The Temple of the Mighty Bague

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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