Monthly Archives: March 2003

Top Gun

Monday March 31st 2003

I’m back playing Ace Combat 4 again after a break of many months. Spurred on by a cowardly challenge in the pub by Cedrick, I got practicing in anticipation of sending him crashing back to Earth many times over at the hands of my arial combat skills.

Sadly Cedrick was more interested in shaking maracas and using a dance mat(!) when I went to his place at the weekend, so the chance to make him crash and burn was lost.

But my brief sortie in the stratosphere has ended up with me being hooked on the game again and I’m trying to complete every mission with a “special” rating at Ace level. No mean feat, I can tell you, as to do so you have to eek out and bring down an ace pilot flying somewhere around the map for each mission.

So far I have managed this on about 14 out of the 20 missions and my highly honed skills of last year have returned to their devastating best! Oh yes! (pegging f*ckers left right and center, I am!)

The reward for all this toil is new planes and paint jobs for said planes. Plus… the elusive X-02 plane that is rewarded when you complete every level with a special rating on hard. Hard!? We don’t need no stinking “hard”! Ace level is where it’s at if you want to be the best of the best! =o)

Ace Combat 4 on PS2 – highly recommended.

Home Alone

Sunday March 30th 2003

This weekend I’ve been all by myself as Fliss is up in Scotland hanging out with old friends at Millport.

It hasn’t been as dull as I thought it would be, mostly because I’ve kept myself occupied for much of the time. I spent most of Saturday during the day playing games – interrupted by a drive into the city where I changed my mind as the traffic got heavy and headed homeward in a puff of smoke. Literally.

On saturday evening I went to Cedrick’s place for games and movies which was quite entertaining. My Big Fat Greek Wedding was the opener and I enjoyed it much more than I thought I would – highly recommended and head and shoulders above Two Weeks Notice in the romcom stakes. Movie number two was Eight Legged Freaks – not something I can recommend if you’re returning to a cold and empty house afterwards.

As I was.

*gulp*

Somehow I managed to get to sleep okay, despite the occasional image of an Eight Legged Freak blinking into my minds eye. The hour lost as we leapt into British Summer Time really seems to have thrown me, though, and I’ve been jaded all day today.

I did make it into town, though – making the mental note that Sunday is definately the day to go in future, as parking was a breeze and there was much less traffic to contend with.

Training shoe shopping did not go as planned, sadly – there seems to be an absolute deluge of white, minimalist trainers available. All very nice if you’re a shell suit wearing scouser, but not really what I had in mind at all. Hence, training shoe shopping transformed itself into CD and game shopping before returning home to wash the car in order to give me some sense of accomplishment for the day.

Funny how we have to do the odd chore in order to excuse doing a whole lot of nothing! =o)

d-d-don’t don’t stop the beat!

Sunday March 30th 2003

Groovy Squirrel After getting hooked on the catchy tune and fantastic video for Junior Senior‘s Move Your Feet I decided to pick up their CD for the fun of it. It’s a bit mental, to say the least – a quirky mix of funky tunes and english as a second language lyrics!

I made the observation that the pixelated “graphics” in the video would have been considered cutting edge and cool around 20 years ago, crap ten years ago, and yet somehow it’s top notch in this day and age of Monsters Inc standard CGI.

Cooler still is their decision to make the video available freely for distribution on the net. It can be downloaded from the dudes who made it, Shynola. Hat’s off to them for the most imaginative music video in years. =o)