Old Emails (it's as exciting as it sounds)

Somewhere in the depths of my Internet past, there's a Hotmail account that went unused and unchecked for about a year. Even though I used to retrieve emails from three different accounts in Thunderbird, I was forced to stop when Microsoft shot themselves in several of their own feet and disallowed all outside access to their accounts by anyone (not just new accounts as before). And their brave attempt to become the most patently useless email provider in the world was a success, because GMail was coming up at that point and everyone was beginning to realize that it was miles better, so many people left. And since then I've been trying to switch every Internet identity of mine over to "DavidN" and point them to my far more usable GMail account.

Yesterday, though, I finally discovered a workaround (not that I'd been searching all that hard before) - I'd used Thunderbird successfully for a while until it suddenly stopped working with Hotmail, but it seems that if you're using the WebMail plugin with the Hotmail extension, and you put your port number up above 1024 and switch to either "WebDav" or "New" as a way of retrieval, then you can magically access your Hotmail inbox again (not the sent messages, but let's not hope too much from battling with Microsoft).

And what came tumbling into my inbox was a year worth of spam that I had been quite enjoying not getting. Most of it was DeVry university offering me a useless degree - one of which was been going to be sent in 2009. The others are for unspeakable things in both English and a variety of foreign languages.

The rare cases were the ones that people meant to send to me. I had set up a "vacation reply" on my Hotmail account ages ago telling people to send things to my GMail account instead because that one was never checked any more, but either nobody listened to that or it just never worked anyway. The majority of them were from GameFAQs, because in my great refactoring I never bothered to update anything I wrote for that site with my new email - nobody ever contacted me about anything anyway until I wasn't checking it any more.

There was one from a forum member asking me about my maps for Unreal Tournament. When I wrote the tutorial for UnrealEd, it was at a point when I'd never seen a decent complete beginner guide (though the Unreal Wiki came along shortly afterwards and was a lot better), and my maps weren't exactly stellar, but I had a look for them all the same and linked him to what I could salvage from what I'd uploaded to Nali City years ago.

I didn't answer any of the others because they're too old to bother with, but they were all questions or suggestions about what to add to the guide - somebody mentioned some details about the barrel-on-wobbly-bridge section of Tombi, where I'd detailed painstaking instructions on exactly where to stamp on the bridge to tilt each section so that the barrel rolled all the way down to the river. He pointed out, quite rightly, that you could just push it.

Finally, there were a couple asking about the silliest-named game in the world, Syphon Filter - the first guide I ever wrote, and the only reason it's significant is that it details how to get past a common game bug that nobody else had worked out at the time. ( is also good at this - see this giant summary of what went wrong in Hexen II.) One of them was asking about putting tags on crates, which does tend to confuse a few people. But the other one was an email saying that the sender's son had been stuck on the first level for "close to a year". As far as I could tell, he could get into the bar that contains the first objective, then couldn't find the "communications array", which is a laptop sitting in plain view on a table with a giant arrow saying "Communications array" pointing to it. I think the only help I could have offered there was to advise her son to get a new hobby.

Vs. the Dentist

I'm honestly trying to think up something entertaining to say about Tuesday morning, but I'm not coming up with anything to make it sound less hideous than it really was. After ages of trying to forget about it, I had finally made an appointment at the dentist - the first time at an American dentist and my first visit to any dentist since Reading Week in my last year of university just over two years ago.

They're nice enough about it. I had heard great things about this dentist (some of them verging on disturbingly enthusiastic, actually) and it was a less frightening experience than the dentist I used to go to in Scotland, but after two years of being blissfully unaware of any problems I might be having, throwing the following at me came as a shock.

The first thing they discovered, to cut a long story short, is that my mouth is the wrong shape. After irradiating my entire head with the 180-degree X-ray scanner thing and taking a first look inside my mouth, the hygienist's first comment was that I have unusual extra bones in my mouth. My last dentist never mentioned anything like that, so maybe it's normal there and we really are a different species in Britain. She also described the usual buildup of nasty things I have around my gums, but said that most people clean them to a lower standard than they do in America - refraining just short (as I'd been afraid of when I arrived) of mentioning my vampiric British teeth and how they weren't anywhere near artificial-looking enough to be American. Instead, she said we would just have to be "very thorough", bringing over a tray of things that looked like miniature hacksaws.

I don't think you've experienced true psychological torture until you've had to lie still with sharp things poking around in your mouth while the entire discography of the Spice Girls plays in the background. I was stuck there for at least half an hour while she went over my mouth with instruments of varying size and hideousness, and eventually finished off by rubbing a bit of what looked and felt like cheese wire between them all. After that had finished, the dentist came through to have another look at my freakish mouth - he was bursting with enthusiasm and was telling me about the time when his uncle was involved in a car chase, but I've never been quite sure what to do when dentists talk to you while your mouth is clamped open and you're strapped to a chair, only able to make vague dribbly noises in response to anything that's said.

I'm now told that dentists in America say this all the time, but I was told that it would be 100% recommended to have my wisdom teeth extracted. Even though I'm not feeling any pain from them at all at the moment, the trouble with them lies in my wrong-shaped mouth and half of most of them are actually growing into my skull. As a result of that, a couple of other teeth around the wrongly-pointed ones might become infected, and they already have a few holes in them that I'm going to have to get fixed next fortnight. A week before that, I'm going to see an oral surgeon about my wayward wisdom teeth, and if he decides they need to come out, I will need to schedule an appointment for skull-cutting surgery followed by a few days of excruciating pain in my calendar.

Teeth are so badly designed.

Stupid things to do with "Wish I Had An Angel"

Just a few years ago, nobody knew what power metal was at all apart from a few people in Europe (and if one more person asks if I listen to Rammstein when I mention that most of my music comes from Germany I'm going to throttle them). But certain little subsections of it have crept into popularity, and it's now likely that a lot of people will have heard of bands like Sonata Arctica, Dragonforce and Nightwish.

The trouble with becoming popular is that your increasingly rabid fanbase can give you a bad reputation as a whole (e.g. Nobuo Uematsu, most Squaresoft games). A practice among particularly manic listeners that's become fairly common thanks to Youtube is making "anime(/animated) music videos" of films or games set to music. Sometimes they can fit - one of the most overdone is Kingdom Hearts to Sonata Arctica's 'Kingdom for a Heart' due to the quite unbelievable appropriateness of the title, but usually it doesn't matter how stretched or non-existent the link is between them.

As Nightwish's "Wish I Had An Angel" is what I'd hazard as one of the most popular songs in the entire genre - possibly because it combines harsh and smooth vocals as well as a power metal sound and an almost Europop-like beat - it's now been attached to a variety of unlikely things. Such as:

• Alone in the Dark (I should probably point out that this is actually the official one, but it easily qualifies as a stupid thing due to being written by Uwe Boll)


• Final Fantasy VII


• Brother Bear


• Doom (the film)


• Final Fantasy VIII


• The Sims


• Sailor Moon


• Dragonball Z


• Final Fantasy IX


• The Lion King


• Harry Potter


• Final Fantasy X


• Final Fantasy X-2


• Starlight Express


• Rammstein


• Kingdom Hearts again


• An entire tribute to Tails or Miles or whatever his name is now


• Just put up to double speed


• Lip-syncing it through your silly hair


• And an entirely nonsensical custom-made 3D rendered film!

Oh, and as I mentioned KH AMVs before, putting it to Modern Talking's 'Witchqueen of Eldorado' has to have a mention. That one's going to be difficult to beat.

Internet pecking order

Normal, rational human beings

↓

People with Livejournals

↓

People with Myspace accounts

↓

People who post on GameFAQs

↓

People who post on GameFAQs (not on the Classic Gaming board)

↓

People who post on the IMDB boards

↓

Other sentient beings

↓

Half of the people on Daily WTF

↓

The other half of the people on Daily WTF

↓

People who comment on Newgrounds

↓

Urban Dictionary contributors

↓

Worms

↓

Single-cell life forms

↓

People who comment on Youtube videos

↓

Jack Thompson

Let me know if I've missed anyone out.

Crystal Towers 2 - Behind the scenes

This is appalling, I'm sitting here proudly writing a Java-based solver to find solution paths through my own game, while sustaining myself by eating a pile of crisps directly off my desk. It's only a couple of steps from here to Linux and a Dustbuster.

Frosted Flakes Gold

If in the unlikely event that through reading this journal you've begun to care about me or my life, you may know that one of the things that I struggle with in America is the lack of Crunchy Nut, the breakfast cereal of choice that is totally unavailable without having to actually arrange imports of it from my parents' house ourselves. Every attempt to find something similar when I started living here failed. However, a couple of weeks ago Kelloggs brought out Frosted Flakes Gold, which sounded tantalizingly close - after a trip to the supermarket I've just come into possession of a packet and will try it out, in as live an experience as Livejournal allows.

As you'd expect, the box is coloured shiny gold, and it's also one of the toughest cereal boxes I have ever encountered. It's marketed as a healthier alternative to the original Frosted Flakes, and I'm sure I've worked off at least a few calories trying to prize it open.

Initial impressions are... surprising, to be honest - as soon as I opened it a strong sweet smell hit me, like the smell of Scotch tablet when it's in the molten proto-tablet stage. The look of it is also quite odd - the flakes are pale and much greyer than normal, looking perhaps like Special K. On putting one in your mouth you're hit by a sort of honey explosion that gradually subsides, but they remain stuck to your teeth like all decent breakfast cereals should. Time to dive in and actually pour in milk to taste them properly.

I've got to admit that these are almost entirely unlike Crunchy Nut. The honey is much more obvious and gives them an honestly rather medicinal taste. However, it's important that - almost uniquely among whole-grain corn cereals - they're not utterly revolting, and probably something I would choose to have for breakfast.

So I'm still going to have to put another phone order in with my parents, but they're not going to be relegated to the back of the cupboard until they turn to dust either. Probably the most successful in the search so far even though they're nothing like what I expected them to be.

<lj user="dr_dos"> grows funny creatures

SPTHWAP!

A few months ago, happened to mention a series of horror games by Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw on his journal, and shortly afterwards a post of my own appeared detailing how absurdly traumatic they were. For some reason this account convinced a number of other people to download them too - which was pleasing, because horror games have this immense viral appeal to them in that you want to convince people to play them too to prove that you're not a colossal wimp and that they do indeed cause normal people to sleep with the light on for a week. In a continuation of this saga, today I sent off for the special editions of the series and I've been playing through them again.

The second time through, they're not too bad - the "director's commentary" is interesting, describing his influences and thoughts on his own game, and the extras like this are very welcome. But the biggest thing is that, even without Yahtzee's constant comments about how rubbish the game is or how rubbish the players were at said game, I can't believe I didn't realize how hilarious the possessed captain's death (where you have to whack him into the suspiciously exposed reactor) in 7 Days was before. Just listen to it - it's a lonely futuristic engine sound and tense piano, cut short by a loud noise best described as "spthwap", like Eddie Izzard's 'sword' sound effect.

I'm still not looking forward to Sunday, even though there's apparently a warning given in the special edition before you're suddenly killed. And I'm also a bit apprehensive about 6 Days because apparently there's an illusion scene in it that I didn't get but did.

You should still play them, you know.

Bonesaw

Nowhere near as horrifying as the name sounds at first, Bonesaw is a side scrolling platformer/sort of beat-em-up crossover written by Kyle Pulver (Xerus) - I think it's his first project of this scale, and it's an impressive release. It's also a relief to have it finished, because I was one of the testers for quite a while last year and I know it suffered a lot of unfortunate glitches just before it was released today (as everything does).

The title comes from a team at Clarkson University in New York who play a sport involving Americans zooming about on ice and beating each other with sticks, and while the "sport" bit of that doesn't feature in the game, the beating up is a major aspect of gameplay. (Their nickname comes from something to do with harnessing the power of Randy Savage, but I won't go into the details here.) You make your way through a variety of environments pummeling hockey players from St Lawrence along with fire-breathing onions, giant penguins, and most anything else that gets in your way, either with your bare hands or a variety of sporting equipment.

The game's graphics are relatively simple but gel together well into a consistent, almost Kirby-like style, and the soundtrack is provided by Josh Whelchel, who has really become a standout musician in the Click community in the last few years. His chippy background music reminds me quite strongly of Epic Games' titles in the 90s when Robert A Allen worked with them.

What I really like about the game is that it feels so reactive - everything has some measure of physics applied to it, and you won't find any typical platform game enemies that wander mindlessly back and forth until you jump on them (such as in, for example, mine). Enemies are thrown back by your attacks, can be pushed off ledges and will jump around to chase you, and there are whole sections involving trying to coax bouncing balls or imminently-exploding bombs into the right place. And it's pretty massive - I think there are well over 30 levels, each with multiple 'acts' or sections, and even after that's over you can go back and find Golden Pucks to get yourself access to an even harder section.

It's properly difficult, too - the levels themselves aren't too bad as long as you avoid the deadly sudden-death drops, but the bosses will hold you up for a while. It took me ages to even get past the first one, but importantly, it was the right sort of frustrating difficulty that got me to have "one more go" until I eventually worked out how to effectively damage and defeat it. And if you don't feel like doing that, there's also always the option of going back and charging up your Bonesaw so that you can go in and deplete all their health pretty much instantly, but you do end up feeling a bit of a cheat.

Download Bonesaw here!

Somewhere out on the Internet

For a long time, there's been this sort of unwritten agreement between two Internet subcultures as to what they will and won't touch. On one side, there's the furry fandom which tarnishes things we grew up with like the Sonic series, the majority of the Disney films and anything and everything else animated and anthropomorphic. And on the other side, the community of slash writers takes care of just about every other film or storyline involving one or more men, including Lord of the Rings, Torchwood, and countless others. (I'm well aware this is a bit of a weird introduction, but keep going, it gets even better.)

I could cope with that situation, but at the beginning of the week I was appalled to find out that a number of these individuals had turned their attention to power metal as well. I have seen many horrors of the Internet and haven't been overly fazed - let's be honest, you could rightly say I'm part of several of them - but there was a boundary line in my head, and this crosses it, smashes it to bits and reverses over it with a tractor. The introduction on the description page invites you into this new area of expression that features "love, loss, hope, insecurity, frustration, joy, addiction, disappointment, ego, failure, success" as well as the entire membership of Iron Maiden, Helloween, Rammstein and Marilyn Manson (among many others) in a gigantic slash mega-bender. I have not explored this area of the site any further.

But as if that wasn't enough, you'll be thrilled to hear that a significant number of these writers have been published in a number of collections and stand-alone novels. They have four individual categories for various levels of creepiness and insanity, but in reality all but two of the books have the tag "slash" and involves members of German bands talking in surprisingly English accents and eventually violating each other. One of the full-length ones involves Kai Hansen being kidnapped by aliens from Uranus, and the page shows an excerpt where he has to pretend he's homosexual to avoid a potentially appendage-endangering situation. I had to use a cache link for that because it mysteriously disappeared in between the time I saw it and the time I wrote this up. Maybe they're hiding.

This post has been unusually damning, I know, and normally, I'm all for people doing what they enjoy as long as they're being good to each other and not posting lolcats. But my difficulty here is that I can't get past the fact that taking anyone else's real, non-consenting and unaware personality and moulding it to your own will seems a bit... wrong. To stand against what must be a common thought, there's a quotation from the California Supreme Court displayed at the bottom of each page on this site. "Surely, the range of free expression would be meaningfully reduced if prominent persons in the present and recent past were forbidden topics for the imaginations of authors of fiction." And it did make me stop and think for a bit... but in this case I'd rather not know any more of what the imaginations of these authors of fiction have come up with.

The lesser of two evils

I couldn't help noticing that somebody has let that ghastly Ann Coulter creature on television again (well, I say "somebody" - it was FOX News, naturally), but what she has to say this time is surprising - apparently she'll support Hillary Clinton over John McCain if the two are running against each other because McCain doesn't hate gay people or non-Christians enough, or something like that. Nobody is sure what goes on in this woman's head, but if she doesn't like the Republican candidate then it's fair to say that he must be doing something right. I'm hoping that this means that the surprising number of Americans who listen to her will go for the Democratic side of the final presidential race, but equally it'll probably turn off those who are in possession of all their faculties of reason.

I don't have the right to vote in America yet because I'm too foreign, but the rest of them have a chance to get the place back to being a country again instead of a sort of international joke - naturally I'd love it if Obama won this time, but because the country doesn't have a stellar record of electing a suitable leader I'm trying to remain optimistic about the other two. Hillary's campaign has been... a bit dodgy so far, but at least her husband did something decent to the economy, and even if people go for Iraqi-bashing McCain instead, anything's uphill from where they are now. But that much was obvious already. When you have three candidates and all their individual merits are overshadowed by the way that they couldn't possibly be as bad as the last one, something is wrong.

Just nine months until it's over - looking on the bright side, it's actually flown past and most of the world is still here. Let's not do that again.

Clickteam at the TCEA

An interview with Jeff of Clickteam has appeared on an educational blog after the Texas Computer Education Association conference. Educational software is where Clickteam seem to be having the most success and most of the interview concentrates on that, though it also features a couple of commercial games developed using their software such as Robotopia. (There's a small mention given to the online score table. Guess who wrote that.)

No matter whether you're interested in the content, though, you have to respect him for having an entry on Metal Archives. Going from being the guitarist of a thrash metal band to IT and marketing is an interesting career line.

Crystal Towers 2 - Vertical Platforms

often mentions that his iPod has developed a strange sense of appropriateness in its song choice depending on mood or location. And it seems that my iTunes has become similarly self-aware - putting on As Long As I Fall while I was yet again struggling to get vertical platforms working can only be attributed to malice. After hearing the line "I don't hit the ground" while watching your character sail right through your carefully constructed detector you aren't sure whether to laugh or cry.

But after a lot of frustration this week, and even more whiteboard note-taking (Whitney got me a whiteboard for Christmas, and it was fantastic, because I'm miswired like that) I think I might have just got them working. Nearly.



I was always pretty fascinated by the state of whiteboards in the CS department after someone had been working on something for ages. Presumably every fragment of information on them is in some way useful, but altogether they always look like unorthodox impressionist paintings born from too many packs of Wine Gums.

Anyway, the real point of this overambitious week is that I now have a grand unified Platform object that can move horizontally, vertically or any direction in between. Have a look at the practical demonstration - graphics are very much temporary, but it shows the kind of thing that can be done, starting off with dull simple left-right movement but gradually introducing more elements such as vertical movement and movement by sine waves for swinging platforms.



Vertical platforms sound simple in themselves, but it took ages to get these working at all - with plain horizontal movement you only need to worry about moving left and right in the same way as walking normally, but if the player is to be moved vertically, you've got to work against the gravity that you've written and build in support for that. And as much as you know I like MMF2, there's something very wrong with its detection of collisions of objects that have moved during fastloops - the whole thing works by looking at one invisible detector underneath the player and another one on top of the platform, seeing whether they match when the player is moving down and while the platform is moving in any direction. But as collision detection was so erratic I had to switch over to looking at the positions of each object instead and decide whether they were overlapping based on that information.

Another problem was that as I was moving detectors and objects around so much on each frame, it became very difficult to keep track of where objects actually were during it, no matter how much I put into debug information during the loops. (MMF2 provides a debugger for examining each frame, which helps a bit, but it's actions before drawing a frame that I was worried about this time). So in the end, I made it up to the player object to decide whether it was on a moving platform or not - that's what the "OnVert" property that's still in the text at the top right of the screen is for. When a platform is told to move, it checks whether the player is over it first and sets the OnVert property to its own ID value before doing so, and this is later used to decide whether to allow gravity to affect the player or not.

The trigonometric movement of the platforms is done by giving each individual platform a "Type", and writing a special-case set of pixels to move horizontally and vertically for each of them (I finally had to remember differentiation again to work out how the swinging ones should move). I might be able to simplify it a bit by putting another couple of values on the platforms to specify where they should move to on the next frame, and let the game work out the actual distances itself from there.

Frankly I'm very surprised that you've read this far.

New videos and interviews

That's enough attempting politics - back to music again. Both Helloween and Gamma Ray have released new albums and the videos that come with them fairly recently (it was towards the end of last year, actually, but like I've said before America gets to know about these things much later than everybody else and I am failing catastrophically at keeping up).

To sum up, the video for As Long as I Fall by Helloween is utterly ridiculous. Not surprising from the band who brought you Limozeen in Space, but this actually looks a bit more like a Rhapsody video with a slightly higher budget in places. The band views are all right, very Metallica-like in that they're standing on a rock pillar that slowly crumbles away like a game of Kurushi even though it's surprisingly intact by the end of it. Instead, it's the daft Mortal Kombat-style adventure in between them that's the worst bit - what does any of it mean? I've no idea what the fat little devil is, either. I love the brief air-piano shot near the end, though. As for the song, it sounds slightly like Helloween are trying to become a pop group again, but with rather more success than what happened the last time Michael Kiske convinced them to go in that direction.

Similarly, the opener from Land of the Free II, unusual in being a direct sequel to an album that was released over ten years ago, is happy and enjoyable, and much more positive than anything Gamma Ray had to offer on Majestic - so it sounds like they've done what they intended and made a return to their old style between the times they were a political band and a sci-fi band. As for the video, well, on the one hand it's good that they now have a producer who has upgraded from using Windows Movie Maker and MS Paint, but on the other, I have to admit that this one's in very bad taste. I understand the point they're trying to make - freedom and liberty and the end of oppression and America and everything else they're usually on about - but the whole thing looks just a bit too bloody and Clockwork Orange for me to comfortably watch it.

The only real disadvantage with the band, I find, is that as much as he's respected as the driving force behind just about the entirety of the power metal universe, Kai Hansen does have a nasty habit of stealing other people's songs.

Also of interest are the two interviews with the bands that SPV did - Kai of Gamma Ray and Weiki and Andi from Helloween are interviewed by a loud prat with an American accent and all the charm, wit and subtlety of Timmy Mallett, and they appear comparably bemused by him throughout. Frankly I didn't expect Andi to have as deep a voice as he does in the video, and for the most part they're both rather understated, although there's quite an interesting explanation of where the idea of the song came from.

Quite apart from the hat he's taken to wearing that makes him look worryingly hip-hop, one of the most surprising things in Kai Hansen's interview is how he says that he's been listening to a lot of Dragonforce recently and is impressed by where they've got to. I also think it's impressive that a power metal band has got so much recognition, particularly in America, but why did it have to be them?

In fact, if I can finish on this unrelated side note, I've finally worked out what I don't like about them. It seems that most of the bands I listen to enjoy power metal because, well, it's a bit of a laugh. Dragonforce seem to be going for the younger System of a Down-type audience and teaching them that it's instead about being 3xtr3m3 with 4tt1tud3, and I'd like them a lot more if they stopped with the image of being the fastest band aliii-eee-ive and just enjoyed themselves more. Or took themselves less seriously, or something like that. I don't know.

Super Mega Ultra Tuesday

According to Google yesterday, I was the eleventh person in the world to use the term "super mega ultra Tuesday", but by the time I got to putting this up I'd dropped to 46th place. However, if it had been "super ultra mega Tuesday" instead that would have been even more painfully unoriginal, with 207 results as I write this. Anyway.

Super (and possibly both Mega and Ultra) Tuesday was yesterday, the day when most of the American states submit their votes for who they want to represent the two political sides in the upcoming Presidential election. The race that everyone is really interested in is between Obama and Clinton, and neither of them have come out ahead - Obama seems to be favoured by more states overall but Hillary is getting the more important ones (it's the delegates that actually count and each state has a different way of calculating how to use those depending on how everyone else votes). It seems that many people think that nominating Hillary would be putting Bill back in the White House, but you have to admit he did a decent job of it a decade ago (as long as he's kept locked up or supervised at all times).

On the Republican side, John McCain is coming out well ahead with about three times as many delegates as either of his competitors. The rest of the people I live with in Massachusetts went for Mormon nutter Mitt Romney, partially because he was our governor until recently but primarily because they're idiots. Apparently he thinks he's "going all the way to the White House", which would be a bit of a sorry outlook for the rest of us, but he's not really in with a chance now, so that's all right. The trouble with Conservatism is that it tends to drive people mad - it even made one man have an affair with Edwina Currie, so clearly has devastating effects on the mind.

Having said that, at this point I honestly wouldn't mind McCain as president, because he seems too old and out of touch to be able to do any real damage, or at least, not on the same scale as the last one. But the trouble with whoever gets nominated into the White House this time, no matter whether it's the first black/woman/zombie president, history is primarily going to remember them as "not Bush". And while that's a good achievement in itself, it's not really something to be remembered for.

Silent Force - Walk the Earth

Doesn't this look rather like the cover for The Fourth Legacy?

It's been absolutely ages since I actually listened to any new music. Recently I've been more involved in activities that don't lend themselves to a musical backdrop - namely transferring my songs to GP5s and failing to play along with them on the guitar. Combined with that, my music-buying tactic used to consist of wandering into music stores as I passed them and picking up anything I didn't have that I was interested in - but that's not really an option here because my entire existence is in the flat, in the office and on an underground line in between (not even mentioning the fact that European metal is even more difficult to find in America than it is in Britain). But I think it was that put an end to that by giving me Silent Force's Walk the Earth for Christmas.

When I've talked about albums recently I've gone through them track-by-track, but I know that this is a rather long-winded way to do it, and this type of review was discouraged by Metal Archives (or Encyclopaedia Metallum if you want to be quite agonizingly pompous), deeming them 'unprofessional'. An album is definitely a complete experience in itself - just working out the arrangement of songs is a difficult process, involving decisions like which moods, themes and speeds of songs go together or should be separated, and even length comes into the equation as well when you decide where to put your ten-minuters (the fourth and last tracks being my personal choice most of the time) - but in the end you're going to enjoy or dislike each individual song on its own merit. However, I've realized that at least one good reason for not going down to such an involved level is that invariably, as soon as you submit a review saying which songs you like and dislike, your opinion of all of them will completely change.

But I don't really have any standout songs at the moment, because in general, I have to admit that Silent Force's latest effort seems a little... flat, so far. There are a couple of different points that I find myself wanting to hear again, but I haven't yet identified anything truly amazing. In comparison, their last album Worlds Apart had some blindingly great songs and some absolute duffers - Ride the Storm was epic, Hold On plodded, No One Lives Forever was all right with a disappointing chorus, Heroes had so much power and energy behind it that it made you want to go and bomb the pants off Afghanistan even if you were normally relatively sane, and so on.

American power metal vocalists tend to be 'smoother' in sound than the Europeans, who have a harder, scratchier edge to their singing styles. DC Cooper, who has not yet emerged from the 80s, has as good a voice as ever and has even learned how to pronounce more than just the vowels. However, I'm honestly not sure if this is a good thing. I don't know if it's just being able to hear the lyrics better and therefore being unable to ignore them, but I think they've taken a definite downward turn in quality from the previous album - Worlds Apart had lyrics that made no sense, but Walk the Earth has lyrics that make no sense but are still recognizable as not very good.

If I was going to pick out standout moments, I'd say that Man and Machine has a good pre-chorus before duffing up the real one, DC's voice (does this man have a real name or just two initials?) on Walk the Earth itself is amazing, The King of Fools and Running Through the Fire are fast-paced and very enjoyable, but that's about it. In From the Dark is also good until the seemingly random chord changes near the end. However, according to the rules I laid out above, it's bound to become one of my favourite albums ever as soon as I hit this Submit button.

Report on Superbowl 42

Well, I didn't understand any of that.