It's pretty obvious Neversoft completely failed to understand what's fun about the Guitar Hero games, or they'd neither have added the stupid Boss Battles nor shoe-horned in the painfully cliched “sold your soul to the devil” plot.

Least they managed to avoid fucking the rest of the game up.

And where're the decent downloads. Why can't I play any song from any guitar hero?

($5 for the entire album in FLAC - go buy now...)

...it seems it would be a prog band

Band Name: Browneopsis macrofoliolata
Title: It's always helpful to learn from your mistakes because then your mistakes seem worthwhile.
Art: The Beauty of Reflections
Rules: The CD Cover Game

... Updating God's MySpace Profile for Him

Bald white monk in orange robes: [Mumbling to himself.]
Bimbette, to friend: I guess he's, like, praying for a safe journey.
Bald white monk in orange robes: No, I'm on the phone [shows BlackBerry].

--Metro-North

Overheard by: jharris

via Overheard in New York, Jan 12, 2008

Getting back to Hugo reviews; I've managed to gather all but one (out of print and expensive second hand) but have rather abandoned reading them in order. And reviewing them here. So let's try getting back into the swing of things with the 2001 winner of the Hugo Award.

Unfortunately, the 2001 winner was J.K.Rowling's Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. I say unfortunate, not because it is said it won largely on the back of uninformed voters, but because after reading the first three (on occasion I thought I'd read four - for a reason which will shortly be obvious - but on seeing that the Goblet of Fire is large enough to beat whales to death I realised my error) I'd become tired of that which even the notoriously NPOV Wikipedia has to term “a very strict formula” and which I call “same fucking plot”.

The plot in question is a fairly simple one too. Each year, after suffering through living with his lower class guardians, orphaned upper class scion Harry Potter is allowed to return to the exclusive boarding school where he's finally able to once again handle the all-powerful money and play Rugger.

Wait... what? I'm doing what? Sorry... I'll try that again:

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Christmas as the Parental Overunits' house is always nice; there's nothing like an open fire (even when it's not that cold). There is also nothing like watching someone who's never really played computer games (at least, not since Tyrann on the Oric-1 back in the early 80s) get used to the WASD controls in a MMO. Imagine watching someone tap the W key to move 1-step at a time, then tap the D key to turn - and then have to tap the A key a couple of times because they'd gone too far.

DNA fans may be familiar with the term “kent”... suffice it to say I looked a complete kent.

We had beef for Xmas dinner - a change from the usual turkey on the basis the recent bird flu fun 'n' games had driven the price up.

New Year's Eve was round my brother's. He cooked a large pork dinner and handed out presents which he and the GF had been unable to give due to being at the GF's parents for Xmas. Kindly they got me Guitar Hero III - unfortunately, for the PS3.

We had a stab at a game called “Picture This” they'd been given for Xmas. The general idea was you moved a counter around a board and answered questions in four categories: News, World, Sport and Entertainment. Each card had three questions about the picture on it: question one was almost invariably “who is in the picture”, question two was some other fact about them and the third, and hardest, question was - strangely - often about who was Australian PM at the time...

I won two of three games. Mum won the other.

I found where my Wilma's Rainbow EP had got to... my brother had also found the book mentioned in this post about killing jars.