The Cave

Would you like to know a secret? A secret that has haunted my gaming pedigree for years, leaving me in fear that it might be discovered during game-related conversation and I might be ostracized by my peers as a result. A fear so pronounced despite how ridiculously tame it is I’d murder to keep it under wraps. It is the secret of Monkey Island.

What’s the secret?

That’s it! That’s my secret! The Secret of Monkey Island. It’s a game, silly, and it’s one I haven’t played, I know nothing about it! I haven’t played it’s numerous sequels, either, and that’s just shameful.

“Why? Why is it shameful?” I hear you cry in confusion.

It’s shameful because it is one of the most beloved game franchises of all time, and one of the greatest adventure games ever made. It’s various iterations find themselves in all sorts of top 10 lists around the internet. I’ve never played it. I’ve never played Maniac Mansion, either, or Day of the Tentacle, or even Grim Fandiago. The trend here that game-savvy readers may understand is that all of these games were written by Tim Shafer and Ron Gilbert (with the exeption of Grim Fandiago). Even savvier people will know that the title and focus of this article, The Cave, is an adventure game written by none other than Tim Shafer and Ron Gilbert.

Both of these designers are reasonably well known in the gaming industry as a result of their work on these games.

Tim Shafer created Double Fine in 2000, and in 5 years worth of magic he produced Psychonauts, which is a game I have played. It is a good game. It is a fantastic game. It is an extremely weird game, and it make my penis hard.

Now when I first thought about writing an article for The Interactivists, it was a couple of weeks before the release of The Cave. I thought it was perfect, not too big a game to play thorougly enough to warrant an opinion and nothing too obscure.

So, of course, I was exited about The Cave.

And then I played it, I started writing this review and after around an hour’s worth of play I stopped. The reason I stopped? The Cave is a boring game and boring, of all the adjectives one can use to describe a piece of entertainment, is probably the most damning of them all.

The problems with the game are pretty obvious,

Running around for padding

Repeating the same thing

Not funny

I cannot reccomend this game at all. Play something else, better yet, play Psychonauts, because that game rules.

Wikipedia

Natalie Blocksham was in Medicine Dr Quinn.

France Day 1: A Day Too Far

France Day 1: The Flight

I get by (with a pillow)

link!

Dear achievement hunters (and various denizens of the internet),
This is a forum on which 3 achievement hunters have found a way to trick the new Kinect into thinking you have a friend in the room with you, as there is an achievement for it on the game Kinect Adventures. These people need a method to trick the Kinect into thinking there is someone with them, instead of asking someone to do it with them.

I would like to you take a moment to consider that.

Please resume your lives, and thank you for your time,
Uberbeard

A Message to Messenger

Briefly and earnestly I must commit these words to form: MSN Messenger still trumps Facebook Chat.

This may just be in my mind; It should, could and would drive it to the ground with features, video and sound that evolved from use and managed to escape the disastrous and frustrating design treatment that Microsoft so haphazardly treat us to yearly, bi-yearly and quadro-yearly. Buggy, perhaps, is the worst of the insults that my prominent program deserves. Outdated, inexcusable! That is just not fair and how very dare you for saying so. Fax machines are outdated. Text messages are outdated. Phones are soon-to-be outdated. MSN messenger? Was it even in-dated?

Sideline aside ironically I still miss avoiding ’who the hell is this?’ Nicknames came, later than they should have (of course), but they provided an escape from incomprehensible user names and 10 minute conversations spent as a savant detective attempting to glean an identity from tactile questions like, “How are you?” and “What have you been up to?” My Colombo days are over. It’s CSI Southampton now. People and this may and could and possibly definitely includes myself, cannot control the flippancy that they use the ‘add a friend’ feature. The social network has it’s own rules and they’re out of control. I recently accepted a request from someone I could only presume I had met. Once. I think. Now they know everything about me, ever. They’re probably reading this right now, it’s perverse.

Often, in the recent months I have logged into my account; perhaps on a whim I have found myself at the creamy blue login screen for Hotmail and merely felt wintry at the college-based nostalgia it possesses for me. My rose-tinted glasses are no longer a pleasure because they are making me feel a little like I have watched too much Heroes and cannot adjust to the colour correction.

That creamy blue is now lugubrious beryl. The only thing I use it for now is making sure my Xbox payments have gone through properly. So consider this a premature eulogy of sorts, even if it’s poorly coagulated and of an off rhythm.

“To a dying friend; your Facebook contrecoup spells the end, a finute minite, lest you convalesce and replevin your missed ‘pizazz’ we will see you off with a pulchritudinous nudge.”

If I had a hat, I would tip it. I would say “you will be missed” but that’d be a complete lie because it turns out I have slightly better communication skills now. Oh, and a headset.

Keeping it Sanitary

Now, this is an odd post about an odd subject that’s existence, under any normal circumstance, would not even occur to me: Tampon sanitary towel decorations.

Were it not for my mother, whose observational skill is not documented to be any better than anyone else, I would not be writing to let you know that this normal looking tampon I am showing above (which may also be the highest resolution photograph of a tampon hosted on wordpress) has been shipped with a nice little easter egg for anyone willing to stare at it longer than it takes you to throw it between your legs.

That’s right! It’s ultra absorbent! No, no that’s not what I was pointing out at all. Look at the shaping of the central pattern; is it just us or does that resemble a fish? Well, it’s either that or a Fat Man nuke but I’m fairly sure nobody has accused woman parts of smelling like atomic power before.

Is someone sat in the Bodyform office snickering away at their own wit? Or have they unknowingly designed a hilarious pattern gracing the pubic area of millions of women, cementing the association between sea life and vagina’s for centuries to come? I don’t know, nor does mother and between us we know almost nothing about everything.

beard