The Clan of the Cave Bague

I’ve just taken a cold call at work. It went:

“Good afternoon, is it you that looks after the ‘phone systems in your organisation?”

“Yes,” I say, “that would be me.”

“Ah excellent. My name is XXXXXX and I’m calling from Primus. Do you know anything about voice over IP?”

“Yes. Yes, I do,” quoth I.

“Fantastic! We’re just in the process of rolling out a great new product and were wondering if you would be interested in atten GGZZZZZZZSSSHSHSHSHSHSHSHSSCRACKLECRACKLCRACKL <boo-bee-boop The other person has cleared> clunk”.

I have to say, I’m seriously on the hook. Any telephone company which can provide a service which blares high frequency static down the line at customers and then cuts them off definitely wins my money!

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Well, my lovely wife not only managed to raise a fair bit of sponsorship for the local school, but she also managed to complete the 5 kilometer race in quite a respectable time! She had originally planned to dander round at her own pace but then realised that a lot of the others were quite competitive so upped the pace a bit. Here she is, getting her official time noted. Very proud of her we are too, particularly as she gave the lycra-wearing ‘taking it all too seriously’ brigade a good run for their money wearing walking shoes and jeans

Well, I’ve had a longer go now and can safely say this is ACEBEST. It’s kinda like a cross between football manager and sim city, but very much simpler than both. Basically, you build a city, hire and train adventurers and send them out to do random stuff. I’m only a short way into it, but so far it’s proving to be one of those incredibly annoying “Just another day” type games.

Stupid name, though – hence the shortened version in the title of this post.

I’ve not played this long enough to give any kind of gameplay description – just sufficient to spot a gotcha which may be helpful to others, and to say that it’s very cutesy.

The gotcha – if the game seems to hang on the “Create Save Game” screen and not respond to keypresses, check if you have a GameCube controller attached. Cos if the game finds one, it will ignore all other inputs and expect you to use that. Took me ages to work that out

One of the nice things about working in Musselburgh is that it’s a lovely place to be on a sunny day. This lunchtime, safely cocooned in my ipod, I went for a wander down to the harbour (literally across the road from work) and sat there for a wee while eating my lunch, then went on a leisurely stroll along the beach to the far end of town and then another stroll back through town to work.

It’s nice to get out during the day. It allows me to shrug off a lot of the stupid that I get contaminated with.

Death == DEAD. As Deaths go, he was pretty easy really. Only two forms (this time round – let’s face it, he’s not actually dead and will reappear later in the game). Anyway, as I was saying – two forms – a dark and a light. Dark is pretty much invulnerable to melee attacks, so nuking him with the girly’s thunder spells did the damage. Light form, unsurprisingly, was weak to melee attacks, so whippeding with the rose-stem whip did for him.

Two additional points of interest. The clock tower is as rotten and evil as ever, but much easier to navigate than Harmony of Dissonance, that’s for sure.  Secondly, I’m not at all sure of the whole two character mechanic. It really just gets in the way and adds complexity which the game just doesn’t need.

So, the fuel price is calculated (roughly speaking) as the actual price, then the duty, then the VAT (yes, that’s right folks, you pay tax on the tax!). So let’s take the VAT off that price.

102.8p

OK, each litre of diesel has 54.68p duty on it. Let’s get that off as well.

48.2p

That’s right, folks, thanks to Thatcher’s government, Bush’s war, Blair’s spinelessness and Brown’s lack of organisation, 48.2 pence of diesel actually costs 120.9p. 72.7p on taxes. Of this, 18.1p is actually TAX on the DUTY.

And people are quite happily going along with this? Our grandfathers took to the streets for less than this, but our generation are cap-in-handedly tugging our forelocks, taking a deep sigh, and just putting up with it. We should all be bloody ashamed of ourselves. 

With the news that there’s a new DS Castlevania game in the making, my explorey juices have started flowing again. This always seems to happen, and it usually results in me playing through all the others in anticipation. Having left Portrait of Ruin unfinished last time, though, means I have to do that first. Sometimes I think I’m borderline OCD. Anyhoo, I discovered (to my joy) that I’d left off just before Legion, who happens to be my favourite game boss of all time, so that eased me in gently. Then it was back to the castle, whippeding some skullotons, and then beating up an evil vampire girly. Then it’s off to the FOREST OF DOOM, which – despite the name – is mainly an indoor area, but never mind.

The Forest is a pretty small level, all things considered, but the end of level boss is a pain in the neck. It’s a combined frog-fishy thing and it has an orrible breath weapon that it seems impossible to avoid. I’ll get it in the end though.

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