Mat Bowles

Pirates! Lego Pirates! On the Wii! Yay!

2011-02-03T23:30:01Z

There now follows an advert. For which I am not getting paid. Because, well, it's for LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean: The Video Game

I think the reason for me posting this video should be apparent to all. It's not available for preorder on Amazon yet. I've checked.

( the full press release )

May is also when I can renew my phone contract so I can get over the immense phone envy I am suffering over Jennie's new N8.
via

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Wii: Goldeneye

2010-12-11T19:40:31Z

Goldeneye was a reason to actually buy an N64 thirteen years ago. I didn't, but a good friend did (my former boss). We spent hours playing that game. A bunch of us would regularly decamp to his house and spend the evening shooting each other in the back. I was crap at it. Really, really, crap at it.

Jennie is pretty much housebound for the next few weeks. My parents have wired me money for Xmas presents early, knowing that we'll have some cash flow issues. I bought a 2nd hand Wii with some of it as our old one is broken. This has proven to be a very good decision. Of the games we have, Worms has proven to be the most popular, we have a houseguest helping us out, so three/four player games are good.

We went into town today (her second time out of the house since the op, her first not in a car for the whole time), and thanks to the staff at the excellent Ninja Games in town (nice store, shame about the website) we got a collection of cheap stuff. We also got a copy of Goldeneye for thirty quid.

I'm crap at it. Really, really, crap it it. It's great. The controls are going to take a lot to get used to, they've put a lot of thought into them and it's a very powerful interface. But, um, I'm not used to it yet. Despite being Goldeneye, it's got Daniel Craig voicing Bond and Dench as M. This Is Good.

The graphics and the game engine have both been updated, but it feels right. It feels like Goldeneye did sat on Lee's couch getting shot by Simon and Doug. In the back. Repeatedly. At least playing it single player I'm getting shot repeatedly by Russians.

We're taking a break from it at the moment, Alien Syndrome looked like a good buy for £3 if the objective is simple multiplayer games. And we got fed up dying as Bond.

But we'll be back to Goldeneye soon. I want to shoot Jennie with a Golden Gun.

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clickbzzzz*reboot from start...

2009-10-27T00:51:46Z

Apparently, if I stop posting here, people will start ringing me to check I'm ok, or wondering what I'm up to, or other similar things. This is especially true if I just, y'know, stop writing stuff and stop commenting elsewhere.

Well, I did. It started as a weekend break from t'internet in which I didn't even look at my email, then it turned into a few months where I simply scanned my email for important stuff, occasionally checked into Twitter, but otherwise didn't read any of my reading, friends or feed pages and simply turned off. Honestly? It's been good.

So, what have I been doing instead? Well, making money definitely wasn't one of them. Ah well, that'll have to start changing. What I have been doing is enjoying life in many respects.

Learnt how to bake and cook

I've learnt, not just how to bake (which is quite easy), but also how to actually, y'know, properly cook. I am no longer scared by a recipe that requires I chop an onion. I know what a vichyssoise is (but not how to spell it), and have even made one. My carrot, cream and orange soup, adapted from Mary Berry's recipe, is quite simply gorgeous, and I successfully made baguettes yesterday.

I've been helping miss_s_b in the garden, in which we have potatoes, beetroot, oregano and even scented geraniums growing well. The newly planted garlic is already sprouting, so that'll be nice for next year.

Biggest bestest cake in the world

I've been spending time with amazing_holly, reading, playing games, cooking and having fun. I managed to get her to teach herself the basics of multiplication and division while baking a cake. I even, as a reward for her for sticking with learning to be good enough at Speed Racer to actually beat Mummy in a championship cooked, with her, the biggest bestest cake that Mister Mat has ever made! which has, somehow, now become the biggest bestest cake in the world. Well, she is 6. It was fun making it though, even if it was so big it had gone dry before we finished it.

But also? I've been playing games. A lot of games. For this you can mostly blame liadnan. Y'see, awhileback I had a catastrophic OS failure involving a critical Fx vulnerability and a dodgy porn site, and we gave up on fixing Windows and switched to Ubuntu for the main desktop. I had some problems getting a few things to work, and he pointed me at the wonder that is the world of Linux repositories. So I installed some, to see what I could find.

Open source, extendable games

Mostly, I found games. Open Source, extendable, games. Based on some wonderful classics like Elite, Civilisation, Sin City and similar. I will, I hope, write up the ones I enjoyed, just so I can have a record of them. I may even write up the ones I hated, to remind me not to install them again. In the meantime, I'm back. I've been reading, and even commenting on, most of my reading pages, and plan to completely reorganise them to keep my sanity in place.

In the meantime, enough about me, what've you guys been up to, have I missed much?

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