Playing the first Assassin’s Creed was like going out with some very cute, bi-polar girl. She’s attractive, and crazy enough that the sex is amazing, but you have to watch out because her mood could change in the blink of an eye and next thing you know, you’re waking up in a bath of ice with a giant hole where your kidney used to be, just because you didn’t compliment her on her new shoes.
To strain this analogy even further, Assassin’s Creed 2, is like her cute, completely stable younger sister. She’s just as attractive as the older sister but, most importantly, she’s learned from all her older sister’s mistakes (Lesson number one: don’t be fucking insane). And yeah, the sex might be less wild/dangerous, but you know where you stand. It’s safe.
I lovedAssassin’s Creed 2. It never had any real moments of standout genius in it, but at the same time, it never had me repeating the same six missions-types for five hours, unlike the first game. Instead, it had a continuous string of smaller, more diverse missions, which meant that you were constantly doing something new. One mission would begin right where the last one finished. You never had a chance to get bored, and you never really felt like turning the game off was an option. I’ll say this now: for me, Assassin’s Creed 2 did a better job of doling out missions than GTA IV.
In fact, I liked this game so much, I’m ploughing through it to make it the fourth game I’ll have gotten all 1000 achievement points on. At least, it would have been, except there’s one achievement - for kicking a guy while flying your little Hudson Hawk hang glider - that you could only get on one particular mission that you couldn’t replay. Of course, I didn’t know this when I played the mission, or else I would have kicked that little bollocks off his perch and gotten my achievement.
With the first batch of downloadable content for the game, titled The Battle of Forli, Ubisoft dropped a whole load of these flying machines into various parts in the levels, which means that people like me who missed the achievement first time around could finally get it.
Oh, and they threw a bit of a story around it too.
And here’s where I lost interest. The story in The Battle of Forli is bullshit. Total bullshit. The “dramatic” climax has you fighting a metric fuckload of guards as you chase down the last remaining bad guy. I only bought this DLC to get the achievement, so at this stage, I cared so little about the story that I just ran past all the guards. It was like a Benny Hill sketch, me tearing through the Tuscan countryside with 50 sword-wielding soldiers chasing after me. All it was missing was a bit of Yakkety Sax. In the end, the bad guy reaches his pre-scripted “end” spot and turns around to fight me, at which point I smack him in the head with a hammer before he can even draw his sword. End of DLC.
The perfect end to a storyline I couldn’t have cared less about.
Update: I got the last of the 1000 achievement points this evening. As if you care.
I don’t get it. 30 Rock is massively successful and gets nominated for all sorts of awards every year, despite coasting on fumes for the past three seasons. I can’t remember the last time that show made me laugh. Meanwhile, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia - the one show on TV that will consistently make me gut-laugh until I feel like I’m going to pass out - slips under almost everyone’s radar.
Okay, I understand that jokes about main characters developing crack addictions to get on welfare and finding dumpster babies aren’t exactly for everyone, whereas Tina Fey joking about eating pizza instead of going to the gym is something completely inoffensive that everyone can find adorable. But fuck, is that really an excuse for hardly anyone to watch It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia?
Not only is this show funny, it’s also full of great ideas, especially if you’re on a race to the bottom. This show introduced me to the idea of drinking wine out of a soda can, which has immeasurably improved my ability to party. Now I can dance and gesticulate wildly while not spilling a drop of my wine. And then, of course, there’s Kitten Mittons:
Seriously, if you haven’t seen this show already, you should stop what you’re doing, turn off your phone and spend a weekend getting caught up. If you have seen this show already, wouldn’t now be a great time for a re-watch?
If you know me, you know I’m not particularly great at managing my time. I’m not one of those smug cunts who can churn out 3 books and a PhD defense before breakfast. I have trouble staying focused and finishing the things I start. My wife loves it when I leave wet laundry lying on the bed because I got distracted halfway through hanging it up.
Right now, college is sucking all of my time. I’m in my final year (fingers crossed!) of an arts degree, and so I’m up to my nuts in postmodernism, victorianism, romanticism – lots of -isms – Kant, Plato, and the various ontological and cosmological reasons for God. It’s all fun stuff - even more so when my computer hard drive craps out right in the middle of writing an essay. Hilarious.
This is something I really, really want to finish. I don’t want to look back on the past three years of college and think of it as a giant pile of wet laundry. So, this means that I don’t have much time for anything else. Sorry, Dragon Age! Sorry, Demon’s Souls! Sorry, Bioshock 2! Sorry, this blog!
I’ve got my final exams in the middle of May and then I’m heading off to the Primavera festival in Barcelona immediately after. Things might get back to normal after that.
Ira here. Philip Glass, the iconic composer of operas and film scores who—there’s no non-weird way to say this—is also my cousin, is doing a live performance at the Apple Store in Soho this Thursday, January 21st. Apple is filming it and is going to offer the video on iTunes at some point, maybe that same day for all I know.
I’ve been asked to perform a piece that Allen Ginsberg used to perform with Philip, Ginsberg’s great Vietnam-era poem “Wichita Vortex Sutra.” Philip set it to music years ago, and there are a few great recordings of them performing it together, which you are just a google search away from, or try this YouTube clip, and at this point by the way are we still supposed to capitalize Google when we use it as a verb or adjective?
I’ve performed this with Philip once before. He plays that piano a lot louder than you might think. It’s like reading a poem inside a helicopter. It’s also really fun. Ginsberg used to perform the thing with a beat poet grandeur I’d be embarrassed to attempt. When he calls down the gods in the second half of the poem, he really calls down the gods. Needless to say, it’s kind of the opposite of talking on the radio, where the whole point is to sound off-hand and conversational.
I’m the smallest part of this event. Philip will be playing solo, and with cellist (also his GF) Wendy Sutter which is always fantastic and really emotional, and with his chamber group.
If you’ve ever listened to an episode of This American Life, then you’ve probably heard Wichita Vortex Sutra before, because they use it as part of their interstitial music all the time. It’s the one that isn’t by Why? and isn’t from the Amelie soundtrack. It’s also one of my favourite songs in the world - actually, all of Philip Glass’ Solo Piano pieces are terrific - and I’m completely psyched to check this performance out.
Something very strange is going on in the offices of The Guardian.
Before, I thought maybe it was just a temporary blip - that someone had spiked the punch at their Christmas party, and that’s why they voted Team America as the fourth-best film of the noughties. I thought maybe they were just giddy with the excitement of 2009 finally being over - surviving the first decade of the Will-enium - and that’s why they voted Borat as the second-best.
Because it definitely seems as if they sobered up, realised what they’d done and made up for their moments of giddiness by finally doing the right thing and voting There Will Be Blood as the best film of the 2000s.
There’s no excuse for their list of the 50 best TV dramas of all time. A lot of the results are artificially inflated by bullshit sentimentality, or worse. For example, your teenage boner for Sarah Michelle Gellar does not mean that Buffy the Vampire Slayer had better drama or was a better show than, say, Battlestar Galactica or even Band of Brothers.
But seriously, Mad Men at #4 and _The Wir_e at #14? Did some wires get crossed somewhere? Let’s leave aside the fact that The Wire isn’t the clear winner and focus on Mad Men for now. I’m sure that if she was still around, Vivian Mercier would describe Mad Men as the kind of show where nothing happens, a lot. In fact, so much nothing happened in the second season that I’d be hard pressed to find any one of my friends who managed to watch the entire thing without having to go back and start again. Don’t get me wrong, I still watch Mad Men, and I still enjoy it. I just think it’s a little premature to put it anywhere near the top of a list like this.
As if to acknowledge that their list is completely pants-on-head stupid, the Guardian has launched a TV club to go through some of the shows that didn’t make their list, starting with the terrific Edge of Darkness. It’s a great idea and I hope it goes on for a while.
And maybe when it comes around to 2020, their next list will be better.
note: this post has been updated to remove some offensive language
I’ve had a little bit too much All of the people start to rush (Start to rush by) A dizzy twister dance Can’t find my drink or man. Where are my keys, I lost my phone. What’s going on on the floor? I love this record baby, but I can’t see straight anymore. Keep it cool what’s the name of this club? I can’t remember but it’s alright, alright.
Just dance. Gonna be okay. Da-doo-doo-doo Just dance. Spin that record babe. Da-doo-doo-doo Just dance. Gonna be okay. Duh-duh-duh-duh Dance. Dance. Dance. Just dance.
Wish I could shut my playboy mouth. How’d I turn my shirt inside out? (inside out, right) Control your poison babe Roses have thorns they say. And we’re all gettin’ hosed tonight. What’s going on on the floor?
As someone who is approaching middle age, this song fucking terrifies me. In a best-case scenario, this girl is blind drunk. Worst-case, someone has slipped something into her drink (which make me worry about the answer to the question of “How’d I turn my shirt inside out?”).
In either case, it’s not ‘alright’, it’s definitely not ‘gonna be okay’, and she should absolutely not ‘just dance’. This is the last thing she should be thinking about right now and will only make matters worse. She should find her ‘man’ (unless he’s the one who spiked her drink), or phone someone to come pick her up and take her home so she can get into her pyjamas and get a good night’s sleep.
I don’t know about you, but I thought that – as years go – 2009 was fairly shitty. There were a few good points (awesome birthday party, Primavera, holidaying around Italy with my wife), but when I look back, I can see a whole bunch of shit that I really didn’t want to have to deal with. So hooray for 2010.
Except when my wife asked me what I was most looking forward to about 2010, I went blank. The joke about it being the year we make contact is getting a little old. The only thing I could think was “at least Lost will FINALLY be over.”
Are you watching Jersey Shore? You should be. It’s perfect car-crash TV. Self-obsessed guidos and guidettes living together, all boozed up, horny and aggro. It’s entertaining in the same way that nature documentaries are entertaining. The pure, primal instinct of a pack of lions is always fascinating to watch because you never know when things are going to kick off. Now, imagine those lions were drunk - how much better would that be? Well, that’s what Jersey Shore is like. Drunk lions, covered in fake tan.
How good/bad is it? UNICO, “the largest Italian-American service organisation in the USA” has called for it to be canceled, describing it as “trash television” and saying the show “relies on crude stereotypes” and deliberately highlights the worst aspects of guido culture.
Trash television? Crude stereotypes? Why not just put out a press release, saying “Everyone, stop what you are doing and go watch this show now”?
During a promo for the rest of the season, they showed a clip of one of the girls, “Snooki”, getting a full-on punch to the face. From a big, muscly dude. Now, I’m totally against violence towards women, but HOLY FUCK LOOK AT THAT SHIT! HE BOPPED HER RIGHT ON HER STUPID FUCKING NOSE!
Idiots like me have been posting this clip all over the internet. It’s huge. It’s, as they say, “gone viral”. And so, MTV have decided to cut the scene with the punch out of the episode. They said that “seeing how the video footage has been taken out of context to not show the severity of this act or the resulting consequences, MTV has decided not to air Snooki being physically punched in next week’s episode.” I’m no expert, but if they’re that concerned about the context of the clip, I would have thought that the best way to give some context would be to show it in full? If I search for this clip now, I just get a load of user-uploaded videos taken from the the promo clip. If MTV don’t show the full clip, with context, then this is all there will ever be. There won’t ever be context.
Oh well. Punch or no punch, this show is still ridiculously entertaining.
“Until today, justice has been a cause without a rebel. Now we have one,” said [UNODC Executive Director] Mr. Costa.
Cage has said that he will “use the performing arts as an engine for global justice and victim support”.
Now, let’s take a look at a couple of Nicolas Cage’s movies that are coming out in 2010.
Drive Angry - “A vengeful father chases after the men who killed his daughter”.
The Hungry Rabbit Jumps - “After his wife is assaulted, a husband enlists the services of a vigilante group to help him settle the score”
This is Nicolas Cage’s interpretation of “global justice”? What next? A right-wing homophobic actor with a history of drug use and sexual assault being elected governor of California?
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