The last year has been an oddly game free zone. Under the perpetual threat of trans-pondian deployment I resisted buying anything new - all my old consoles would be packed up to come with me but I'd sell off my 360 and the modest stack of "Review copy - not for resale" white labels so there was no point buying anything new let alone tracking down a Wii (let us not go into the sordid subject of Sony consoles).
All told not exactly a bad year to miss out though. I'm not that bothered by missing Bioshock to be honest. Portal I do want to play but I've made do with the Flash version. Rock Band we get to play in the office which is far more fun to do than playing it alone (even if my 'singing' does tend to set the SixADogs off). I do want to finish Halo 3 however, even if 2 pissed me off no end.
Next year however - aww man. I've already squeed over Patapon (although it's at odds with my "have never bought a Sony console, will never" philosophy of life) and there's a new CES trailer
and, best of all, Rez HD
Awww yeah.
It's kind of hard to explain just how good Rez is. In fact some people hate it which is fair enough except that those people are wrong and killed my beloved Dreamcast and probably only ever buy endless yearly updates of FIFA and Pro Evo and Madden and Tony Hawks. They should, to paraphrase Warren Ellis "suck bear cocks in hell".
Suffice to say that it's beautiful and enthralling and mesmerising and chilled and frantic and fun. I gave a talk on it when it first came out, standing in a freezing east end warehouse projecting it through a VGA adaptor onto a wall. A friend, squatting on the ground, played through the first level as I talked. I turned round to point something out and paused momentarily to watch it. And then realised that I hadn't said anything for 5 minutes but that the audience hadn't noticed either. Later I was interviewed by Violet Berlin for the TV program Gamepad. I used the word salivated not once but twice during the course of the interview. That pretty much sums up up my state of mind at the time.
ObJanePinckardReference: I have no idea if it will come with the Trance Vibrator attachment. I have now fulfilled the seemingly mandatory requirement to link to that post whenever Rez is mentioned anywhere on the Internets.
Not content with previous hacks using the Wii remote - such as a multi-touch display and a cheapo interactive whiteboard - the rampant coolness that is Johnny Chung Lee has just posted a video which demonstrates head tracking using the Wii controller.
The money shot is 2:45 in - I'm not ashamed to say that it made me a little aroused.
Ok, I need to play this game.
This might actually persuade me to break the habit of a life time and spend actual money on a Sony console - something I've never done before.
UPDATE: Now with video ...
I have to confess I struggled with picking a track today.
I'm off snowboarding in a few days and I was up at 5am watching the snow reports from Tahoe so I really wanted to do ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead's epic "Will You Smile Again" since it's inexorably linked in my mind, via the First Descent trailer, to hurtling down mountains. The one small snagette is that it was only released in 2005 which sort of stymies my plan.
The Beta Band's Dry the Rain, as seen in an awesome scene in High Fidelity was an option - I had a whole spiel about Nick Hornby percolating in my mind but there's no video. The same goes for Le Dernier Coup by Marseilleses hip-hop god IAM - although you can listen to an instrumental version in the chase scene at the end of the original Taxi.
The awesomely surreal Midfielding by Midfield General (if you've never heard a song in which various woodland animals fly to Africa to go beat up Lions and Tigers using a huge wooden shrew lined with KitKat wrappers and with the eyes of an Old Russian Lady who had seen to much - dangerous but beautiful at the same time) was also only released in 2000.
So I'm going to go with the hugely underrated Terrorvision - Brummie purveyors of oddly anthemic tunes.
Of course, most people, if they know them at all, know them for the novelty Mint Royale remix of Tequila
which, whilst a fine song, isn't really representative of the Terrorvision ouevre.
Unfrotunately YouTube seems to have forsaken me - classics like Perseverance and Middleman seem to be oddly missing so we're going to have to go with the frighteningly catchy Oblivion.
Dreamt up by the sons of campers that you killed back in the forties?".
Since I'm short of other examples you have to watch the video of Fists of Fury which is a great song in its own right but also serves as a great parody of whatever Madonna song that she did when she pretended to dress up like a cowboy and play guitar.
Forget Faceball - it may be getting all the publicity but true hipsters know that's there's only one game in town.
And yes, despite being so jetlagged that I have brief moments of believing that I'm a humming bird, I am now a proud member of the '2 club'.
I won't reveal my secret but suffice to say - tai-chi, waterfalls, orange robes, the waxing of classic American automobiles - all these things are needed.
Bit of a first, an 80s track, but there's a line in this song which keeps going through me head
You were watching the whites of your eyes turn red ♪
Why yes Mr Jetlag! It is 5:30 in the morning. How can I thank you enough?
Oddly resonant, this one
Q: What do you do if you see 16 lawyers lying dead on the floor?
A: Stop laughing and reload.
You know, I really feel like I get this joke now in a way I've never truly got it before.
I was once told by someone that, at one point, the top 20 tracks in the UK singles chart at the time were all penned either overtly or semi-anonymously by Max Martin, Cathy Dennis, Take That's Gary Barlow or Gregg Alexander. I have no idea if that's true but it sounds plausible and that's good enough for me - after all it's widely known that Sweet Dreams My LA Ex was offered to at least Britney and one of the Minogue sisters (I forget which one) before Rachel Stevens.
Travelling round South East Asia and the Lands of Oz way, back when I was younger and (slightly) less cynical, the guy I was travelling with and I managed to have "Love is a Rollercoaster" by Ronan Keating (but written by Gregg Alexander) stuck in our heads. But not the whole song. Oh no. Just the lines "Love is a Rollercoaster, so don't try and fight it" which we we tunelessly sang over and over to the tune forsaking any other lyrics. For several months. For that reason alone I should hate Gregg Alexander more than I hate anyone else on earth, yay, even Geri Halliwell.
Yet I don't. I really liked "Maybe You've Been Brainwashed Too" for all its faults cos you've got to love someone who releases a commercially and (largely) critically successful album, gets to #1 in a few places with the debut single and then breaks up the band because he's bored and fed up with celebrity. The anti-Spears, the yang to Lindsey Lohan's yin. If only today's Reality TV Stars would take notes.
Put it this way - when Ice T says your debut single is the only thing that's grabbed him in the last few years, Joni Mitchell praises you in her liner notes and The Edge says that it's the song he's most jealous of you've probably done something right.
No 90mm last week 'cos I was Illy McSickerson of Crappy Town and, to be honest, I've not really been able to shake it this week either. Bleeeeuurgh.
But it's a bright, sunny but cold day and kind of reminds me of being in Toronto. So this seems appropriate.
Updated: weirdly enough there's actually a short film about a man's ever more exteme attempts to get it out of his head.
