Wednesday, December 14, 2005

Life Update (for those who care.)

Ah, the stench of that dark cloud hung over us yesterday as we all trudged home from work, feeling like we were fleeing the Martians (H.G. Wells' original Martians that is, not whatever spitworthy mass media Martians were conjured up for the movie.) My trudge had a little more bounce in it, despite the miasmic inhalations, because I'd had a damn fine weekend. I'd seen my dad against the wishes of my step-mum apparently and we'd had a great time, then met up with some other friends for a 360 LAN (Perfect Dark Zero multiplayer proving a surprise hit), then got drunk with Toller, Penny and the delightful Elly in Putney and finally got lost in Camberwell... Sunday I saw John Stewart (an unfortunately expensive and tedious reading of the Daily Show book), wrote a review of Condemned for Metal Hammer and didn't have to go to the office. For the first time in weeks. How could it get better?

Well, I interviewed Graham Linehan yesterday, the writer (with Arthur Matthews) of Father Ted, in his studio where he's cutting his new sitcom The I.T. Crowd. Meeting one of your life's heroes and finding that he's exactly as down-to-earth and pensive as you hoped he would be (and also a gamer, hence the interview). (His wife was also surprisingly gorgeous.) Pity Ted himself is no longer around, though the IT crowd manages to maintain that "weird-leading-the-weird" sense of humour of Big Train, Black Books and Ted.

I also managed to complete Condemned last night; possibly the most brutal and nasty game I've ever had the fortune to come across, it's also tightly plotted, challenging and addictive, with one of the best end sequences to a game since Monkey Island 2. It makes me want to go back and play it again, even though I know it would be boring as hell, just to unlock the other elements of the plot.

1 comment:

Grilly said...

i'd never refer to karen as 'step-mum'. it just doesn't work like that.

and let's not forget 'hippies' in that list of comedy, dan.