I’m surprised that I enjoyed Just Friends as much as I did, a romantic comedy starring Ryan Reynolds and Amy Smart. Reynolds physical comedy is great, especially the fights with his brother. Anna Faris does a great job as the spoiled wannabe pop star and throughout, the laughs just keep coming. 3 1/2 out of 5.
Knocked Up is exactly what you expect from the trailers, a fun comedy with a good heart. It reminded me a lot of Judd Apatow’s last film, The 40 Year Old Virgin, although I have to say it’s not quite up to the same standard. I’m torn for a score, but I’m going to say 3 out of 5.
Me and Andrea played crazy golf in Bath today, which was great fun. I’ve never played before, and my golfing skills are hardly exemplary to start with, but I still managed to pull out a win, although it was close for a while. It wasn’t quite as crazy as I would have liked, there was no windmill, and a lot of the holes were quite similar, but there was enough of a challenge to keep it interesting.
Playing in front of us was another couple, who we’d actually seen the day before at the Roman Baths. And good god, was she annoying. “It’s so hard”, “I can’t do this”, “The hole is so far away,” she whined with increasing force. The amazing thing is that he didn’t seem to bother, he just carried on playing anyway, like he was used to all this by now and it just bounced off him. Around the seventh hole, she just gave up, refused to play anymore. Andrea overheard them and said it was an argument to do with getting her photo taken, but I never heard anything myself. But she just stood there, stopped after he took his shot and wouldn’t play on. Now considering we had to wait for them each time, he had to wave us on, telling us that she “was being a bit of a…”.
I wanted to finish his sentence for him, I really did.
The Roman Baths in Bath (not just a clever name) is the most famous tourist attraction the place has to offer, and the only naturally occurring hot springs within the UK. Like everything in Bath, it’s an expensive place to visit, around £12 per adult, which quickly adds up when there’s a few of you. You’re given an audio handset when you go in, and numbers are placed around the site which you enter into the handset so you can then listen to commentary about that area. Normally these are dry and historical, but a smaller selection of clips is also available from the wonderful Bill Bryson, whose stories and descriptions are recorded as he himself walks around and soaks it all in. It’s not a very big site, and while you can use your own imagination to picture what it was like when the Romans were here 2,000 or so years ago, Bryson’s comments give you a much better perspective on what you’re looking at, and give your own imagination a bit of a helping hand.
All the audio clips spend a lot of time telling you how wonderful the baths themselves are, and how cultured and sophisticated the Roman’s must have been to use such a place, but if you want to experience that for yourself you’ll have to go to the recently completed Thermae Bath Spa, as you’re not allowed to bathe in the Roman Bath’s themselves. These, as you can imagine, will add further expense to your trip, so we didn’t go.
Me and Andrea drove to bath today to spend a couple of days with Graham and see what the city has to offer. I had to throw in the towel half way there though, I was just so tired. I can actually fall asleep when driving, which is a scary thing, especially considering I can’t fall asleep on an aeroplane when sitting in the same kind of position. Andrea took over and got us there safe and sound, but it still feels very strange sitting in my car and not being the one driving.
Staying in a Holiday Inn Express, which is about a 20 minute walk from the centre of Bath, but was the cheapest hotel I could find. Despite that, it’s still incredibly expensive, I’ve stayed in 5 star hotels that were cheaper than this, and the room is just a tiny cupboard compared to some I’ve had for far less. The staff at the desk were courteous and got us sorted easily enough (like actually knowing the booking was pre-paid) but there was a definite sense that they really couldn’t care less.
Does the improbable by having the third part of a trilogy actually be better than the second, and even come close to beating the first. Never stops, brilliantly written, brilliantly acted, and no obvious CG anywhere in sight. 4 out of 5.
It’s Andrea’s dad’s birthday on Wednesday, so today we had him, along with Andrea’s sister Stephanie and her boyfriend David over for a spot of dinner. After dinner we brought out the cake, a massive sponge cake with white icing which is probably approaching over 2 foot wide and 1 foot high. It’s really designed to be eaten by 20 people rather than 5, but it’s cheap and tastes great, so what the hell.
What I’m wondering though is the etiquette regarding sticking your face into a birthday cake, particularly when it’s not yours. The opportunity arose for me to do just that, but I decided against it because it seemed inappropriate. The feeling from the collected crowd though was that it would have been funny, which was of course what I was aiming for, so I kinda wished afterwards that I had done. A bit of cake on your face never harmed anyone.
I bought a giant picture of New York’s Flatiron building for my living room wall, two metres wide and around a metre and a half tall. There’s one long plain wall in the living room and I decided that putting small pictures on it, like a couple at one end and another couple at the opposite end just wouldn’t look right, so I made the decision to put one giant one in the centre instead. It was either going to work fabulously, or it was going to be a disaster.
The picture came rolled up in a tube, with the frame all in bits. This meant assembling the giant frame on the floor and then stretching the canvas over the top of it, holding it in place around the back using plastic clips. Then the corners had to be folded in to create neat sides. It was, all in all, a complete nightmare. With the help of my dad, we put other things up on the walls tonight, like the bathroom cabinet, and towel holders, but this was by far the worst - and took the longest.
Up on the wall, thankfully, it looks great. It makes me really long to be there again though, if only so I can stand on some of the spots in the picture, and take photos of that.
So at last I’ve got some actual PS3 games, and at last I’ve got a chance to put them on. Motorstorm is the one I always thought looked cool in the trailers, but when the reviews came out, they were less than stellar. Not bad by any means, but averaging 7’s out of 10, and enough to put me off at the time. But now that I had the opportunity to pick up some titles for free, it was the obvious choice.
The first thing you’ve got to say about Motorstorm is how good it looks. There’s just no escaping it, this is one very pretty game. Just like Super Stardust HD there’s a sheen to it that 360 games don’t have, something which is quite hard to describe but which you can’t help but notice. I’m also pleased to say that as somebody who has played Burnout Revenge on 360 more than any other racing game recently, this moves at a good pace too. So many racing games I just can’t play because they feel so slow in comparison, but the sense of speed here is good. Also good is the track design, although I have to say, it’s fiendishly hard. Either I’m just completely useless (which, to be honest, isn’t outside the realms of possibility), or this is one tough game. I haven’t even managed to get past the first track, where you can pick any vehicle. And vehicle choice matters, because they all feel different, and have to take different routes on each track to maintain the maximum speed. So far I’ve been sticking with the ATV, but I have a feeling I may have to switch to something else, like the motorbike, to give me a better chance.
I obviously need more playtime to really get stuck into it, but first impressions are definitely good, and it’s a lot more fun than I expected. I know Jennifer has a copy of it too, so I’m hoping that we get a chance to race each other online. Although I probably need more practice, I don’t want to embarrass myself.
With Andrea being off down to York for the weekend, I spent the day taking all the boxes, bags and other items sitting on the living room floor, opening them all up, and putting the contents away. I started around 2pm, I finished around 11pm, with only a small break in-between. NINE hours. I honestly thought it would only take a couple of hours at most, it really didn’t look like there was that much. What a huge difference it’s made though, the living room finally feels like home, rather than just a dumping ground for all our stuff.
Pleasingly, there are three cupboards that I haven’t used at all, and another one is only half full. It’s not often you can say that about a new house, where you’re lucky to get any kind of storage space at all. This means that I can now spend a few years buying as much crap as I want, and I’ll still have somewhere to put it all. Woohoo!
I’ve had the Sky box for a couple of weeks now and I only just found out today about the Sky Anytime functionality. Basically the box records programmes from a special hidden channel during the night, 10-15 items that it believes are the highlights of the week. Since I have an HD box, that tends to be a lot of HD stuff, so there’s a programme from National Geographic on there, something from Sky Arts, a couple of HD movies, something from the Biography channel and so on.
I found out about it because I was going to watch The Da Vinci Code tonight and was waiting for 8pm when it was due to start. I was a bit disappointed it wasn’t on an HD movie channel, but was going to watch it anyway. Just before it started the voiceover woman said that if you wanted to see it in HD, you should check your Sky Anytime. So a few button presses later I found out what she was talking about (I told you the interface was horrible) and was able to just start watching The Da Vinci Code right away, in lovely HD.
There’s so many channels, working your way through them all to find something appropriate to watch is time consuming. If they make that choice for me, by cutting it down to a small handful of items, then all the better.
So I’ve had a chance to play with the PS3 a bit now and my initial impression is mixed. To start off with, the cross media bar user interface isn’t a patch on the Xbox 360 one, it’s not as organised, it’s not as clear, it’s not anywhere near as cool. It’s far too minimalist to be used on a big HDTV, which is of course the feature the PS3 touts all the time, and was probably best left on the PSP where it came from originally.
I had to do a system update to install the latest firmware on there, which is obviously something I’m used to as a 360 owner. On the 360 it’s really quick, it only takes a minute to download the file, install it and then restart the console to start using it. On PS3, it took me over half an hour to go through this process. The download took forever, it was so incredibly slow, and installing it took even longer. I don’t know how big the update actually was, but it’s ridiculous what it made you sit through and the license agreements it made you accept before it would continue.
The PS3 store is an equally terrible experience. Firstly, it’s really just a set of web pages that the internal browser is displaying, much the same approach as the Wii takes. But using a web browser on a TV is a horrible experience, trying to move a hand pointer around the screen with the joypad and clicking on buttons, waiting for pages to load, some graphics not even loading properly and just showing up as red X’s. I tried to purchase Super Stardust HD, which it said was £4.99. I’d already been through the long, drawn out process of registering myself and my card details, so you would think I could just say buy and that would be it. But instead I have to deposit money into my virtual wallet and then buy the game using that, the trick being that you can only deposit amounts in increments of £5. So not only did I have to jump through all the hoops to get the money in there and buy it, I’m stuck now with this 1p in my wallet that I’m never going to be able to use. After the game was purchased, I had to go to some separate area to download it, then it wouldn’t download. Just kept giving me errors all the time. So I gave up and tried the next day, at which point it was kind enough to let me transfer the file. But unlike the 360, where you simply download something and get an option to go play it, I had to then install it. So you go through another process of actually installing it onto your system so it’s ready to play. Installing things! On a console! People buy consoles to play games because they don’t want to go through all the hassle that PC gamers have to go through and here is Sony just giving us it all back again. I could go on about the negatives, like the fact the games for sale in the store don’t have free demos you can download first (like every 360 Live Arcade title) or the annoying way it’s organised, but it’s too easy a target.
The media connect functionality promised a lot but delivered very little, it detected my Windows Media Centre PC but then kept telling me it had no video on it, and it also saw my Mac which I installed Eyeconnect on, but wouldn’t play anything off that without constant network errors. At least the 360 Media Center extender functionality works.
On the upside, the system is very quiet, which is a definite boon for when I start buying blu-ray discs. The 360 is like such a jet engine it’s not a pleasant experience to use it for playing movies on. The controller is also very light and far nicer than I expected it to be, especially since I’ve never been a fan of the PS controllers before now. I don’t know what’s different about it, but so far I’ve not been experiencing the same problems as I’ve had in the past. Super Stardust HD is also very cool, and there’s a definite shine to the graphics that 360 games don’t seem to have. I don’t know what it is, but clearly the PS3 has some extra bit of graphics filtering available in it’s chipset that can just make games look a little shiner, even if in reality they’re not that far apart in terms of power.
Overall, it’s disappointing because of the wasted potential the system has. The media functionality would be great, it would allow me to play the music from the machine upstairs on my PS3, but it just seems to do nothing. Displaying my photos from iPhoto would be great too, if only it worked. The store should be the future of games purchases, no longer requiring physical media, but the experience of buying something is so poor you wonder what kind of user testing they did before it went live. Hopefully these issues are addressed in future system updates, but even when they are, I’ll still need to sit through the half an hour process to install it.
All content is (c) Copyright 2003-2008 Richard Smith. This is where it ends.
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