The Importance of Being Idle

King Of The Iron Fist

I think it's safe to say that having been trapped inside with minimal contact with the outside world for the past two weeks is making me a little crazy. I've already told the boss I hope to return to work on Monday (although this afternoons wobbles aim to make a liar of me) so I hopefully that'll have some positive effect on my sanity.
In an effort to entertain myself I went scouring the world for second hand PS2 games (which are becoming increasingly hard to find) and managed to get hold of both Tekken 5 and Soul Calibur 3. Now I haven't so much as looked at SC3 yet (it's more Soul Calibur, I'm sure it'll be lovely) but Tekken 5 has more than held my attention for the day. In a lot of ways that's a surprise; although I've played Tekken a lot in the past (particularly when it was the only game in town!) I've never particularly been a fan of the series, over-shadowed as it is by my beloved Virtua Fighter. And it still IS over-shadowed by VF in terms of being a pure, technical fighter, but for an explosive and exceptionally beautiful action fighter it's amazing. The game looks astonishing, sounds big and bone crunching and has lots and lots of fighters to beat the hell out of each other. And the character design is great, a massive evolution of the blocky characters I remember from back in the PSOne days (and if you don't believe me, play the original arcade Tekken, included as a bonus on the disk along with Tek2 and 3). After one day I'm not convinced the depth is there, but there certainly seems plenty to do and I'm not exactly wiping the floor with the CPU players so it's all good. And on top of that they've stolen/borrowed the character customisation bits of VF4 (when oh when will I find a copy of VF4 evo I wonder? *wanders off to eBay...*) so you can have almost endless fun earning credits and dressing your favourite characters with lots of funky bits and pieces. Excellent!
In other news the Olympics has begun. Normally sport isn't something I cover here because, well, because I could care less, but for the two weeks of the Olympics it'll be the background (and occasionally the foreground) to everything that happens as I become a temporary armchair expert on diving, sailing, shooting, cycling and all the lovely track and field events. Oh and the gymnastics and weight lifting (love that! God knows why), the fighting events, almost everything except the Olympic soccer which has no place there. There's just so much to see and watch us lose at! And speaking of watching the UK lose... the opening ceremony the Chinese put together was little short of astonishing. I normally watch them and they are a struggle, but this one was just utterly charming, enchanting and ingenious. We are gonna suck ass and fail at this in four years time, it'll be so cringe worthy I can hardly bear to think of it even now. I know it's terribly British of me to just assume we'll suck at the presentation but I mean, you've seen the logo right? That's an abomination in and of itself, just imagine what the bloody opening ceremony is gonna be like... The Chinese opening ceremony was a beautiful run through five thousand years of chinese history apparently directed by the great Yimou Zhang. I'm sure I wasn't the only one thoroughly impressed by it, I just wonder what the hell we're gonna do that isn't gonna be an embarrasment?

Pleasently caving in
I come undone

posted by BadMonkey @ 6:21 PM