Finally got around to finishing The Getaway on PS2 yesterday evening. The best feature of the game is surely the incredibly detailed rendition of the streets of central London (40 square kilometres of 'em). OK, so some liberties are taken with regards to the intricacies of the road layout, but for someone with a passing familiarity of the area there are plenty of Deja vu moments. This allows for much fun haring around the capital at high speed (usually carjacking fresh vehicle a-la-Grand Theft Auto when you trash yours) through authentic volumes of traffic (well, nearly). The plot is a reasonably interesting gangster theme - with the twist that you play through two threads as different characters. The gameplay has both driving (get from A to B in a certain time, or take out another car) and on foot (straight-forward shoot-outs plus some Metal Gear Solid-style sneaking). On completing the game you get free rein to drive around London (starting in a Lotus 7). On the downside, there are a few glitches - pedestrians have a habit of diving front of you rather than out of the way, sometimes missions didn't complete correctly and on some of the sneaking it's very unclear what you're supposed to be doing.
Be warned, there's plenty of violence and strong language
Getting geared up for this weekend's Harry Potter fandom meet here in Oxford. Current indications suggest that there are going to be 20-30 of us, which is a pretty impressive number, I reckon. Hopefully I've successfully done my part of the organisational stuff - I'm now working on cleaning up the MRJ Hotel to receive guests - one on Friday, six on Saturday night. Yikes!
After a comment on
thegraybook's journal pointed me towards thefirstevil (WARNING: contains major spoilers unless your current with what's showing in the States at the moment), I seemed to have stumbled onto a Buffyverse RPG running concurrently with (and somewhat MSTing) the current runs of Buffy (series 7) and Angel (series 4) which is currently providing me with much entertainment. It's also led me to play with friend groups, putting them all in one friend group and excluding them from the Default View (helps avoid spoilers until I've downloaded the latest episodes).Currently in the process of ripping a large pile of Cheesy Eighties Music into oggs - two box sets times eight CDs times 18 tracks. OK, so there's a fair bit of dross in there, but also some forgotten gems (or at the very least nostalgia trips). All I need now is for Apple to produce an iPod that plays oggs, so that I run out of excuses not to buy one.
As I'm sure all of you who care know by now, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix finally has a release date - the 21st of June. The question is, do I aim to be in a bookshop at 00:01 BST, or should I order it from amazon.co.uk at half price and get it a few hours later. My first though was to go for the former, but that would mean not getting to bed until, say, 8am - possibly not such a good idea, plus it could be hard to appreciate the book while half-dead with sleep. The other problem is trying not to get it confused with half a dozen fan-fiction universes...
I finally won the battle with myself as regards getting a Mac laptop, although half a victory as my thrifty side only permitted a bottom-of-the-range iBook rather than the top spec and desperately lustworthy PowerBook G4 17" (on the grounds that the latter cost three times as much as the former). Wireless networking to follow in a few weeks when the new kit becomes available. Much geeky squeeing some time next week, no doubt.
