Story time

For the last couple of weeks I have been sitting and waiting impatiently as the pages of the Penny Arcade Prince of Persia storybook are drip fed to my awaiting impatience.

The story is now complete, and all I have to do is figure if there’s some way to get a copy of the book (preferably without having to buy the game as well, since I don’t have any time to play it), because it’s such a cleverly subtle epic tale. I really did enjoy it a lot…

The flourishing of wands

On thursday I went with Simone and two of our friends Margaret and Prue to see the new Harry Potter movie.

It was good, although having recently re-read the book as some light bedtime reading I found it a bit frustrating how much of the good stuff in the book they had to cut in order to fit it into the 2 1/2 hours. This phenomenon is becoming more and more prominent (and, in my opinion, problematic) as they get further and further through the series. Harry is also starting to look disconcertingly old, and perhaps more incongrously, buff for the character he’s supposed to be portraying.

Still, I enjoyed it overall, and it’s only a short while until the next book comes out (with recent suggestions in the media that JKR may not be as averse to writing more Harry Potter books in the future (contrary to her previous assertions that there would only be 7)).

I also saw the other day that they’ve released the companion game for the Order of the Phoenix movie, and one of the flavours it comes in is for the Wii. This is cool, because it would appear that part of the game is that you use the Wiimote as a wand to cast spells. I must say I’m looking forward to wingarduim leviosa’ing stuff, and perhaps even Reducto’ing a few things. 🙂

Cheers big ears

For those geeks of you out there, here’s something that’s sure to appeal to you:

An online partially visual version of the old hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy game (which if you’ve ever played the old text only version (which I think may be available at Home of the Underdogs), you will know to be spectacularly, amusingly frustrating. In fact I don’t think the adjective frustrating really adequately does justice to how entertainingly infuriating it can be at points. Anyway)

Golf day

Over easter Simone and I went down to Canberra to visit our best people (my best man and best friend James and his cool wife Chantelle, and Simone’s matron of honour Tash (best woman would be a perfectly accurate term, but sounds a little odd somehow), and her great husband Dave (bloody Dave’s. Far to many of ’em. Bloody everywhere they are)).

It was superbly good to get away, and even better to spend the time with such great friends.

And on the monday we had a golf day.

Now apart from Simone, I don’t think that any of us have done much more than watch golf on TV, but I must explain that we had a really good time none the less.

In the morning we had a lazy sleep in and went for a bit of a walk around the neighborhood after coffee at a local bar. Then we went and played a quick 18 at the local minigolf course, after which we had take-away-lunch-of-your-choice, topped off with easter eggs, and spent the remainder of the afternoon playing 4 player “Mario Golf: Toadstool tour” on James and Chantelle’s Nintendo gamecube.

It was so much fun that since arriving home I have been forced to go out and buy a gamecube and Mario Golf, so that Simone and I can continue the fun.

As if we didn’t have enough to do with our time as it was…. 🙂

Compilable

On and off for the last few weeks I have been playing a game called FreeOrion, which is a community written open source game based roughly on the Master of Orion style. It’s a great game, but since it’s still relatively early in FreeOrion’s development the game has an irritating tendancy to crash right when you’re getting into it.

Now at present there are only two ways to get the game:

  1. You can download a pre-compiled older version of the game (Version 0.2), which is what I initially did, and have found it to be quite crashy, or
  2. Download the source code and some other software and compile the latest version of the game yourself.

Now I really quite like the game, but have never compiled something like this before, and am torn between on the one hand desire for the game, and on the other hand a bizarre combination of apathy, trepidation and fear of the unknown.

I’m sure that I will eventually bite the bullet and figure out how to compile it, it would be so much easier if they would just do it for me…

Wierdword

Apparently they have issued a 2005 edition of the scrabble world list, and amongs the newly added words are “Google” (as a verb, not a noun) and “Bootylicious”.

I’m looking forward to the next time I get to play Scrabble (which we frequently do when we go to see Simone’s parents, so it may not be too far off) so I can try and fit one of them in.

Rock on

I followed a link today which took me to the official site for both the New Zealand and the Australian National Air Guitar Championships. Fantastic!!

The site also has a link to the Australian national Paper Rock Scissors championship, and if the Queensland round of the competition wasn’t being held in Darwin (??!??!!) you know I’d be there with Bells on.

Downfall by civilisation?

While in the aforementioned games store I picked up a legit copy of Civ 3 for AU$16, which was definitely worth spending, and I have been allocating quite unhealthy amounts of time to taking over the world since then. I always forget how easy it is to loose entire days to this type of game when given to opportunity.