There's a snake in mah boots

I’ve never been a huge fan of westerns.

I don’t know why. I guess the setting never really appealed to me. Maybe the landscape of the old west wasn’t as much of a draw to the younger version of me as the notion of barrelling down the Death Star trench. I had no understanding of the freedom it represented – the lawlessness and the excitement. I grew up in a bungalow in Wigan, a million miles away from Cowboyland.

All that’s changed now. Well, since I’ve been playing Red Dead Redemption anyway.

I’m not saying that I now know just what life in the old west was like, due to me simply playing a game, but I’m starting to see why kids are expected to like “cowboy stuff”.

The multiplayer version of Red Dead Redemption is great fun. It contains all the iconic elements of life as an outlaw, without any of the boring stuff, like eating or resting or having to face the law if you shoot someone. I realise this semi-review arrives a good few weeks after everyone else’s, but it’s finally starting to hit home just how appealing the cowboy life can be.

The game world affords a similar sensibility to the old west, in that there are no real consequences for your actions. You can choose to help, befriend or shoot anyone or anything you happen across. And in an online multiplayer world where strangers inhabit the same space as you and your friends, this presents so many opportunities for fun, it’s unreal.

Last night I rode out across the plains of New Austin with three friends in my posse. We chose a simple mission and headed across land to our destination, only to find a group of other players had already arrived before us, intent on taking the loot we wanted so badly. What followed was an astonishingly enjoyable massacre that saw us ousting the bad guys, taking the swag and riding off into the sunset.

I never left my comfortable seat, but I had a storming time with a bunch of friends, playing a classic role in a guilt-free environment. Finally, I understand why the old west is such an enticing prospect.

I walked out the room last night with a little bit more of a swagger in my step.

©2012 HEAD BLOG. All Rights Reserved.

Right, so if I remember this correctly….

Ingredients:

• Pork mince
• Potato flour
• Salt
• Spring onion
• Fresh ginger
• Soy sauce
• Japanese Mirin (sweet cooking Rice Wine)
• Hondashi (Japanese Fish stock)
• Udon noodles
• Seaweed leaves (pages?)
• Eggs
• Chinese cabbage
• Carrots / green beans / any other veg you want really
• Miso

Technique:
Put the mince into a bowl, and knead in some grated ginger, a little spring onion, some salt and some soy sauce.
Add about two tablespoons of the Potato flour to bind the mixture.

Add about a level teaspoon of the Hondashi (fish stock) and about a tablespoon of the rice wine to a nice big pan of boiling water.

Using a couple of spoons, sculpt the mince mixture into balls and drop into the stock. This is a good point to imagine you are an alchemist.

Bring another pan of water to the boil for the Udon noodles.

Oh, and another one to hard-boil a couple of eggs.

Cut a few pieces of the seaweed off the main sheet and put them into a bowl of water to expand and soften.

Chop up a decent amount of the Chinese cabbage and add other veg as you see fit. Add these to the stock.
Once the noodles are nearing completion, take a hefty tablespoon of Miso and lower it into the stock, using chopsticks to break it up into the liquid.

Important: The stock should be just simmering at this point. Under no circumstances allow the mixture to boil when the Miso is added. I am assured this will change the flavour a great amount.

Empty the Udon into a colander, and rinse through with cold water to stop the cooking process.

Then rinse through with boiling water to bring back to temperature.

Serve them into a couple of bowls.

Add the vegetables and pork from the stock, then pour the stock over the dish.

Add your seaweed, your peeled, hard-boiled egg, and a generous sprinkling of chopped spring onion.

Season to taste.

Eat with a spoon and chopsticks, allowing 30 minutes resting time after the meal for a contended snooze.

©2012 HEAD BLOG. All Rights Reserved.

The young David studies the last ten minutes of "Woman in Red"

Head First is ten years old. We’ve been asked to ponder the number 10 and write a little something.

Rejecting “My 10 favourite games”, “My 10 favourite snacks” and “My 10 best lists”, I decided to just take the number, and apply it elsewhere.

I consider myself on the verge of being a grumpy old man, so I thought it would be nice to ponder a time when I was a little less grizzled – 1982. The year I was 10.

To recall the details of myself at that age, I have one sure-fire point of reference – I take a look at what was on at the cinema that year. People say they can remember where they were and what they were doing when they heard about Kennedy’s assassination. I chart my development via Gremlins and Back to the Future.

Looking back at 1982, the biggest grossing movies of that year include:-

• Blade Runner
• The Thing
• ET
• Poltergeist
• The Dark Crystal
• Tron
• First Blood

Now, upon seeing this list, I wanted to sit down and write something scathing about the paltry offerings of today’s cinema in comparison to the infinitely better offerings from my youth…

Of how these movies of classic status hold seniority over any pretenders to the throne that may arise in these times of remakes and scant originality.

I wanted to take a great big bite out of the Hollywood of today, and talk of how a 10 year old kid in 2009 is missing out, of how imagination needs feeding, and the nourishment on offer today would mean that the next generation’s creativity will be underweight.

I wanted to hold “Knowing” or “Wolverine” up against Blade Runner in an attempt to prove once and for all that things were better in the old days.

…But then I thought of a few films that I really enjoyed this year.

Not just enjoyed, but would actively recommend.

Films like District 9, Watchmen and Star Trek.

And then there are the films that I would still really like to see…. Moon, Up and Black Dynamite.

All films that I would have thought were cool as hell when I was ten, and I’m sure the ten year olds of today would like too.

Which kind of ruins my old man rant.

Kids these days…

They don’t know how lucky they are.

©2012 HEAD BLOG. All Rights Reserved.

Ok, I will happily hold my hands up in defense of my love of Transformers. An unpopular lifestyle choice in our office, but one that I remain unashamed of. Optimus Prime could read from the phone book into a camera, and I’d probably still pay to see it. I have no problem with the subject matter, however, watching Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen the other day, I found myself pondering something.

Is the quest for ultra-realism in special effects killing the “magical quality” of cinema special effects?

I only ask, because, after 2 and a half hours of robots battling inches from my face in an IMAX cinema, I can honestly say that my brain probably only processed about 60% of what was going on. Part of my visual disorientation could possibly have come from the Bourne-Ultimatum direction style, but as the film reached the points I’d paid good money for (the robots battering each other), my eyes struggled to adjust to the frenetic visuals, I had to wonder how someone like Ray Harryhausen might have tackled the same subject matter.

I think it was the late Stan Winston who once said something along the lines of “Visual Effects should be used to blur the line between the reality and the fantasy in cinema…not simply because they are there to be used”. I agree wholeheartedly with this, but at what expense is does a movie suffer from striving to present reality? There’s so much motion blur and camera shake in the battles between Autobots and Decepticons that I defy anyone to see who’s hitting who.

What happened to the director using the camera to a more dramatic effect? I still get chills seeing Talos the Bronze God getting ready to teach the Argonauts a lesson. Mainly because I can SEE it. It’s a really simple, static shot, showing Harryhausen’s great effects to their full. This type of classic cinema reveal seems to have been replaced with a need to present everything in High-Definition, shaky-cam, motion-blur-o-vision. That may be apt if you’re going for an updated version of recognisable camera techniques, like this moment from the movie Signs, that was obviously based on this classic sasquatch clip, but when I pay to see big robots, I’d like to actually SEE them.

Or could it be that I’ve finally gotten old, and all this “fancy rubbish” is just for the kids?

©2012 HEAD BLOG. All Rights Reserved.

Bet you I can jump ten flags on this

For weeks now, GTA IV hasn’t left my Xbox 360. I’ve played nothing else. To be more specific, the “Free Mode” Multiplayer element of GTA. I’ve hardly scratched the surface of the single player game itself. I realise that a lot of people cottoned on to the pleasures of Grand Theft Auto a long time ago, but my habit of waiting for most games to come down in price has made me a late starter.

Something about the freedom of a sandbox game has always attracted me. Assassin’s Creed, Just Cause and now GTA IV (my first foray into the realm of GTA) seem to be the games I’ve enjoyed the most in recent years. They all stand up as solid, fun games based in a world that the player can explore at their own pace, and even revisit again and again. But something about my recent spate of hurtling around Liberty City had me stop and wonder why I’m drawn to it so much… Then one night, a few weeks ago, giggling to myself as my brother suggested we “try jumping a scooter over a helicopter and into a river”, it struck me.

This is the closest thing to “playing out” I’ve done since I was a kid. A huge virtual playground – and one that you have complete control over.  Open that world up to your gaming mates, and suddenly, all the old memories of the playground come flooding back. The key element that keeps me going back is that there’s no direction to our meeting.

As a kid, my friends and I would aimlessly wander to each other’s houses, with no plan of what to do with our time, just knowing that it would be better spent in the company of friends than alone. This is what it feels like to open up a game the size of GTA IV to multiplayer. I can start a game, sit and wait, and watch my friends leave the game they’re playing and drift into mine. I can lose hours at a time to my friends’ pointless suggestions:- driving around the streets of Liberty City with no predetermined destination, flying a helicopter as high as possible then leaping out of it into the sea, trying to jump a car onto a passing boat…. all frivolous wastes of an adult’s time, but unabashed fun, for one good reason – it’s a shared experience.

I know everyone’s gaming tastes change all the time, and that the next big amazing single-player experience is just around the corner somewhere, but for now, GTA’s free mode is gaming perfection. It’s like the developers have handed me and my friends the keys to an entire city, and it’s brought out the kid in me.

Why don’t developers do more of this? Why don’t they open up the worlds they create to multiplayer free mode? I understand that game developers want to develop ‘games’, but sometimes, just giving a group of friends somewhere to hang out can be just as rewarding. I’d love to roam the islands of Just Cause with my mates at my side… Or have access to a landscape as beautitul as that in Assassin’s Creed, just so I could see how many market stalls I could clear by jumping off a roof.

Developers of v.2 of these games – take note. “Pointless mode” could be the reason I buy your game at full price.

©2012 HEAD BLOG. All Rights Reserved.

My idea of heaven is quite basic. Requiring only a tatty old 3′x2′ wooden board from my childhood (the ‘drawing board’), a pile of clean, untouched paper, and a freshly sharpened pencil. The possibilities are endless. The very definition of a blank canvas. That’s my heaven.I’d liken the emotion of facing the aforementioned objects to the few minutes on Christmas mornings of my childhood, when my brothers and I had to wait (on pain of death) for our parents to wake up so we could go and see what Father Christmas had left for us. Our imaginations would be in overdrive. There could be anything under that tree. Whatever we imagined had a real chance of being there…

Once the door to the living room opened, and we got our grubby little hands on the presents, a different emotion, influenced by reality, and maybe a little more frenzied, would take over. With the reality of our Christmas morning having revealed itself, the imagined version faded into the ether. Our living room door being like the lid of a festive Schrodinger’s cat box.

Similarly, once the drawing process begins, a creative path has been taken, and, with every line drawn, the infinite possibilities of the resulting piece start to diminish.

I sometimes find myself wallowing in the potential of the blank canvas, often to the extent that I can lose hours to wistful daydreams of drawings as yet undrawn. The untouched paper contains every drawing I can think of until the nib of the pencil touches it.

I once took note of a signature beneath a forum user’s comment on Conceptart.org – a great source of artisitic inspiration. It was a quote from Orson Wells. It said “The enemy of art is the absence of limitations”.
This struck a chord with me.

Limitations? On Art? Surely limitations and art are two words that do not sit well together? Surely this is a direct attack on my enjoyable hobby of “sketching nothing”? Surely by restricting my creativity, I restrict my enjoyment?

Surely ACTUALLY putting pencil to paper instantly dilutes the endless possibilities held in the tip of my freshly-sharpened 2B?

Or maybe it’s just a different way of saying “Get your head out the clouds, Dave. You’ve got to start somewhere.”

©2012 HEAD BLOG. All Rights Reserved.

I thought of something that Stan Lee once said when introducing a showing of Sam Raimi’s first Spider Man movie to a crowd of eager comic book geeks somewhere in Texas. He talked about how the expectant audience shouldn’t worry too much about the ‘authenticity’ of Raimi’s movie, and that it was simply one person’s view of an character that belonged to everyone. Whether the movie was good or bad, the character would always exist differently for each of us, depending upon how we perceive them. I like that. That a reader is entitled to their own personal version of their hero.

As much as the X-Men movies are entertaining, I always felt that Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine wasn’t quite as angry and hard as the comic version I remember. The guy I used to read about was always spoiling for a fight, and certainly wouldn’t have been voted as one of the sexiest men in the world. He was a hairy, arrogant wise guy, who loved a good scrap.

I thought of the first time I took notice of Wolverine in the comic world. In this particular issue, he had woken in a snowy landscape, not knowing who he was or why he was there. There was a real mystery as to who he was, and how he had gained his powers. The image I recall most clearly is the first time his claws appear from his hands. He had been taken in by some helpful soul, and given a place by a fire. He is surprised by something, and his claws shoot out from his skin. He looks terrified, almost like a cornered animal. I thought, what if he actually reacted like an animal would, and took flight to the safety and anonymity of the wilderness outside? Where would he find his name, and his costume?

I thought it would be nice for him to simply think of himself as a Wolverine, surviving on what the wilderness provides, clothed in the roughly-sliced pelt of his animal namesake. It’s certainly not the yellow spandex that Stan Lee originally envisioned, but it sits well with my own personal Wolverine.

©2012 HEAD BLOG. All Rights Reserved.

I find myself attempting to turn my eyeballs trying to follow the horizon on a few of these, frustrated that I’m not as visually blessed as a chameleon.

Imagine viewing some of these on a rotating display…

Like, wow man.

Sports, as seen by god. Who probably didn't pay for a ticket.

©2012 HEAD BLOG. All Rights Reserved.