Wrestlevania

I'm getting a repeat 404 for that URL..?

I can't make Tuesday (wedding anniversary) or Wednesday (Grand Thumb Auto) this week. Any other day is good for me, though 8pm onwards if possible as I don't get home from work until 7pm at the earliest (and need to eat!).

I've just spent a lunch hour learning about "jumpjet parenting", "attention-seeking missiles" and "Jesus zapping polar bears". I laughed a lot--thank you, Dan. Incidentally, it looks like the whole of the 2nd series will be available on iPlayer until Friday, 3rd January.

I prefer the remix--the breakdancing at the end makes more sense this way.

For the uninitiated: Simon Quinlank, King of Hhhobbies. Quite possibly Kevin Eldon's finest hour, and still one of my favourite sketch characters of all time.

I saw this and thought of you, Yufster: It's taken from GamesRadar's recent All Console Avatar Showdown article.

I think the current cinematic climate, for me, is best described as "scratching around in the dark". We saw Stardust as part of our anniversary last year and both really liked it (underrated if you ask me--it's an excellent 'fairy tale' flick). So we were thinking of going to see Ink Heart this time, but I can't stand Brendon Fraser beyond the original Mummy remake. Beyond that, there's really very little choice at all. Mrs V suggested going to see Quantum of Solace again, but sitting in far better seats this time to see if that's why it was shit the first time around. But I've absolutely no interest in watching it again. And we watched Indiana Jones & The Cash-in Skull Fuck last night on DVD - Mrs V hadn't seen it before - and that's poisoned blockbuster films for me still further.

Oh, er, Mrs V and I were planning to see that on Tuesday. I was assuming it'd be merely pants, but is it stratospherically worse than that?

Sorry, I registered at the start of the week but didn't read about posting/PM'ing my username [Wrestlevania, naturally] here. Really looking forward to seeing how much the game has progressed since my sneaky peek several months back, whilst cluttering up eljay's premises for a couple of nights.

Following Miffy's lead, but this time going with Ghostbusters girl: She could cross my stream. I'd put my ghoulies in her trap. Erm, that's your lot I think. Edit: Oh, oh, one more! I'd be her keymaster.

Sorry, I'm a knob-end; Tuesday is clearly the 16th, so I won't be able to play that night. Wednesday is the only night I can make next week, as Thursday is our office Christmas party.

My shits would go down particularly well on any of the days listed, methinks. NB: I know it's not on the list, but in case someone else suggests it; I couldn't do Monday Tuesday as it'll be our 8th wedding anniversary. ..."our" being myself and Mrs V, not toblix. (Perverts.)

...oh minge. Right, Thursdays it is then! Actually, how would people feel about bumping Grand Thumb Auto up to Tuesdays until we're into the new year?

Only one more?! Dude, as far as I'm concerned, Grand Thumb Auto is now a permanent Wednesday fixture until further notice! Look forward to running you over seeing you there. Highlight for me this week was steaming along in a big, gelatenous sedan with Infovore--him driving, whilst I leant out of the window and absently fired into the occasional on-comer. However, whilst travelling at high speed we encountered some sudden traffic. Infovore took evasive action, clipped a safety barrier at the side of the road and promptly rolled the car... with me still hanging out of the window. It's a good job GTA IV doesn't have any serious gore in it, because that would've looked nasty. What's more - just to add insult to (instantly fatal) injury, the car landed back on its wheels, allowing Infovore to race off! The spawny bleeder. The other highlight (for me) was getting into a game of car sumo with toblix on the dockside. And managing to shunt him into the water, mwah hah hah ha! Coupled with Miffy and Nachimir taking pot-shots at each other with RPGs, this was I think the most hectic session yet. Oh! And we tried out "Turf War" which I've never played before; very cool game mode, in which either team must capture and hold key spots around the map. Each spot ticks money, when captured, and the team with the most money at the end of the game is the winner. We had some frantic back-and-forth battles, plus it was very cool to all converge on an enemy territory and flush them out. It was another ace night, really.

Yes, thoroughly stupendous use of explosives and alternative transport last night. Personally, I like the games best when it's just with people we know--especially when LIVE craps out and only allows half the party to join a public match. Other than that - and the initial setup frustrations early on - last night was another riotous success. Couple of new faces too, including Infovore. Really looking forward to Wednesday nights now.

Actually, you could legitimately setup 8bitalarm.co.ck...

It's absolutely true; I created a "ring-fenced" version of IE6 once, for evolt.org, and it suffered from exactly this problem. +1,000,000 for actually using properly virtualised browsers, running on the OS they were designed for.

Oh, just in case anyone was wondering about the picture quality for not-games (i.e. films), I gave a couple a quick viewing last night. Blade Runner I have just your average, bog-standard DVD copy of the film--no special treatments or elaborate formatting (i.e. HD-DVD and similar nonsense). But the opening scenes were so much better, using the Xbox 360 as the player; you can see all the individual lights up the sides of the Tyrell Building, instead of the more usual blue haze of glow. And when Leon comes in for his interview, you can see the fibres in that crinkly blue shirt he's wearing. Not to get too wanky, but--oh alright then! It gave me goosebumps. Wall-E For something much more up to date, production-wise, I gave Wall-E a quick spin for 10 minutes. Picture quality is, again, simply fantastic; there's so much crisp detail in every shot, and the colour separation and definition (at least to me) seem to be all-but-perfect. Very crisp blacks as well, which is lovely.

The first free pack of clothing is being released this week, I believe. It's all snowboarding gear, however - coat, trousers, hat(?), etc. - and only one of each particular item, which is a bit rubbish. They need to release a clothing editor of some sort. Something like that could be an interesting springboard concerning Game for Windows adoption, assuming the clothes editor was exclusively built into that. Then Microsoft could truly invoke Allard's One True Vision™ [last para, page 1].

Yeah, that'd really annoy me too. It's partly why I've not bothered buying an LCD monitor before now; all those slightly off resolutions, or not quite right aspect ratios (16:10?!), that seem pervasive most of the time. Just ordered a 3.5mm stereo coupler from Maplins and I should be all set once that arrives. And, hopefully, that'll be by Wednesday...

Leagues better than it was at bog-standard CRT TV resolution; very sharp and easy to read. It looks like font DPI scales according to the resolution, so the text looks the same size but is of much higher fidelity.

I'll wait for Rab & Ryan's approval personally, but UK:R have dropped numerous little mentions as to how genuinely good Sonic: Unleashed actually is. If there's an Xbox 360 demo, I'll make a point of snaffling that tonight/tomorrow anyway. I adored the MegaDrive games.

Well, after misunderstanding Dell's rubbish telephone robot delivery woman, my monitor actually arrived just before 1pm today. That aside, suffice it to say that - even after just 20 minutes of setting it up and very briefly testing it to make sure the LCD is good (i.e. no dead pixels) - I have had to change my trousers already. Twice. Need to sort out some proper audio, but I'm going to pick up a tidy little 2.1 set at Pissy World tonight*. All that remains to be said is: roll on Wednesday! * That's assuming Mrs V and the Vanias are all OK. I'm at home today, as they've all had that monstrous stomach bug in some form since late Friday and been incredibly ill. I spent the whole weekend sleep-deprived and up to my armpits in vomit... and worse.

I could likely quantify the amount of professional time IE6 has cost me to date in mother-fucking years.

I've emailed the creators.