Tim Vine: So I Said To This Bloke... Review

Yesterday morning, me and my mother went to Diss to go to some shops and also for me to see my dentist for a biannual checkup. The dentist was first, in which I met a girl I'd not seen in years. It's always an odd feeling, knowing that a decade ago I was standing outside her garden gate showing off my Dragonite Pokémon card to her (Dragonite was her favourite Pokémon... jeez, talk about selective memory). The checkup went fine then we headed to the shops. I got some throat lozenges from a chemist (see previous blog entry) then a load of stuff at Morrisons.

One thing I like about Morrisons is their cheap entertainment. Yesterday, I got Rocket Science for £1, Avatar for £5 (as part of a shopping deal, will probably review this later), and the one I'm going to talk about as I've already watched it - Tim Vine: So I Said To This Bloke... . It's a stand up comedy from a comic well-known for cheap, groan-worthy rapid-fire puns.

As funny as the stand-up was, its 65 minute duration felt more like three hours. Ten-second puns really don't do well so consecutively - Vine is funnier when he's co-hosting shows or similar (he's a frequent Dictionary Corner resident on Countdown) and hence isn't the centre of attention.

One thing I disliked about it was the amount of songs. He's not a singer; I won't pick on him for that though (again, see last blog entry). None of the songs were actual, singable, proper songs though... well, excluding one, "Alarm Bells", which I've seen him perform before but which is actually rather funny so eeh.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcFd5j1cios]

Other songs included one in which he was allergic to choruses, so he'd sing about the allergy in the verses then cough, splutter and look very ill in the choruses, and one about his trusty metronome, which was actually enjoyable for about twenty seconds... then the song just repeated and, with the joke behind the song, sped up.

There were a couple of hugely tedious gags in the show. The worst was called Pen Behind The Ear. In it, Vine attempted to throw a pen, backwards, at around shoulder height and land it behind his ear (and have it stay there). To do this, he had a tube of around 20 pens. He finally managed it after having failed with all the pens four full times, each requiring him to bend over, pick them all up, and put them in the tube. All of this was to a monotonous "Pen Behind The Ear" chant. You could hear the audience's laughs slowly dying down with every refill, and the resulting cheer when he FINALLY managed it more one of relief than admiration.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pwbQvJDFzQ]

But, in general, it was enjoyable to watch. Certainly worth the £2. It would just have been better in small doses - even Vine himself continuously joked about what he was putting his audience through, and indeed one of his very first jokes notified the crowd of the level of regret they might start suffering very, very quickly.

Skate 3 Demo Review

Having very much enjoyed, and still being an owner and player of, both Skate and Skate 2, I felt a level of excitement suddenly born inside myself when I heard a friend mention the existance of a demo of the third instalment being publically available. I've now managed to give it a play, to mixed feelings.My first impressions were good. It appears that they've completely dropped the grunge act they had going in the first two games. Skate had erosion abundantly, its sequel not quite so much but still a fair bit. It seems now to be shiny, good-looking interface-wise and definitely an improvement. Having said that, I'm surprised they dropped it - as cliché and boring as it's gotten over the last decade, it seems to be a staple for any game where its average player might refer to friends as "brothers" and anything that looks rather pleasant as "rad", "cool", "wicked", or any other buzzword that got boring years ago but remains in heavy usage.

Before I got into the game I was given a set of options. These included a new difficulty mode (I started with "Normal", more on this later), the choice between the two camera angles Skate 2 had (I chose the further-away, slightly-more-overhead one, the dynamic one makes me feel sick), and a choice between five characters (presumably a demo-only feature as the two before it had you make your own character).

So, into the game. I was greeted with some douche with an annoying face and a more annoying voice. I skipped his stuff as quickly as I could, completed the first task (with a rather pleasant 180 kickflip) then got away from the goals and went to spend my 20 minutes of demo time in the small allowed area.

I spent five minutes just trying out all my favourite, and all the generic, manoeuvres from Skate 2. The kickflips, the ollies, the twists, the grinds, the obligatory Hippie jumps etc. To be honest, it felt worse than 2. The Hippie jump in particular feels really floaty in comparison to the old version. Getting off your board and moving on foot, however, is much, much better. Skate 2's walking was as good as broken, with what must've been an attempt at dynamic running ending up as spasticated can't-turn-very-well running. With Skate 3, it's whichever-way-the-stick-is-pointed that's-the-direction-you-run-in. Lovely stuff. But the jumping (not really Hippie jumping because there's no skateboard involved) is just as broken as its boarded counterpart.

I noticed something else which I didn't like. The HUD is just as clean and beautiful as the menus, which is a positive. But the negative is that there's no colour coding for multipliers. With Skate 2, 1.5x resulted in green, 2x resulted in yellow and 3x red. Now, 1.5x is blue, 2x blue and 3x... well, a slightly shinier blue. But it's still blue so you have to physically glance down to see how many extra points you're getting.

So, with the disappointment of the controls and everything down, I decided to try out the other two difficulty modes to see if they made it better. They did nothing. I couldn't tell the difference between the three. All I know is that if I do get the game in the future I'll be playing it on Hardcore because it'll probably net me more trophies.

I can't comment a huge amount on the music because I'm sure that, being a demo, it's only partial. But the tracks the demo had were crap. I gave them the whole 20 minutes just to see if I started enjoying them after a while, I didn't. I wasn't a fan of Skate 2's soundtrack either though - I either played it muted and with my own music, or just listened to Money For Love's "For Kristoffer" on repeat. So, meh.

Overall though, it's not bad but it's not great. It'll be a future purchase, I'm sure, but there's no chance in hell it'll be a full-on £40 one. I'll likely wait until I can get hold of it for £10-15, maybe £20 - then it'll be more worthwhile. But for now, I'll get my skating-game kicks from Skate 2, while shedding the occasional tear at how badly Tony Hawk's games died. Tony Hawk's RIDE... you son of a bitch.