Tom Charman

“If you ever do want to kill yourself, back lack the courage, I think a visit to Palmerston North will do the trick.”

John Cleese had some unkind things to say about Palmerston North.¹ I can imagine thinking along similar lines if one had to spend a sustained period of time here. However, for a quick trip, it’s not too shabby. There are more lawyers than milk bars² and more flouro tops than you can shake a stick at. It also has power lines under the ground, and a few little oddities.

The main city is arranged in a square. I like neat cities. However, they also just dump their garbage by the road rather than putting it in bins, so this neatness is somewhat undermined.³ Four sheep jokes out of ten.

1. The residents did get some revenge later. ↩
2. Or dairies, as they call them here. This unfortunately means they have to call actual dairies “those places where you squeeze the cow bits to make yummies.” ↩
3. This happens across New Zealand apparently, aside from some of the really big cities. ↩

Lame. The food court is tiny and they wouldn’t let me upgrade my regular Red Rooster meal to include iced tea. Apparently only lard-arses who aren’t on my patented “medium chips” diet are entitled to Nestea. Disgraceful. Also, the weather was too hot, and the train driver between the airports was sarcastic. 2 daylight savings time abstainers out of 10.

I could not find the Internet in New Zealand. What will follow over the next day or so are the time-delayed blogs from my travels.

Off to New Zealand! If I find any nice wireless networks then you might even hear from me while I’m there, but otherwise, you won’t, because it’ll cost me $20 per megabyte to use data there. Yeesh.

I likes me some Prince of Persia. I have a soft spot for all the parts the Sands of Time trilogy, even if they did manage to screw various things up royally in the sequels. I’m very keen to play The Sands of Time again should they ever get around to releasing it on Xbox Live. I’m nostalgic.

So, do I hate this crazy new Prince, with his illustrated body, big scarf, and strong american accent? Well, no, because Ubisoft seem to have the knack back. After two sessions I’ve been won over; mostly due to the care they’ve taken with the dialogue between the Prince and his new friend, Elika. Someone over there has clearly found wherever they wrote down the secret of charming, simple, entertaining and amusing storytelling before they lost it for Warrior Within.

The platforming is simpler in many ways, but unlike some I don’t think that necessarily translates to easy, or at least, not to bad easy. Yes, some of the obstacles are removed by having you simply jump at a wall to wall-run, rather than holding a thumbstick towards the wall. But those obstacles were the obstacles of irritation and not the obstacles of working out where the hell to go next. Meanwhile, the game takes the surprising move of having collectables which actually have a story function — meaning that when I do eventually scour the kingdom for all 1001 of them, I’ll have the dubious excuse that not all of them have been collected in the name of obsessive compulsion.

Finally, and I’m not sure it’s even necessary to point this out, it’s a beautiful game. After the gorgeous visuals of Assassin’s Creed I’d have been disappointed if it wasn’t, but it’s its own crazy kind of illustrated, fairytale beautiful, with the beautifully animated Elika the icing on the cake.¹ If you leave the game alone for a bit, it’ll even pan across some of its soothing landscapes, just to make sure you realise that it’s very, very nice indeed.

It’s kind of easy, but it’s kind of nice. Certainly, after playing Left 4 Dead and constantly being brutally slaughtered by legions of hideous zombies, this hits the spot.

1. Clearly someone’s learned the value of subtlety at some point since Warrior Within. ↩

OK. Let’s say you’re the sort of person who sees ropey romantic comedies with Vince Vaughn. Which of these do you go to?

These are, of course, the same film. But oddly, the one which has been stripped of all things Yuletide is the one being released in Australia and New Zealand. Here’s the trailer — watch as the voiceover guy completely fails to actually mention the name of the movie. I’m not saying either of them look good, per say, but one of them at least manages to get across some kind of concept to the audience. I don’t recall what the tagline for the Down Under version is, but it didn’t do much to dispel the obvious and erroneous conclusion that our two vertically different actors would be travelling to four different relaxing destinations and getting away from it all, rather than having four awful family experiences in one day.

At least, Four Christmases sounds shorter.

I’m not the first person to notice this, by the way. Clearly sensible people everywhere are bemused. Unlike Mr Dunks, I’ve never read a letter to the editor whinging about overly Christmasey overtones — rather, I only ever seem to read the ones which whinge about said hypothetical whingers. But either way, I find it hard to imagine anyone taking issue with a film for involving Christmas as a tangential and not particularly Christian plot point.

And if these people do exist, is the plan to hoodwink them into seeing such a film? There must be more of them than I can possibly imagine to make the effort of rebranding the film worthwhile.

I don’t get it. What upsets me more, though, is the realisation that at some point in my life, “Four Christmases” turned from sounding awesome to sounding terrifying, and I didn’t even notice.

As I write this, there are 79 minutes left in November, which means I’ll need to average something like 10 words per second to finish NaNoWriMo in time. Maybe next year.

Several things got in the way of it, but one of the most enjoyable was Fable II. After previously giving up on Fable in irritation after a gaggle of annoying villagers called me “Chicken Chaser” for no reason I could sensibly work out, I didn’t expect to enjoy the sequel, but a bunch of good reviews persuaded me to give it a chance. I was happy I did; though the villagers are still annoying in that they’ll swarm you the second you come into the village,¹ the generally malleable nature of the world is highly entertaining. Any game which claims that you can make your own destiny will always be lying to some extent, but Fable II’s major decisions and consequences are usually interesting, and occasionally hilarious.

Another thing was Gears of War II, a solid if unremarkable sequel to the solid if unremarkable original. I’m playing through the campaign with Andy and with housemate Andrew at the moment, which avoids those awkward moments when you shout out the wrong partner’s name during a particularly intense bit.

I moved house recently, and was given a chilli plant. Having gotten over my initial disbelief and excitement at learning that I suddenly controlled the means of chilli production, I almost forgot I had it. Luckily, it still appears to be alive.

They’ve released a Deluxe Edition of Casino Royale, the bastards. It’s not even remotely fair. Most films don’t even have one Blu-Ray release, and here’s Casino Royale getting two. I’ve gotten some practice at palming off DVD copies of films to friends when I want to upgrade to Blu-Ray, but it’s harder to find people to palm old Blu-Rays off to.

I’ve been meaning to write one of Andy’s “And Now, Five Things”, but then, I’ve been meaning to do a lot of things.

1. And, occasionally wander into your bedroom while you’re sharing a special moment with your wife. ↩

This [NaNoWriMo](http://www.nanowrimo.org/eng/user/420554) stuff is *hard*. And it’s sucking time which should be being used to fix up our archives, or even, god forbid, write new reviews. So apologies, gentle readers. If you’re very unlucky, perhaps you’ll get to read two 50,000 word [opera](http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/opus) at the end of all this.