Donkey Kong Jr.

Posted on September 30, 2014 by Adam Randall

PictureEveryone knows the original Donkey Kong, but its sequel Donkey Kong Jr. is perhaps a little more obscure. Nonetheless, this is an interesting piece of Nintendo history, featuring the debut appearance of the eponymous Donkey Kong Jr. and a very rare villainous depiction of Mario.

The game is a direct sequel to the original Donkey Kong and is Mario’s revenge against Donkey Kong for his earlier kidnapping of Pauline. Mario locks Donkey Kong away in a tiny little cage and Donkey Kong Jr. goes through four different levels in order to rescue his father. It’s very short, but, you can go through it again and again in order to get high scores (in both a normal and a hard mode) and there’s also a two-player mode where you take it in turns with somebody else to go through the levels.

It’s a nice enough little game but there’s not much to it and it does have its downsides. Donkey Kong Jr. moves really sluggishly and dies really easily. Of course, touching enemies will hurt you, as with many games, but falling really short distances also kills you and often you’ll jump a distance that seems perfectly fine only to be annoyed when he dies. On the subject of jumping, it feels like he’s really bad at it too, he barely leaves the ground. I think he probably has the exact same level of mobility as Mario did in the first game, but for some reason it feels much worse for Donkey Kong Jr. perhaps because he’s bigger. Sadly, having the only playable character be so cumbersome has the knock on effect of making the whole game feel rather slow, which is a shame.

So, it’s nice to play the game and know that it (much more than the first Donkey Kong) is the seed from which the spectacular Donkey Kong Country series later grew, but as it is, this is nothing more than a curiosity for the fans.

Rating: 5.9/10

Buy it as part of the compilation Donkey Kong Classics here.

 

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Donkey Kong (Game & Watch)

Posted on September 29, 2014 by Adam Randall

PictureWhen Donkey Kong became a big success for Nintendo, of course they wanted to release a version for their Game & Watch range so that people could play it ‘on the go’. Sadly, the technology to simply port it onto a portable device did not exist at the time and so the game was completely remade as a Game & Watch title. This had its upsides and its downsides.

As is the case with most Game & Watch games, there is only one level now and it’s kind of like a combination of the first and last levels of the original game. You use ladders to climb up onto girders and have to avoid rolling barrels as you do so. Eventually you get to the top where you have to turn on a crane with a switch and swing on its hook in order to sever the cables which are keeping up the platform that Donkey Kong is standing on. So many aspects of the original game are lost, which is a shame. On the other hand, however, this one level is now much more detailed; rather than just looking like girders in a black void (as it originally did) the events of the game now very clearly take place on a construction site and you can even see the skyline of a city in the background.

But while the level itself may look nicer, all of the characters look very weird (even in the box art, as you can see!). Mario looks like a generic Game & Watch man, Donkey Kong looks has a very weird face and Pauline (who is actually part of the background) is just a really bad doodle of a woman. The gameplay is also much jerkier and unnatural, making it often hard to time things, but then all of these things are to be expected of any Game & Watch title due to the limitations.

Once you’ve beaten Donkey Kong, you can continue to play through again and again to increase your high score and I actually prefer the Game & Watch score system over the original (it’s more fun), but other than this and another few minor improvements (it’s quite nice to see such an old double screened game too), I think this is a game you’ll only enjoy if you’re a big Nintendo, Mario or Donkey Kong fan.

Rating: 5.5/10

Buy it here.

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Watchmen by Alan Moore

Posted on September 26, 2014 by Adam Randall

PictureAlan Moore’s Watchmen is a standalone graphic novel, which takes the superhero genre and tries to play it as realistically as possible. The result is something which is very pleasing and something which can be enjoyed both by fans of the genre and those who are unfamiliar with it.

The titular Watchmen are a group of superheroes who are publicly known and used by the government, and none of them are really the paragons of morality that you’d classically associate with superheroes. Perhaps the most disgusting of the group is one called The Comedian, a character who is immensely unlikeable and who commits a wide variety of atrocities throughout the story. My favourite, meanwhile, is Dr. Manhattan a man who, after some mistake in a science experiment, has become virtually omnipotent. Dr. Manhattan is very interesting because he knows everything that is going to happen, including what he is going to do, so he can only do what he knows he is going to do as he is bound by causality to do so. At one point he comments that for him, all of his life is happening at once, and he can duplicate himself to do multiple things at the same time, and, as I’m sure you can imagine, this makes him seem un-human to some, especially his romantic partner, who feels quite alienated by it. A lot of the team are shown to struggle with things like that, and it makes them all rather endearing characters.

I must warn anybody who’s going to read this, though, that it is rather a depressing story. There’s rape, the murder of innocents, the deaths of main characters, war crimes and all manner of other horrible things. All of this is against the backdrop of the 1980s fear of nuclear war and we’re constantly told how the cold war is escalating and how a nuclear strike is becoming more and more likely. But this feeling of doom, this sense that the end of the world could come at any moment, gives the whole thing such a great atmosphere and feeling of tension that it can be hard to put down.

So, on the whole, I’d say this is well worth a read. The only downsides, for me, were the fact that it became a bit too depressing at times and that there was also the occasional boring period.

Rating: 8.4/10

Buy it here.

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Chilli Challenge

Posted on September 24, 2014 by Adam Randall
In 2008 I went out to the local park to meet up with my friends Matt Smith and Elliott Egan. It was a regular thing back then, and I always had a lot of fun. Anyway, this particular time, Matt had brought with him a bag of tiny, especially spicy chillis. These days I absolutely love eating chillis, but at this point I hadn’t ever had one before. There was also another person from my school there that I knew.
    “You should eat one of these,” Matt said to me.
    “I’m not sure,” I said, thinking of all those videos where people ate chillis on the internet.
    “Yeah, you should,” said Egan.
    “I’ll have one,” said the other person.
    “Good,” said Matt. “And you should too, Adam. I had one earlier.”
    “Well, I guess I don’t mind too much,” I said, hoping I’d not regret it.
    So the other person and I were each given a chilli and we booth ate them at the same time. Since it was so small, it was all gone after about three bites. It tasted kind of nice at first, and it wasn’t really hot at all. After that, though, the heat came. It wasn’t unbearable, but it was a little uncomfortable. But, in a way, the warmth of the chilli felt a bit nice. In fact I was enjoying it. Nothing wrong with it at all.
    Sadly, while I may not have had any real problems with the chilli, the other person didn’t seem to be handling it well at all. He fell to his knees, groaning in pain. Eventually, even that was too much, and he was just lying on the ground screaming and crying. I offered him a sip from my Trusty Water Bottle to ease the pain.
    “Did you chew your one, Adam?” said Matt. “It’s no wonder it’s not hot if you didn’t chew it.”
    “Oh, I did,” I said, “it just doesn’t seem that hot.”
    And it didn’t. I’ve never done anything like that again, but I am rather fond of spicy foods now. Nando’s is one of my absolute favourite places to visit with friends and I always get the ‘extra hot’ sauce on my burger. People have remarked that I must have something wrong with my mouth, meaning I never have trouble with spicy things. Maybe they’re right.

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Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters

Posted on September 22, 2014 by Adam Randall

PictureFour years after the first Kid Icarus, a sequel (Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters) was released. However, while this is a return for the characters of the first game, this isn’t much of a sequel story-wise. At the start of the game, Palutena has a premonition of the coming of a demon named Orcos and so to prepare for this, Pit must travel around to three dungeons in order to obtain the three sacred treasures… Just like he did last time. Of course, this time Orcos is the villain, rather than Medusa, so the story isn’t exactly the same, but I can’t help but wonder why Pit didn’t just keep the sacred treasures after the last game.

In terms of gameplay, Of Myths and Monsters is pretty much exactly the same as the first game. It’s a 2D platformer, but instead of just sidescrolling, there are also levels where you have to move upward. There are, of course, also the three dungeon levels where you have to find a boss who guards a sacred treasure, but can pretty much go where ever you please (left, right, up, down) as you make your way through. Quite nicely, a few little annoying problems from the last game have now been fixed: enemies will now sometimes drop items which can restore health (an enormous help), when you enter a shop (or other building) you don’t have to wait for all the shopkeeper’s speech to slowly appear on-screen before you can move (which was annoying when you didn’t even mean to go in) and power ups are also much easier to come by. Graphically, I think this one is just a little nicer too (even though black and white).

The biggest noticeable difference between this game and its prequel is the difficulty. The first game can be very tricky indeed at parts, where as this game (aside from the bosses) is never really hard at all, which is a shame because they’ve added all these things to make it less hard as well, even though you don’t need them this time. You’d think this decrease in difficulty would be quite good, considering the other one felt too hard at times, but with this game not being hard, you realise that it’s actually very short. You can breeze through this in under five hours and, other than doing it again, there’s not much else you can do after that.

So, I think this game takes a step forward at the same time as taking a step back. I can’t rate it any higher or lower than the first one.

Rating: 7.9/10

Buy it here.

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The Moon on a Lake

Posted on September 19, 2014 by Adam Randall
During my first year at university, every Thursday there was a plenary lecture which went from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. and was given by guest authors each week. These were absolutely lovely, but it was at least a little inconvenient for me to get back to Corsham so late in the day, especially when I often had early classes on the Friday. As such, I had a nice little arrangement with my friend Tülin where I would sleep over at her house on those days.
    So, on the day of each plenary, I’d arrive a little early, meet her at her house and then we’d go down into town and get the bus to the university. One day when I came, it just so happened that she hadn’t eaten yet, so she asked if we could go to McDonald’s before getting on the bus, and since she was providing me with a place to sleep for the night, I could hardly say no. So, we went to McDonald’s and she very kindly bought be a vegetarian burger along with her own dinner (and it was really rather tasty). That was all very nice but it did, however, make us a little late.
    When we arrived at the university, the lecture had been going for about fifteen minutes and the prospect sneaking in in the middle was not an attractive one. We could just turn around and go home, but we did still want to see our friends who would be in the lecture, so we decided to have a walk instead and then afterward we’d just wait outside the lecture to speak to our friends when they came out.
    I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before many times, but Bath Spa University’s Newton Park campus has an extremely nice surrounding countryside area, my favourite part being the ‘lake side walk’. When my friend and I walked down there, I’d been there several times before, but never in the middle of the night (as it was then). Up in the sky, there was a full moon and with winter now beginning to take hold, there was that wonderful crisp feeling in the air that comes around at the end of the year. The whole time, there was the peaceful sound of flowing water too.
    As we came around the corner, we stopped and waited by a fence and looked down at the lake. The full moon and the stars were reflected on the water in the most beautiful way imaginable. I was very, very happy indeed, because by this point I was completely convinced that I would have an extremely good time at Bath Spa University. In the heart of winter, just my friend and I, I thought that the lake may indeed be the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I wasn’t much of a photographer, but I took out my phone and I just had to take a picture.
Picture

Sorry if I got your hopes up! It seems my phone’s camera wasn’t quite capable of capturing what I saw. But when I look at this picture, it helps me to remember what it was really like even more and I hope I never forget. It’s also nice to consider that, at the time, it would have seemed to be a ‘bad’ thing to miss the lecture, but in retrospect it was a very ‘good’ thing.

(Don’t miss today’s Finger Puppet Show!)
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The War of Art by Steven Pressfield

Posted on September 17, 2014 by Adam Randall

PictureThis is non-fiction book which sets out to help its readers overcome any forms of creative block and get on with their own projects. The main focus seems to be on writing (as Pressfield himself is a writer) but he says that it can be applied to any kind of art, or business venture, or whatever it is you want to do. Perhaps, as a writer, I’m a little biased, but I liked the way that this was applied to everything and I think that it worked rather well and will probably make the book more accessible to others.

The main thing I took away from The War of Art was the idea of Resistance (with a capital R) and the various ways that we can counter anything that may hold has back when we’re trying to work. He identifies things we may be doing to hold ourselves back without realising, which was often rather interesting. This all seemed pretty sound and pretty standard. I’d have liked a bit more solid advice, as it was mainly about what to avoid, but I do think that it might have been for the best that he avoided more specific advice, since everyone works differently and on different things, and this may have spoiled the fairly universal appeal of the piece.

But while the first half is a pretty good, pretty helpful and generally what you would expect from a book that’s designed to help motivate you with your projects, the second half is quite weird. There were times when he was talking about the nature of existence, how all people are just different aspects of God, how there are different spheres of reality and William Blake and it all seemed a bit incoherent. Without wishing to appear judgemental, it is around this time he also mentions that it is good to consume recreational drugs, so I can’t help but wonder if these parts were written under the influence.

On the whole though, this isn’t a bad book. If you’re wanting to get started on a project but don’t quite feel motivated, I think reading this might just give you the push you need. It’s also quite a pleasant read too; it only has small sections to read at a time meaning you can breeze through it at your own pace. It’s downsides come from becoming quite derailed at times and moving away from the main topic, as well as what I considered to be a slightly too idealistic point of view. It seems like he thinks that every person who isn’t a huge success is only not a huge success because they didn’t really believe in themselves, which I’m sure is easy for him to say, since he became a success, but I am sure there are lots of people who try as hard as they can and still don’t succeed due to external factors; to suggest it is all internal seems both naïve and inconsiderate. Still, a good read nonetheless.

Rating: 6.9/10

Buy it here.

(Don’t miss today’s Finger Puppet Show!)

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Mint Leaves

Posted on September 15, 2014 by Adam Randall
A month or so ago, I had a lovely day out in Bath with my friends Dalfino Madrigal Keyte and Christian Watkins. An important part of any day out, of course, is the lunch and we went to the marvellous Pizza Express. It’s a restaurant I’ve always been very fond of; every time I order a pizza called a romana padana and it has spinach, onions, goats’ cheese and many other excellent toppings which make it a rather wonderful meal.
    But, for me, when visiting Pizza Express, the biggest excitement always comes from the desert. Every time I go there, I get myself their absolutely delicious tiramisu. I already like tiramisu a lot, but this thing is on a whole different level. I mean, when I eat porridge, or beagles, or lemon cake, or whatever, I think of them as nice things to eat, but when I eat a Pizza Express tiramisu, I think of it as a nice life experience. So very nice indeed. As an appetiser to the desert, there’s a mint leaf on it that I eat first.
    As I was lying in the silent ecstasy that follows from one of these tiramisus, I realised that Dalfino had not yet eaten the mint leaf that came with his own tiramisu.
    “May I eat your mint leaf, please?” I asked him.
    “Yeah, sure,” he said.
    “Excellent!” I said and popped it into my mouth.
    “Except I was sucking on that for ages earlier.”
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Metroid II: Return of Samus

Posted on September 12, 2014 by Adam Randall

PictureA few years after the first Metroid a sequel was released for the original Game Boy, and in my opinion it improves over the original in several ways.

The first game had a few problems: you had to use passwords to save, there was no easy way to recover health, you often couldn’t shoot enemies because you were taller than them and could only shoot straight ahead and the whole world could be confusingly labyrinthine. All of these problems are fixed. There are save spots and things you can find which will fully heal you, Samus can crouch which makes shooting things easier, and the world feels much easier to navigate (I wish it had a map, though). So, while I had to seek help on the internet while I played the first game, I got through this one without assistance.

The story this time, is that after her past experiences with the Metroids, Samus has gone to their planet of origin in order to completely wipe them out (which, to me, does sound extreme). You have to explore a huge 2D cave network in order to find and destroy all of them. What I like, is that some areas can be very atmospheric indeed. In lots of places there’s no background music and just lots of rather creepy sound effects. You’ll often find yourself worried that there’s something very dangerous nearby, and more often than not your concerns turn out to be justified. As you go onward, you collect more and more items which give Samus more powers and make it possible for you to explore other areas.

So, on the whole, it’s a sequel that does just what it should do; the old gameplay style is replicated, but improved, while at the same time adding lots of exciting new features. Graphically, despite being black and white (which actually seems to suit it, tonally) this game is also an improvement. One thing that might disappoint some people, is that things aren’t quite as open as the last game; last time, other than the final thing, you could do everything in whatever order you want, whereas this time, while still fairly open, the game does present you with much more of an order to do things in. For me, being more linear did not detract from the game, I can enjoy a linear game and a non-linear one, but it might be a shame for some.

Rating: 8.7/10

Buy it here.

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So Many Goodbyes

Posted on September 10, 2014 by Adam Randall
One thing that always concerns me is becoming separated from my closest friends. I’m a terribly needy person, as I’m sure regular readers of this blog may have been able to discern about me, so it makes sense that I’d be sad when I can’t see friends anymore. So it’s a terrible shame that this has happened an awfully large number of times over the last few months.
    First, it was David Tubb. He and I would do things together all the time. We’ve been to the theatre together, trekked through fields, climbed under barbed wired fences, gone out to dinner together, played video games, made videos, made comic strips, gone to Christmas events and a huge list of other things. All of it was wonderful, but sadly David slowly began to become ill. Due to a very unpleasant illness (which he wrote a superb blog entry about) I now see incredibly little of him, even though we’re both very keen to meet up, we just can’t. He moved away somewhere quiet to help speed up his recovery, along with Naomi Brennan, his housemate and another friend of mine. I’m very pleased that he still has a friend with him, but also I still get the occasional selfish thought about it being a shame that I don’t get to see her anymore either. I also can’t help but feel selfish about writing this, since my mild upset at not seeing people is probably nothing compared to his regular troubles.
    Then there’s my old friend Elliott Egan. I’ve known him since about 2007 and in 2011 he left for university. As he’s such a kind and reasonable person (with a lovely sense of humour) of course I really enjoy spending time with him, even if that time is in a night club. Recently, I had the rather misguided idea that he’d be back to Corsham once his course was over (which was silly, since it’s a nursing course, and there wouldn’t be many jobs of that kind here) and recently I had the most wonderful surprise when I saw he’d sent a lunch invitation to my phone. Of course, I accepted this, but it was while I was there that he told me he’d be permanently moving away and that he had no plans to live in Corsham again, which was sad. At the end of the lunch he said “Bye, Adam, I’ll see you…” and I got excited because I thought he was going to name a day during the week “sometime next year probably.”
    My friend Mairi Mac Arthur has always lived in London, so it might seem strange that I feel sad about her moving away from there when I never lived there myself. But I’ve regularly visited Mairi for a few years now, and I’ve always had nice, fun days out with her. She may not have lived in Corsham (or even Bath) but in my mind she was always a ‘current’ friend, and if I ever had a strong urge to pay her a visit there was nothing stopping me from doing so. So that’s why I was a little sad to find she was moving to Scotland (which is out of my range). I arranged a ‘Goodbye Day’ and we had lots of fun together before I went back home. When I got on the train, I was still very happy because of the high of a nice day out, but it slowly dwindled into a sort of melancholy as I began to think of how days like that may become rarer.
    I must say, that I find it strange that I have so few anecdotes on here about my friend Rory MacLellan. Rory is infinitely kind and helpful and I’ve spent such a huge amount of time with him that it seems odd that I scarcely write about it. I guess the explanation is that we just do nice things together which wouldn’t be all that exciting for somebdy to read about, but are very exciting to take part in. Funnily enough, he also moved to Scotland, and at the same time as Mairi! I certainly enjoy fun coincidences like that, and I’d enjoy it even more if it didn’t mean Rory were moving away. We watched some Doctor Who together during my last visit, and I had the feeling of not wanting to leave as the day drew to its end because I knew that would be the last time for a while that I’d get to spend time with him.
    And finally there was my friend Tülin. It’s actually rather funny, in a sad way, because before the last time I met up with her, I had actually suggested making it a ‘Goodbye Day’ because I had a feeling I’d not get to see much of her anymore, but she insisted that we’d still see each other lots and I was just needlessly worrying, and now that was the last I saw her before she arranged to move to a place far away (and out of my range). She’s done some extremely kind things for me in the past, and her help in getting me to overcome certain anxieties has been invaluable. No longer do I have somebody to watch Star Trek: The Next Generation with, and in a rather silly way, now I’ll feel a bit sad when I watch it by myself.
    And so I’ve been a little sad lately because so many of my friends have ‘disappeared’. I almost wrote something along the lines of “so, I’ve lost a lot of friends lately” but I haven’t lost any of them. I still love them all deeply, and I’m sure the feeling is at least partially mutual and with things like Facebook, I’ll never lose contact with them. I also realise that this must seem a very selfish sounding entry; instead of being happy for all of my friends who have exciting new beginnings, I’m wallowing in self-pity. But I am still happy for them, and proud of them, I am just also sad that I will no longer be able to share their company. I feel like a chick that stayed in the nest while his brothers and sisters left to become wonderful eagles.
    But on the bright side, at times like this, I can appreciate the friends I can still see even more. I should be sure to spend as much time as possible with friends like Oscar Taylor-Kent, Chloe Ward, Sophie Marie Mills and others who are not far away. I also don’t mean to imply I’ll never see the people mentioned in here again, another bright side is that when I next say them, that’ll be something else I’ll be able to appreciate even more.

(Sorry for a rather personal entry today.)

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