The Clan of the Cave Bague

This is the fourth platform I’ve played FF1 on – others being SNES, PS1 and GBA. I have to say, the iPhone version is easily the best. It seems to be a straight port of the very pretty PSP version but with the added advantage of well thought out touch controls. And it’s only a fiver – considerably less than I paid for the other versions.

‘hang on’, you cry. ‘why are you playing a game you’ve already completed?’

Because it’s awesome and it’s on my phone

So, gabled Garland and I’m heading north on a crystal hunt.

OK, so I sneaked a wee go while Tristan was playing Team Fortress 2. So, having woken up in a Goomba hut, I proceeded to go looking for Grampa Goomba, fell off a building, found a hammer in a bush, thumped some blocks, thumped more Goombas, then finally met the King Goomba and thumped him too. Then I saved.

So I’m attempting to finish some games that kinda fell by the wayside after The Great Falling Out Of ‘09, and Paper Mario came top of the list. One thing I discovered along the way is that Wii Virtual Console purchases aren’t tied to your Nintendo account, they’re tied to the hardware. This means that, shiny new Wii or not, any VC purchases you’ve made need to be purchased again. Nintendo, bless them, did say that if your hardware dies at any time (even out of warranty) they’ll transfer all the purchases over for you. Seems a bit primitive for this day and age, but anyway – I digress.

So, I managed to play about 15 minutes of this last night, but that was just enough time to see that cad, Bowser, kidnapping Princess Peach – AGAIN! Honestly, the man / turtle / thing really needs to get a girlfriend.

Dave: I hate this f*cking place.
Me: It’s a hell-hole.
Dave: If Buffy came in here she’d turn around and walk straight back out.
Me: Faith would get right in there though.
Dave: Yeah. She’s…. dirty.
Me: …..

David stared into the bowl of soup where the face of Jesus had materialised and wondered why The Man looked so much like a serial killer. “I mean, if you’re the Son of God you can look like anyone, right?”

The face widened its eyes a little, rivulets of Heinz Cream of Tomato streaming to the sides of the plate like the parting of the Red Sea in miniature. For an entity without even a whole head, it did a remarkably accurate approximation of a shrug.

“Well, what’s that supposed to mean?”

The manifestation of the divine smiled and opened its mouth. Thick reddish orange liquid bubbled around the words. “I look as you expect me to look.”

“Bollocks,” David said. “I expect you to look like Robert Powell. And don’t give me that  disapproving look – you’re a bowl of soup. I can talk to a bowl of soup any way I like.”

“Gonnae keep the noise doon, Chief?”

David looked up. Gordon was sitting at the table opposite with his own bowl of soup upturned by his side. As usual, he’d been finger painting and the front of his hospital gown was covered in a lattice of thick orange smears.

“Keep it down yourself, Gordon,” David scowled. “I’m trying to have a conversation with Jesus.”

“Yer talkin’ tae yer soup again, boy. D’ye no think it’s time ye stopped it?”

“Do you hear me passing comment when you’re smearing shit on the walls of your ward? Or screaming abuse at the seagulls? Have I ever said a word about you sitting up half the night chatting to the furniture?”

Gordon thought about this for a moment. “Naw, Chief. Ye’ve never said anything. But then, I’m just a mad bampot  – you’re a bloody doctor.”

Ok, so after spending a while playing World Of Walkcraft and watching it effectively kill the MMO, I was surprised at my interest being rekindled by the introduction of an MMO based in the Star Trek universe. So I gave it a go. I’ve only played for a few hours so far, but here’s my thoughts:

My character is currently a Lieutenant 4th Class of a little starship called the USS Enlightenment. Right there is where the game differs from all other MMOs. You have a character which you have to level up, equip, train and so on. So far so good. You also have to do the same for your ship and your bridge team. Each player in the system is in fact a little squad.  My ‘primary’ character is actually a Science Officer and I have (so far) two bridge crew – an Engineering Officer and a Tactical Officer.

Each officer type is subclassed, providing your standard ranged DPS, healers, debuffers, facemelters etc through the types of technology they’re skilled in. This largely applies to ground based combat. For space combat, different officer skills come into play – expertise in rapid power adjustment, ability to co-ordinate photon torpedo scatters, that kind of thing.

As a result of this, a ground mission involving multiple players can seem very large scale as each player is assisted by an away team comprising chosen members of their bridge crew and one or more security officers.

That’s the basic player / party mechanic, but what do you do? Well, let’s take a couple of random missions. I accepted two – firstly to do a routine patrol of four star systems and, secondly, to escort a Vulcan historian to a temple. So, I beam onto my little ship, request clearance, and warp to sector space. This puts my little ship on a digital representation of the whole sector of space, with lots of systems at different heights / depths above the galactic plane. You really get a feel for the vastness of the game universe at this point. Pull up a star map, and warp to the first location on my patrol.

Approaching the first location, I get a distress signal from a freighter and enter the system to help out. I find the freighter soon enough, crippled in an asteroid field and under attack from Orion Attack ships. I take care of the ships easily enough – by keeping broadside to them, I can hit with both front and rear phaser banks, taking down the shields rapidly. A couple of photon torpedoes later and they’re gone.

Scanning the freighter reveals that the crew are around but so are some Orion boarders. The ship is venting plasma and appears to have multiple leaks. So, I put together an away team and beam down to the ship. I’m taking my tactical guy to do damage, myself doing ranged DPS and my engineer doing buffs and explosives. Oh, and a couple of ill-fated red shirts.

In the freighter, it quickly becomes apparent that the crew are unconscious and the place is crawling with bad guys. I fight my way through them, shutting down a couple of plasma leaks on the way. Quick tricorder scan revealed that the warp core was about to go foom, so headed to egineering. Found the freighter captain there with a couple of guys trying to stabilise it. The captain asked me to get them clear of the warp core while he tried to stabilise and get them off the ship. So, fought my way through more beaming-in Orions with the crew in tow, collected as many survivors as possible and got clear of the ship before it went foom.

Sadly, once back on board the Enlightenment, an Orion battlecruiser had turned up. This ship is considerably bigger than I’m equipped to handle, so a quick call to Starfleet was required. Managed to hold them off for a few minutes by some clever shield powerboosting until the cavalry arrived in the form of a couple of Galaxy class starships and a few extra players. Bad guys defeated, crew rescued, time to move on to the next hop of the patrol.

A quick one, this – miners are on strike and a bit of diplomacy is needed. This one was a fun, talky, mission so I’m not gonna spoil it.

Back to the next patrol hop and it appears we have a major Klingon invasion going on in this system – there are half a dozen player ships in the area and a team is quickly formed. There’s a range of Klingon attack ship, Bird of Prey, and battle cruisers, and the fight is seriously tough. A few of the players, initially at least, seemed to be thinking in a ‘planar’ way, but once they got the hang of the 3D combat, the sky lit up like a Pink Floyd concert. Phasertastic!

And that’s all I’m gonna right for now cos I’m knackered!

7th January – Me

Dear Scottish Hydro, please remove account numbers xxxx and yyyy from my online portfolio as they are not and never have been my accounts.

7th January – Scottish Hydro

Thankyou for your email. In order to close down your account you will need to provide us with the following information,

*The date you moved.
*The name of the person you handed your keys back to.
*The meter read from when you moved out and a forwarding address so we can send your final statement out.

We look forward to hearing form you in regard to your move. If you have any further queries regarding this matter please do not hesitate to contact us direct via this email.

7th January – Me

I have no idea which address these account numbers correspond to so am unable to answer your questions.

7th January – Scottish Hydro

Unfortunately I can not discuss these with you as you are not the named account holder.

We would need to talk to the account holder direct in order to sort any queries regarding these accounts.

7th January – Me

If they’re not in my name, why are they listed in my account?

7th January – Scottish Hydro

These account numbers you have provided are not linked to your address of 34,Blah de Blah Place, Surbiton, EH99 6aa.

Your account numbers are Electric – aaaa and Gas – bbbb.

7th January – Me

Yes, I realise that – which is why I asked for them to be removed! Cos I don’t know what they are or who they’re for.

28th January – Scottish Power

Thank you for using Scottish Hydro Support. If you have any further queries, please blah de blah de blah…

 

WTF??

Well, folks, it’s taken me a bazillion and eleventy years to finally decide my “killer” Mutt colour scheme, but here it is. Stick this in your .muttrc and bask in the glory.

color hdrdefault yellow black
color quoted brightred black
color signature magenta black
color indicator brightwhite red
color attachment black green
color error red black
color message white black
color search brightwhite magenta
color status brightyellow blue
color tree red black
color normal white black
color tilde green black
color bold brightyellow black
color markers red black
color header yellow black “.*:”
color header brightwhite black “^(From|Subject):”
mono header bold “^(From|Subject):”
color index brightblue black ~N
color index red black ~F
color index black green ~T
color index brightwhite black ~D
mono index bold ~N
mono index bold ~F
mono index bold ~T
mono index bold ~D

# Various smilies and the like
color body brightgreen black “<[Ee]?[Bb]?[Gg]>”
color body brightgreen black “<[Bb][Gg]>”
color body brightgreen black ” [;:]-*[)>(<|]”

# URLs
color body brightblue black “(http|ftp|news|telnet|finger)://[^ \"\t\r\n]*”
color body brightblue black “mailto:[-a-z_0-9.]+@[-a-z_0-9.]+”
mono body bold “(http|ftp|news|telnet|finger)://[^ \"\t\r\n]*”
mono body bold “mailto:[-a-z_0-9.]+@[-a-z_0-9.]+”

# email addresses
color body brightblue black “[-a-z_0-9.%$]+@[-a-z_0-9.]+\\.[-a-z][-a-z]+”
mono body bold “[-a-z_0-9.%$]+@[-a-z_0-9.]+\\.[-a-z][-a-z]+”

For those of you who may be reading on facebook, you might be better popping over to http://www.nelefa.org to read this. If you’re already here – well, that’s alright then

Ok, so these weren’t all necessarily released in 2009, but some of them were. They’re albums that affected me in various ways throughout the course of the year. They’re not listed in any particular order as it’s just not possible to compare them as they cross so many genres of music. For each album, I’ve suggested a couple of tracks that listeners unfamiliar with the artist can listen to to get a semi-representative view of the album.

Bruce Springsteen – The Rising. Ok, so the boss is getting on a bit and maybe even getting a little introspective in his old age, but that’s not a bad thing. The Rising seems, at first listening anyway, to be a lot more spiritual than you’d expect from Mr Springsteen. There’s a lot of Gospel influences in here as well as the slightly-cheesy patriotic Americana we all know and love. I’d recommend listening to “The Rising”, “Worlds Apart”, and / or “My City of Ruins” for a bit of an insight into the overall tone of the album.

Note: if you find poignant songs about 9/11 annoying, you may rate this album slightly lower than I do.

Sabaton – The Art of War. I seem to have arrived at the Sabaton party a good while after everyone else – I discovered them after Apple finally got Genius working as far as recommendations go. The Art of War is a stonking album largely based around, as you might expect from the title, various aspects of Warfare. Naturally, guitars dominate the album, but that doesn’t prevent Joakim Brodén’s titanic vocals from keeping you riveted in your seat for the duration. I’d recommend “The Art of War”, “40-1″ and “Cliffs of Gallipoli” but this is really an arbitrary choice. There truly isn’t a bad track on the album, so take your pick.

The Devin Townsend Project – Addicted. A little poppier than the other two, but don’t let it fool you – this is a seriously heavy album. Production-wise, it’s like a spiritual successor to something by Phil Specter – from start to finish, the album is a wall of sound. It has the same dominating qualities as something like, say, Blind Guardian, but presenting catchy pop songs instead of overly laboured bewildering slices of WTF?? There’s touches of KMFDM / Black Lung style industrial electronica mixed with grind metal all with garbage style guitar hooks and cheeky lyrics. There’s even a little bit of pathos in there. I’d recommend listening to “Bend it like Bender!”, “Supercrush!” and “Hyperdrive!” as a way of getting started.

Them Crooked Vultures. Well, any band featuring John Paul Jones, Dave Grohl and Josh Homme has to be something special. This is most definitely a special album. Soundwise, you get the impression of a very rough ‘everything in one take’ recording, which is perfectly in fitting with the musical style. There’s a bit of everything in this album; psychedelia, metal, rock, pop, beautiful harmonies and strangely effective discords. It also benefits from what is possibly the fattest guitar sound I’ve ever heard. I guess this is what you get when you stick three seriously accomplished musicians in one place and leave them to their own devices. This album manages to sound old and familiar at the same time as being new and exciting. Go figure. Really, you should just go and buy it immediately, but if you insist on recommended tracks, go with “No one loves me & neither do I” or “Elephants.”

Turisas – The Varangian Way. This isn’t only the most epic metal album I’ve ever heard, it’s quite possibly the most epic ANYTHING. Varangian Way is Turisas’s second album and builds on their debut, Battle Metal, in almost every way. The same “viking metal” style is there, but the accordions have been replaced by full orchestration on many tracks. I wouldn’t say Varangian Way is better than Battle Metal because the two albums are complimentary and each serve their purpose equally well. Varangian Way just seems a little richer. Again, there  isn’t a bad track on the album, but start out with “Miklagard Overture” and “Cursed be Iron”.

So there we have it. Notable mentions go to “Dark Passion Play” by Nightwish, “Marshall Mathers LP” by Eminem and about a million others, but those five up there have made the biggest impact on me.

For all you ipod / iphone / mobile users out there, I’ve installed a plugin which should make nelefa.org display a little more shinily on handheld devices – thanks to RedSmartie for the heads up.