the things I like are totally done to death. So who knows.

First post on the way.

The AV stands for Audio Visual

Y'know, like The Onion, but not as good.
Yet.