Sweetchuck’s

I truly am a lucky-chucky. For Christmas ‘09 I got a nice shiny black XBox 360 with some games thrown in. Two, actually; Lego Batman and Pure a racing game from Disney. I played Pure on Boxing Day and although quite enjoyable, it’s nowhere near as good as my favourite driving game Burnout: Paradise.

To be honest, I’ve been kinda slipping in the game playing stakes of recent months. Since I arrived in Canada I’ve had nothing to keep my hands occupied of an evening – steady out there – in the form of a games console or even an half-descent PC to play games. Everything happened at once; over the Christmas period I got my XBox and a PC that the work was throwing out. So now I can play TF2 and frag some engies.

It’s like everything, if you don’t practice at it then you’re not very good. I’m still not very good if I’m being honest, but I’m getting better. I don’t run at the first sign of trouble when I’ve got two health bars left. I just calmly look around for the health packs (they are easy to see aren’t they) and keep going.

There is a palpable adrenaline rush when you are starting a round. You wait on one side of a gate while the opposing team prepare for your onslaught. Sentry guns are placed by engineers, medics are uber-ing up Heavys. Then the announcer starts “10 seconds remaining…. 3 … 2 … 1 …” The gates open.

And it’s like the start of Saving Private Ryan. Grenades and rockets fly through the sky and bullets rip through your team-mates virtual flesh as you rush towards the enemy. You make a dash for cover but come short as your nemesis take you out again and as the screen freeze frame’s on your killer the voice says “Thanks for standing still, wanker.”

I’m spending too much time, literally as well as figuratively, on TF2. The real meat and two veg of this post was to talk about the Lego game franchise. It started off with Lego Star Wars and there is currently a Lego Harry Potter (lordy…) in the works. I’ve bought and played all the games, but I only seem to have a couple since moving to Canada. Oh well, I suppose I could get them all on the cheap again.

So why Lego?

Because the games are so flippin’ amazing that’s why. They are cutesy, they have tonnes of real humour in them, they play like a dream and the puzzles are phenomenally good. Even though the subject matter (Star Wars, Indiana Jones) are American, the British humour of developer Traveler’s Tales shines through. Yes, you could argue they are games for kids because it’s Lego, but who doesn’t love Lego?

Puzzle-wise, the games play a little like the old Lucasarts games like Secret of Money Island or Full Throttle. It’s a bit Blue Peter for the kids because sometimes you need an adult helper to get past some sections. Hell, as an adult I need to consult walkthroughs because sometimes the puzzles are a little too ingenious.

If you get a chance, check out one of these games you’ll be amazed at how quickly your can pick it up and have a run through of a level. You’ll be building Lego structures in no time!

Even though we’ve bought a new home here we still have property back in Scotland. We just got news over the Christmas break that there had been a burst pipe and the house was flooded. I don’t know how bad the damage was, and I can’t really go into more details about it, but there’s some work that needs done to fix the mess.

Other than that, Happy New Year!

Winter has finally kicked in. Almost two feet of snow in two days, with temperatures dipping to a balmy -18C this weekend, and that’s WITHOUT wind-chill. Nice, huh? Still, could be worse. Other than the relentless digging out. I feel like a squaddie getting told by the sarge to dig a hole, fill it in, dig a hole, fill it in… Good exercise. So my wife says anyway.

My phone started acting really weird the last day or so. It kept telling me that the little memory card inside had been removed. I distinctly remember not doing such a thing, and on removing the back panel I confirmed it be seeing the card snugly in its little slot.

After a quick Google (I’m like that) I found that the SD card was probably damaged. Something I’d figured out because it stopped mounting itself after numerous attempts.

Luckily, I had a $10 reward voucher from Best Buy. One quick trip there and I got a shiny new SDHC 4Gb card that works just peachy (touch wood) in my HTC Magic. Not bad for $12!

Another week of vacation time has gone and I’m allowed to go back on my PC. Well, when you have guests it’s quite rude to tell them to piss off for a couple of hours while you get your web fix in. Maybe it’s not, but it is in my book. I have in fact been sneaking in the odd web page here and there (mostly Google Reader) to keep up with all-things web/game related using my HTC Magic.

I mentioned in my previous post that I follow the Twitterati and that I’m a bit of an, erm, info freako for want of a better phrase. I won’t go into that here, you can read my previous ramblings. Stephen Fry tweeted that some nice people had written some software for Word Press to allow blogs to be viewed on an iPhone or Android device. So, I headed over to the developer’s page to grab a copy of the plug-in.

Very nice it is too. If you’re viewing this on an iPhone or Android, you’ll notice that it looks like a native iPhone application and not like a crappy full-size web app that you have to scroll like mad just to get it into the HVGA sized screen of these great devices.

I digress. All this is spectacular and wonderful, but what have I been up to this week?

As I said we have had visitors for the last two weeks; they went to Boston for the first week – they’ve never been – to check it out. “It’s alright,” they commented, “not a big college town.*” On Sunday last they returned to Canada in their rental car and we spent the week driving about Ontario and western New York state with them.

I took my brother-in-law and my son to the Leafs vs. Sabres hockey game. The Sabres are technically our local team geographically speaking, so I was keen to see them defeat Toronto’s own. That they did. 3-2 to the Sabres.

Now that we live on this side of the pond I’m determined to get to see and experience as much as I can of the local culture. In Canada and this area especially, it seems that hockey is the dominant sport for most people. The atmosphere at the HSBC Arena was electric; there seemed to be a friendly rivalry between the two team’s fans which was nice. They are after all only separated by less than 100 miles geographically which isn’t much by North American standards.

During the course of the game (60 minutes, but due to stoppages and time between the three periods is almost three hours) there are plenty of things off-rink to take your mind off the game. There are the local armchair manager who will tell you about their play, and who they would have put on first. The mascot, a sabre toothed tiger, fires t-shirts for the kids during the second rest period and dancers come out to do a raffle. Football, this is not. I don’t remember Falkirk putting on a show like this!

* Stolen from Spinal Tap

Johnny Carson once said that a New York minute was the time taken from the light to turn green to the guy behind you honking his horn. And thanks to the Internet, every waking second feels like that. We get bombarded with information from every place, and we allow it to happen.

I have accounts on Facebook, Twitter and (although I don’t use it) Bebo. Not to mention various emails that are pushed into my inbox in a daily basis from various mailing lists I personally subscribed to. I use Google Reader to subscribe to RSS feeds so that I can get the latest information on Hockey, MLB and all-things game related.

I even have a cell phone with mobile internet so that I can get all this information quicker.

Why? Why do we do this to ourselves? It’s too much information.

I think to be honest it’s a simple basic human need to be told stories. We love to discover things, even if someone else discovered them and we ‘just read about it’. Sometimes we just do it for the hell of it, or because we’re nosy. Take Stephen Fry for instance, master Tweeter extraordinaire with such great Tweets as:

stephenfry: D’oh!
about 20 hours ago from Bigbird

OK — his web server went down so he quickly tweeted that, that’s a bad example. What about this:

stephenfry: Had dinner with two billionaires last night. Most odd. Forgive relative twit-silence, much of a busy-ness lately. Off to the set soon.
about 24 hours ago from Tweetie

Now that’s just showing off. You get my drift. These are pull quotes of minutia, they don’t mean anything in and of themselves, but it allows us to have a connection with people as they go about their lives. Those in the know call it micro-blogging, and it is quite fun; I tweet on a semi-regular basis. I feel that more than 5 times a week is too much; some people (I’m looking at you Chris Pirillo) take the piss; ever hour? Really? That’s why I stopped ‘following’ him.

Following is the 21st century version of ’stalk’. Let’s face it, stalkers know where their prey is at every waking moment, and with Twitter, Google Latitude and a whole cornucopia of Web 2.5 apps out there, it’s possible to make that “I’m watching you” phone call a lot easier.