On holiday - Part 4

Today, I got up (not through choice) at about 6am in worry about the coming car journey. Scavenging the house for food again, I found some fat-free milk and half a decaying sandwich from yesterday. Then, at about half past nine, we set off - six people in the car, Whitney and I relegated to the back seat as something approaching cargo because nobody else can fit there, and four hundred miles ahead of us.

I don't think that I've ever had a car journey that lasted more than about two hours since my family used to drive all the way down Britain to catch the ferry over to Germany, but strangely, it didn't really feel that long. Californian roads have a strange speed limit that is something like the average between the actual posted speed limit and whatever everyone is actually doing, unless an obvious unmarked police car is nearby in which case everyone goes as slow as possible. So, at a more or less constant 80 miles an hour, the distance flew past. This journey is something that Whitney's family do quite regularly, but I wouldn't care to experience it again if I can possibly help it.

This is the route.

Now we're finally at Whitney's parents' house, where they're constantly stressed about their increasingly stupid builders - they're having their bedroom rearranged, and this involves moving a couple of other walls around. Whitney's cupboard has moved across the room and everything is coated in a thick layer of dust that we've just about got through. We'll have about two days with nothing incredibly hectic on the horizon, then a trip to get a Christmas tree, which the brothers are always incredibly picky about (it absolutely must be an inch above arm's length to be the right height for the ceiling) and involves a lot of struggling and falling over. This would be a strong contender for the most stressful holiday ever if my own family hadn't insisted on going down to St Andrews most years when I was in primary school and packing six people into a caravan.

On holiday - Part 3

Good morning grass, good morning coconuts. After some confusion as to the plans last night, Whitney and her parents have run off to Disneyland leaving me and rest of the Geriatrics Club behind (Cameron has twisted his ankle, Drew has a cold, and I am slowly going mad and can't cope with lack of proper Scottish food such as meat, fat and gristle). The trouble is that in a house owned by someone who survives entirely on yoghurt drinks, there isn't really any actual food - I did attempt to scavenge some breakfast from upstairs, but I can't recall quite how many years the Cheerios I found were out of date.

It appears that we're going to spend the day watching the worst television in the world - at the moment Jerry Springer is on and has a lot of people with silly accents standing around forgetting their scripted lines and occasionally hitting each other with chairs, but not quite enough for it to be entertaining. And then there's four straight hours of Home Improvement.

Added at 6pm: In the middle of the Transformers film. Send help.

Life in the city, living in L.A.

I've just realized several things. I'm in Los Angeles, surrounded by rather obscene wealth. Somehow, this has made me realize even more that nothing is the same as it is in Britain - the Scotch pies I used to like from Fisher and Donaldson are unknown (in fact someone had to ask me what "pie 'n' chips" were the other week - I was unable to begin explaining it to someone who had no idea of the concept). Nobody here understands what cricket is, and I've no idea about the rules of most American sports - American football in particular seems like a large-scale violent version of Backgammon. And I'm constantly lamenting how rubbish American television is compared to what I miss in Britain, particularly now the writer's strike is set to eliminate all the virtually identical police dramas that fight off all the virtually identical vote-off-by-week reality programmes.

In other words, I've become the Sherrif of Huddersfield.

On holiday - Part 2

I think it's fair to say that nobody in the family was particularly enthusiastic to go to a cocktail party for the over-80s, but it wasn't too bad an experience - in particular, it featured the most expensive-looking buffet that I am likely to see in my entire life, and we all stuffed ourselves with the gigantic pile of sashimi.

And today, we went down to an all-you-can-eat brunch buffet, where everyone made themselves ill and then had to suffer the indignity of the Toilet Attendant. This is something I haven't experienced before - he hangs around outside the cubicles, sprays your hands with soap when you approach, hands you some paper towels and then expects a tip for it. I can't describe to you just how incredibly awkward it is.

One of the advantages of Whitney's grandmother's house is having a pool outside, and we swam during the evening, with me discovering that I can now just about manage twice my official badged swimming length - five metres. Never really having learned to swim is quite embarrassing at this stage, seeing as if you fell into the water while dead you would probably float five metres faster that I can swim it.

Tomorrow we were going to go to Disneyland, but nobody feels up to it any more. We might even drive up back to Whitney's parents' house instead. Five and a half hours on the road - you couldn't drive anywhere near that length in Scotland, you'd fall into the sea. And I wouldn't be able to swim.

On holiday - Part 1

I feel like I've just been transported back in time about three centuries. At the moment I'm sitting in Whitney's grandmother's house, in a room that many years ago used to be her mother's bedroom and still looks like part of the set of Blackadder the Third. We're here for a few days to go to the other grandmother's 80th birthday before we drive up the road to the Bay Area to spend the rest of the week.

The six-hour flight over was undoubtedly not the most horrendous experience of my life, partly because I had prepared myself by putting several tons of British TV onto the iPod I got from them last Christmas. I used not to mind flying that much after getting over a fear of it that lasted until I was about sixteen, but now that I've flown so regularly between various parts of America and Britain I've become aware of just how dull the whole experience always is. My work laptop is now unable to help because its two batteries are almost entirely shot and have a combined capacity of about 11% of what they originally had. So I sat watching Father Ted, while Whitney's brother slowly slumped further and further into the aisle, scaring many small children.

Then something that only happens in films happened - one of the air-hostesses came on the loudspeaker and asked if there were any doctors on board, because we had a passenger with a medical emergency. This was followed by a lot of running about with defibrillators (which no matter how serious their use, is still a ridiculous word that sounds like something out of a Roald Dahl book). His condition undoubtedly helped our flight land faster, because we came in very sharp and there were ambulance crews waiting for our arrival. However, he walked off by himself when they came to get him, so he wasn't as dead as they thought.

Long Beach Airport looks like what could politely be described as a concentration camp. I thought that Aberdeen's airport was small, but this is just a tiny hut surrounded by some planes - even the baggage carousels are relegated to outside the building, next to a tall fence with loops of barbed wire across the top and tannoys mounted on every spiked fence post. After we grabbed our bags I was half-expecting some Daleks to turn up and escort us off, but Whitney's parents picked us up before they could arrive.

And now my internal clock is hopelessly confused, I'm falling asleep in the middle of the day, have no idea what anyone is saying or what's going on - so things are pretty much normal. Time to go to the cocktail party.

23

I don't know if I ever mentioned this here before, but around the end of school and the end of university, I was convinced that the number 23 was following me around. Several significant dates in my life added up in some way to 23, I had locker number 23 in the Purdie building, I found one morning that someone had stuck a "23p" label to my doorframe, and so on. Yes, exactly like that film, so mentioning this would probably have had a greater impact if I'd mentioned it years ago. I was shocked enough to discover that that was what it was about yesterday. And now I am 23, so either it's going to be very good or utterly terrible.

As it happens, today I was honoured with the entirely new experience of receiving absolutely no presents on my birthday. Work was hectic (and because of the wonder of the Internet, still continues to be hectic, seeing as I'm sitting on the sofa with the laptop and debugging things from home) because catastrophic faults in the system always emerge 24 hours before we send it off to the client, and the weather outside was drearier than Scotland has ever managed, so it was quite hilariously gloomy all round. Still, let's look on the bright side - tomorrow I'll have a six-hour flight, followed by a cocktail party for the over 80s the next day, then a six-hour drive through a featureless barren desert to get to Whitney's parents' house.

Happy birthday, . Happy birthday, Glenn Barry from Kamelot. Happy birthday, Mrs Hill who was my teacher in fifth year of primary school. Happy birthday, me.

Eternally fighting, but carried side by side

I'm making steady progress on the guitar after nearly two weeks at it, and can play a significant amount of Iron Maiden's worst song, The Angel and the Gambler (which Steve Harris must have written to make up for some sort of A-chord deficiency). Watcher in the Sky was also quite simple once I realized that I was playing it from the wrong end. In fact, a lot of things that you'd think to be very difficult are actually reasonably easy once you've tied your fingers into the right knot, but currently I'm stuck on attempting the B minor chord, which is like a miniature version of Twister.

I'm also surprised that after however many years of its existence nobody has invented a way to denote rhythm in tablature yet - that's a pretty major deficiency for a musical notation. As it is, most writers of the ones I've downloaded just put a fairly arbitrary amount of spaces in between each note and hope that you've already heard what you're trying to play enough times to emulate it.

I finally created an account at last.fm last week, too, though at the moment I can't recall why. I let it upload my recent playlist just before realizing there were a lot of hideously embarrassing things from DDR on there, and have pieced together a playlist of some favourite bands, but haven't got around to linking my account to anybody else as yet. I've noticed that if something goes wrong with the online radio, you get the information page for a prog/death metal band from Spain called "Undefined" (which could hardly have been a better way of getting recognition if they'd thought it up intentionally). And while looking around the default links from my account's charts, something leapt out at me on the page for the jazz pianist David Newton...



I wrote that. Fair enough, it's got a grand total of one play worldwide, it's there because of the system's inability to differentiate between songwriters with the same name, and is naturally unavailable on the site itself - but I have a song on last.fm!

Oh dear

I know that finding yourself laughing at code is a sure sign that you should book yourself into the nearest mental institution as soon as possible, but I had to save this quite frankly incredible offering from the Java forums here. This leaves me in the uncomfortable position of either posting something that will appear as gibberish or having to explain its utter hilarity from my viewpoint, but I'll just hope that people will understand its quite astounding uselessness.

package javaapplication3;
import java.io.*;
public class Main {

public Main() {
}

public static void main(String[] args)throws IOException
{
int count=0;
String w= "today is a short day";
for(int m=0 ; m<w.length()-1 ; m++)
{


count++;
}
System.out.println(count);

}

}

As one of the regulars said: "This has to be the best example of reaching one's left hand around one's backside to scratch one's right ear (and not even quite reach it) that I've ever seen. Classic!"

One Year

I've now been working here for exactly one year - and it doesn't actually feel anywhere near that long, let me tell you. Maybe it's because I no longer have the handy year-by-year separation that you go through in virtually every other year of your life before finally having to get a real job.

Since arriving on the first day and going straight into C# for the first time on a plugin that someone had half-written and then abandoned, I've been moved up to sitting where the lead consultant used to be, working on the main system that we develop, and being in some way responsible for documents involving complex safety procedures for a rather large petroleum company. (So if half of America disappears under a giant oil slick in the next year - sorry, my fault.)

And even after all this time, I keep on discovering new things buried away in the heart of the system. One of the highlights recently was the comment that read //Probably don't want to do this, but the real question of the day is what on earth a Cacodemon is doing hiding in our install of a set of wiki software under the name "dummy.gif".

The Continuing Quest for a Decent Korma

Korma became one of my favourite meals in fourth year of university, just in time before I moved to America where it can't be found anywhere. If you haven't heard of it, it's a nicely mild curry made with coconuts and occasionally cashew nuts as well. Indian restaurants in America sometimes have something that they call "Korma" on the menu, but it usually fails to resemble anything that I've previously experienced.

The "Coconut chicken korma" that I ordered tonight sounded promising, but after the Night Owl delivery man had braved the icy winds and storm outside to deliver it, what I found inside the bag was a small tub that contained a tomato-flavoured thermonuclear device. I did attempt to re-engineer the stuff by boiling it up with some cream and a spoonful of coconut sorbet, but I was totally unable to get it to calm down to something I could comfortably cope with, spooned out the chicken pieces, and detonated the rest of the liquid in a controlled environment. I think I'm going to have to accept that Indian restaurants here just haven't got the hang of it.

Additionally, why did no-one inform me that Top Gear was back on again? I've got three whole episodes downloading now and another one about to become available on Sunday.

E A D G B E

This morning I did what no human being in possession of all their faculties of reason has done before, and sent a praising comment to the MBTA. My journey home was interrupted last night by someone who had clearly not watched Robbie (see yesterday) and had distributed themselves over a wide area of the rails near Kent Street, preventing the train's progress until the police and fire crew had finished cleaning/mopping up. And the driver of the train I was on, rather than providing the endless stream of "We will be moving momentarily" that I've experienced before, told us exactly what was going on, what we were waiting for and gave us the option of leaving immediately if we didn't want to wait. Which I did, and walked home, beating the train to Brandon Hall by five seconds.

But what's really exciting is that a couple of days ago, Whitney ceremonially paid for a guitar for me. It's an early birthday present/slightly late Christmas present, and I hope to finally get around to learning how to play more than a few bars of a few songs like I've been saying I will for the last four years - an ambition previously made difficult by my guitar being three thousand miles away. It's a Johnson strat copy, which was recommended to me by Rockin' Bob (which is a fantastic name for a guitar shop, and right across the road from work) as a good cheap starter. So I've been following an online lesson - and along with an increasingly steady performance of the chromatic scale that is slowly driving Whitney mad, I've covered six chords, which already puts me above the ability of Fred Durst. The only disadvantage is that the lessons I'm going through have me playing a significant amount of decidedly pickup-truck-driver music.

I might be starting off at a bit of an advantage, though, because one of the instructions on the fourth lesson of the beginner's tutorial I downloaded reads (and I'm paraphrasing a bit, but I promise you this is what it says): "To hold the guitar correctly, place the body on your leg with the neck parallel to the ground. If there aren't any strings under your right hand, turn the guitar over." Perhaps the lessons are a bit lower-level than I thought.

Scaring them straight

Some weeks are just difficult, and this is one of them. Here are some horrifying videos that you might recognize if you grew up in the UK at the same time I did.

The community has been sitting dormant in my Friends list for ages. (The name comes from an old preschool TV programme with Fred Harris (or Chocabloke) about... a yellow machine with a weird bass voice, I think, but it's impossible to describe most programmes I watched growing up without sounding as if I've taken a decent quantity of hallucinogenic drugs, so this tangent is stopping here.) I was very pleased that someone finally posted something in it in celebration of Halloween yesterday, but rather horrified to find out what it was.

In the 1970s, the BBC saw fit to create a number of "public information films" to show to pupils to prevent them from doing anything too deadly. They did this by inciting severe trauma unequalled by any horror film that has ever been written, and showing them in schools well into the 80s. Each of them started out with a selection of happy but rather stupid children, who were then killed off in various ways throughout the film as a result of being unable to recognize the dangers of farm equipment, railways, crawling into ovens, holding lit fireworks, and so on. The one behind the link above is "Apaches", which was one I had never actually been shown even though we lived in an area that was surrounded by farmland. I've only watched bits of it, but it seems to be about as grim as I would expect.

The one that I do remember is Robbie, which was responsible for me being terrified of trains for a length of time that lasts pretty much up to "now". This was actually designed as a less graphic alternative to an earlier film called The Finishing Line involving a series of deadly sports-day style games played on a railway track, clearly written by someone with a mind rivalling the Jigsaw Killer. (NB. I have not watched the film behind that link, and if I were you I wouldn't either.) Anyway, Robbie was more traditional and straightforward, involving just crossing a railway line carelessly. There were numerous versions of it, and I'm certain that the one seen by the author of that Wikipedia article had been sanitized somehow, because I distinctly remember having to watch as an oncoming train approached and cut the titular character into about twelve bits.

Building Sites Bite is another one that sounds familiar but I can't actually remember watching, probably because I had my eyes closed throughout its duration. This video's token dimwit was called Ronald, and involved (not surprisingly) killing him off in a building site. Except it had a unique twist - after he died, other characters in the film would resurrect him each time and send him back to experience multiple deaths such as burning, burial, drowning, explosion, incineration, and a whole host of other things. A bit like Dante's eighth circle of hell. And all accompanied by a Knightmare "Life force draining, team" style heartbeat sound whenever it was recommended that people who wanted to keep their sanity should close their eyes.

And in the small amount of investigation I did into the minds behind these films, I found that one of the writers (the man responsible for "Apaches") also starred in a Doctor Who story called "The Reign of Terror". How appropriate.

Upset stomach, upsetting Americans

A while ago, I joined a community for people in and around Boston (sensibly titled ) in the hope that it would let me know more about the city in which I have somehow come to live (and to provide more to read on my Friends page when nobody updates). Unfortunately, all it's taught me so far is that everyone here is very loud, very stupid and/or very rude. I've been meaning to take it off for a while, but when it occasionally throws up gems like this it's difficult not to want to see the reaction.

You can get a pretty good idea of the attitudes of most of its members by just looking at the rules: "Snark is okay! This is b0st0n. We are cynical and sarcastic. Deal." Translated out of the bizarrely abbreviated way in which most Americans speak, this seems to say "We're a shower of insufferable bastards and if you don't like it, that's your problem." A take on life that many people may also say applies to the entire country.

As you can probably tell I'm not in a particularly good mood at the moment, because I'm lying in bed off sick from work due to a touch of some sort of stomach flu. In fact "a touch" is something of an understatement - I thought I had had stomachache before, but it had never previously felt like being stabbed in the stomach from both directions while the fattest xenomorph in the world forced its way out of my navel sideways. I hope it's not something that I ate that caused it, because I only had a filled bagel last night, and scrambled-egging myself to death would be one of the most embarrassing ways to go ever.

Crystal Towers 2 - First Boss

Well, I have to say that I'm beginning to regret not buying a whole lot of furniture last Spring. But at least Boston's decisive win against Colorado in the World Series (which doesn't actually invite competition from more than one country) means that there won't be any massive crowds of people in red shirts during my commute home in the next while. It's almost enough to get you to start caring about baseball - I'm only vaguely aware that it's nice that a team that previously seemed to be totally useless have won twice in such quick succession.

For carefully thought out attention-getting reasons, I'm going to stop putting Crystal Towers 2 progress posts exclusively in its own journal and include them here under a tag instead (I'll backdate them when I shovel over the rest). To give the best impression of what the game looks like to date, I have hit a new low and posted a video on YouTube.

This video shows a weekend's work on the first boss of the game, which I finally sat down and wrote after weeks of not doing anything. Most of the graphics are yet to be drawn, but it shows what the general gameplay of it will be like, and I'm rather pleased with the result. Bosses are very difficult things to program, needing a complex attack pattern based on several different states and branches, but I think this is the most competent one that I've done yet. The only bit of this one I'm not totally happy with is the large length of time that it spends just sitting on the ceiling if you destroy all the bouncing bombs quickly, so I might have to think of something to do there.

You can also see two transparent areas on the left and right of the playfield, which restore the magic points you have available. Usually you restore your magic in-game by picking up white vials, but this situation needs something to allow you to rapidly get back to full magic and back to attacking again, but I don't want them to make it too easy (particularly as you can also use magic to heal yourself, and if you have an inexhaustible supply the boss becomes impossible to lose to). I could either disable curative spells or make them affect the boss as well so that there's a disadvantage to using them. I may replace the restoring fields with one "magic field" that floats from left to right, then reduce the hit points of the boss a bit to balance things out.

The eventual goal of the game is to find eight instruments and restore music to the Music Castle (an idea that I only noticed I'd stolen from Zelda well into making the game). The instrument carried by each boss is random, and as luck would have it, on that attempt I got the only one I hadn't drawn. The name of the instrument is chosen at random, too, which explains the strange names that appear at the end of the video.

I'm an exceedingly large cake

! This.

(NB. To everyone else - This will probably make no sense)

(NB2. To everyone not in Britain - This will probably make even less sense than that)

Actually, additionally - since when has Livejournal had these HTML previews? I'm sure they weren't there when I was at work, so it must have been about an hour at most.

Pomposi-T

Dear The MBTA,

Over the past two weeks, my evening commute on the T has taken up to 45 minutes longer than usual. During this time I have been routinely trapped in broken-down trains with the doors locked, either in stations or in darkened tunnels with no means of escape, with no information other than that a "disabled train" is stuck ahead of us and that we will be moving "momentarily". (This use, while I'm on the subject, is wrong - a grammar refresher for your drivers might be in order.) Having seen most of a train's occupants having to force their way out of a train and band together in refugee groups to organize taxis to Park Street, I wouldn't describe your treatment of paying passengers as anything short of appalling. The contempt that you are showing to them by assaulting them with the new tidal wave of advertising that you've dubbed "T Radio" - simultaneously going back on your agreement with the subway performers - is similarly despicable.

I would discontinue my use of your comically inept service, but this isn't an option for me because the Green and Red lines remain my only way of getting from one side of the city to the other (the buses being mostly immobile in Boston traffic even if they somehow manage to stick to the correct route). I can only respectfully request a refund of my subway pass for the month of October, as your trains are only occasionally capable of actual movement and therefore I can no longer consider them a mode of transport.

No regards
DavidN.

---

Did I let them off too lightly?

Resident Evil 4

We've started playing Resident Evil 4 now. I had never played an RE game before getting it, but and said it was good, so I was confident enough to buy it without any further knowledge of what it was like.

It stars an American agent called Leon, who looks only slightly like he's in Duran Duran. The story so far involves investigating a small village in Spain in connection with the kidnapping of the President's daughter, because the Europeans are up to no good as usual. On arrival with some police officers with outrageous accents, Leon wanders towards the village, goes into a hut and asks the inhabitant for directions. And gets a knife in the face. And seeing as this is Spain and not Glasgow, he realizes that something's not quite right.

This is where the issue of the controls arises. At first, they feel absolutely dreadful - to give you some idea of what it looks like at the start, Leon takes up a large proportion of the front left of the screen, making it feel a bit like a first person shooter with your own head blocking most of the view. He seems to run diagonally forwards meaning you have to aim a bit to the left of where you're expecting to go, and aiming your weapon is a matter of accidentally shooting the sky, then the ground, then eventually hitting where you were intending to shoot.

But after a couple of practice fights (and largely due to a side mission early on which involves finding and shooting some blue medallions scattered around the place) things suddenly and inexplicably seem to work. You get used to where you're pointing, what you can see, and how to aim without taking out a large portion of the floor and ceiling first. When you're not running around and shooting, there are brief set-piece sections that resemble rhythm action games, having to press buttons at the right times to dodge Indiana Jones-style boulders and harpoon an undead version of Moby Dick.

So far, most of the game feels rather like playing a Simon Pegg film. You spend your time getting Leon to commando-roll out of ridiculously high windows or perform superhuman leaps off towers, kicking zombies in the head until they explode or alternatively shotgunning them in the chest while they're carrying lit dynamite, causing them to fall over and then explode. Even though it's said to be "survival horror" I'm not finding it particularly frightening (unlike Silent Hill, which terrifies me to pieces). You've often got more than enough firepower to deal with the hordes of the undead coming your way, with the only exception so far being the man with the sack on his head like the scarecrows out of Doctor Who, who is intent on chainsawing your head off and refuses to die, or re-die, or whatever it is that Spanish zombies do.

Again unlike Silent Hill, the enemies you face drop useful items such as suspicious health-restoring herbs or extra ammunition. Quite a lot of the time, they leave behind little treasure chests, which doesn't make much sense unless they're zombie pirates. I had wondered at first what money would even be used for in a game like this, but that was answered at the beginning of the second stage where a dodgy man with an even dodgier accent turns up with a coatful of lethal weapons that you can buy from him. This eventually becomes central to the game, getting different upgrades and weapons by using your money rather than having a small fixed set of weapons like in Silent Hill, and trying to stuff them all in your attache case Tetris-style.

I should say, finally, that I don't like escort missions in games. In fact, no one in the world likes escort missions - they always involve trying to protect a particularly dim individual or vehicle that trundles along merrily ignoring all the obvious orc/alien/Soviet/chav/Greenpeace ambushes in its way, trying desperately to clear a path ahead of it and then looking back only to realize that it's been squashed by a falling snooker table in your absence. And after the first couple of sections to where we've played so far in RE4, the game seems to be one giant escort mission as you try and get the President's daughter out of the village. But she's intelligent enough to duck out of the way of your gunfire, doesn't go off on ridiculous failed-pathfinding routes around the other side of the map, and you can even tell her to stay behind for a moment while you busily exterminate the zombies and clear a path. Overall, even the escorting seems to work. And that's probably one of the highest compliments that you can give to a game.

From life's RPG log - Part 2

Well, some people found the first one of these funny. I also plan to make a real entry out of this, because last night was a real adventure (the kind that makes you want to kill people).

> DavidN has arrived in Davis Square Station.
> Waiting...
> Waiting...
> Train arrives.
> Train defends itself with Broken down and going out of service!
> DavidN almost attacks Train.
> DavidN finds Driver instead.
> Driver is found to be clueless.
> Waiting...
> Train begins to move.
> Train is stuck just after the station.
> Another train arrives.
> Another train is stuck just before the station.
> DavidN rolls against Judgement.
> DavidN's Judgement is Really Catastrophically Dreadful.
> DavidN takes train home anyway.
> Train has arrived at Porter Square.
> Train has left Porter Square.
> Train has arrived at Harvard Square.
> Train has left Harvard Square.
> Train has arrived at Central Square.
> Waiting...
> Train has left Central Square.
> Train has actually stopped one carriage away from Central Square.
> Waiting...
> Driver attacks with misuse of the phrase "we will be moving momentarily"!
> Waiting...
> Waiting...
> Waiting...
> Driver attacks with misuse of the phrase "we will be moving momentarily" again!
> DavidN attacks Doors.
> Doors are impervious to damage.
> DavidN moves stealthily down the carriage towards the emergency intercom.
> DavidN is spotted!
> DavidN initiates Passenger Uprising!
> Passengers demand to be let out of their steel prison and get a mode of transport that moves.
> Driver gets permission to back up.
> Train is defeated.
> Doors open.
> The party has moved to Central Square - Above Ground.
> DavidN hails taxi!
> Hail unsuccessful!
> DavidN hails taxi!
> Hail unsuccessful!
> DavidN encounters Seth.
> Seth joins the party.
> Seth hails taxi!
> Hail unsuccessful!
> The party encounters Graeme, Laura and Jen.
> Graeme, Laura and Jen have joined the party.
> The party heads for Kendall on foot.
> Graeme hails taxi!
> Hail successful!
> Laura and Jen have left the party.
> The party has moved via taxi over the Longfellow Bridge.
> Graeme has left the party.
> The party has moved via taxi to Boylston.
> Seth leaves the party.
> DavidN attempts to board train.
> Doors attack!
> DavidN is hit for 50 damage!
> DavidN's normal commute recommences at nine o-fscking-three in the evening.
> MBTA loses ability "Legitimate Mode of Transport".
> DavidN loses ability "Self-Control".
> DavidN finally gets home and orders a decently large pizza.
> DavidN attacks Pizza.
> Pizza is defeated.
> So is DavidN.

You're in trouble if your hit points don't bubble

First of all, are Roysters still around? There's no indication of the above advert line ever having existed and I'm starting to think I just imagined it. And I'm quite looking forward to having meat-flavoured crisps again when I come back to Scotland for Christmas (tickets booked today) - American crisps are very different and come in gigantic bags rather than a large plastic packet with child packets inside them.

You're also in trouble if you go off on that much of a tangent before you even start your point, which is this - after just about a hundred and thirty hours, we have completed Final Fantasy 12. The final boss isn't difficult at all if you've spent any amount of time on the hunting side quest - true, he has three different forms compared to FFX's almost ludicrous anticlimax, but he's nowhere near as difficult as even the low end of the top hunts.

The strangest thing that even after playing it, I'm still not certain if it even had a main character - it's a bit like FF6 in that respect. Apparently they had the characters worked out for a while but switched between who was meant to have the focus, and it shows. Throughout the FF series starting from 7, you had one character that you considered as the "player" and almost always had in your party. However, these characters have got less and less leader-like throughout the series - in FFX the point of the story is that you were clueless about the world you'd suddenly been thrown into along with Tidus. In FFXII, you have Vaan alone in your party for a good portion of the beginning, and he's the one that you control in town areas, but once the plot starts up he never really plays more than a sort of Arthur Dent dragged-along-by-accident role.

The other thing that stands out is the difficulty. Gradually the games have been getting easier over time, with FFX in particular being a bit of a joke. This one isn't as easy as that (you're likely to see the Game Over message in more than two places), and for the most part they've balanced out the lenient way you can swap people in and out of your party at will with enemies to match your abilities. But there are a couple of sticking points. For the optional megabosses (the replacements to the infamous Omega Weapon of FF8 and so on), they've gone for testing not so much your ability as your patience with ridiculous endurance matches against things ranging from eight to fifty million hit points. I didn't bother with the top two of those as I thought by that stage that there were better things I could be doing in the evenings, like catching up with the sleep I lost while fighting all the others.

And to counteract the inflated hit points of the enemies, there's almost too much of a reliance on advantageous spells, after them being almost too underplayed before - in previous games, you had to spend an entire turn for each spell, but in this, you can have them continually cast and ready before you encounter anything. That means that there's no reason not to have them on all the time (Bubble, which doubles your hit points, is particularly vital during the last stages and it feels more something that's a disadvantage when it's off rather than advantageous when it's on).

The ending, though, is as amazing as you'd expect from Square, and genuinely nail-biting at a point where you've spent over a hundred hours with the characters. You genuinely just want it to be over and for them to make it out alive, while there's a tense inappropriately comical air when the token British smeghead Balthier moans about how it's always up to him to save everyone. Although the game wasn't afraid to laugh at itself in several other places - if you talk to one of the people next to the Rabanastre gates quite near the end of the game, he'll start talking to you about all the "spoony bards" coming through. The several days worth of time we spent playing it was definitely worth it even though the series has been going a bit strange.

This is the last post about Final Fantasy 12, I promise. Now on to Resident Evil 4.

Prisoner of the Red Line

"Attention passengers. This is a test of the public address system. This is only a test."

That message was being looped over the speakers at Park Street with a one minute pause in between, calling us for attention in exactly the same way as it says when a train is about to arrive, but then telling us to pay no attention to the message. Additionally, I've heard that the MBTA are experimenting with piping appalling music into the underground stations in an effort to break the will of their imprisoned passengers and prevent further uprisings. If this is just the beginning, I predict that we'll be seeing several Michael Douglas-type rampages taking place in Boston soon. Most of them by me.

In addition to that, one elderly gentleman sitting next to me noticed my exasperation at the continual non-messages and started reminiscing about the time they'd found a bomb in Alewife station and delayed everything for two hours. Once I replied to that, the same thing that happens when I talk to anyone in this country happened, and soon he was off about his distant relatives in Scotland. The train was arriving at this point, and it seemed rude to wander away to another carriage, so in what was perhaps karma coming back from last week, I found myself stuck with the Boston One-Man Boring People To Death team.

There really was no escape as he bounced from Scotland to immigration to the Iraq War to American history to road-building techniques and back, and his way of shouting over the noise of the train meant that most other passengers in the carriage were watching us as I nodded and "mm'hmm"ed my way through the tidal wave of gibberish that lasted all the way to Davis Square.

Defending against the onslaught wasn't my immediate concern, though. That was the fact that I still had several pages of ZZ Studios up on my computer and had rather been relying on the time on the Red Line to sanitize my Internet history before work. Always plan ahead for this kind of thing.