A quick note to say that everyone should go and download the Adam and Joe BBC6 Music podcast. Mr Scaul Pulthorpe first alerted me to this now obligatory audio treat and now I find it difficult to believe I ever lived without it.

Rewarding your ears will be lovely features such as; Song Wars, the war of two songs written by both Adam and Joe on a particular topic, Text the Nation, where us humble listener-folk get to put our two-penneth worth of comment in, and… er… well, no other regular features but just lots of amusing chat. Last weeks one detailed how people from Leicester were called Lezzers, another told the tale of how Joe caught shingles from a dirty sailor and my favourite one detailed the new hit film franchise “STEPHEN!”, a word which you will hear me shout from time to time. Don’t worry, I am on medication.

So go on, download it from the BBC6 website here. This weeks, well, this weeks one talks about a ‘Video Wars’ competition, which doesn’t really work on a podcast, but go with it, go on, you’ll love it. If you listen to the whole thing then there’s a 1% chance that they’ll send you some money.

To be honest, if you read the waffly gubbins that we put onto linkage every week then the Adam and Joe show is probably right up your twisted and bizarre street.

Whilst walking home from town today, I saw someone performing an activity of such innate pointlessness and stupidity that I had to restrain myself from walking up to the chap undertaking this activity and pushing him over onto his stupid face.

What was he doing? He was cleaning the wheels on his wheely bin. But properly cleaning them, as in he was really scrubbing them with a wirey brush that he kept dipping into soapy water for maximum cleanliness. He was giving it some ‘oomph’ too, really brushing those wheels with some serious energy, like a man possessed by a spirit that desperately needs clean bin wheels.

I’ve never seen anything quite so mental. I also noticed that the rest of the wheely bin looked sparkly and clean too, so presumably he’d given that a bit of a polish as well. I can understand cleaning the inside of the wheely bin, to avoid it smelling and to stop all the muck and grime building up, but the outside is surely irrelevant.

Exactly why does someone need to have the shiniest wheely bin in all the land? Is it a new craze that I’ve missed out on? Instead of going out on a weekend and cleaning your car to a sparkling shine, do people now go out and buff their bins? “Ooh, have you seen the bin at number 36? It’s ever so shiny, you should nip out and do ours, I bought that new SparklyBin cleaner.”

I might start a new trend by giving my aerial a really good scrub (no sniggering at the back you, by whom I mean Dodd). Granted, it’s significantly more dangerous than cleaning a wheely bin but imagine the prestige it’ll bring when people see my shiny aerial. They’ll come from far and wide to ooh and aah at my effortlessly clean and beautiful digital signal receiver and Mr Shiny Wheely Bin will be left in the shade of my aerial supremacy.

Form an orderly queue please, no pushing.

Fable II: Pub Games is a top idea. A bundle of three minigames released via Xbox Live Arcade, it rewards players with money and items in the full game when it’s out in a few months. Gamers get a headstart earning some ingame cash & items, Lionhead studios generate a bit of pre-release buzz and some real world gold to boot.

Which would be brilliant if the games weren’t a bit crap. Which they are.

In reverse order of craptitude.

Spinnerbox is a very basic slot machine affair. You set your bet and press A to begin the spins, your xbox then arbitrarily decides if you win or lose. That’s it. There isn’t even a ‘hold reel’ option, if you lose you just spin again, and again, and endlessly onward until the game decides to randomly let you win, before losing again, and again…

If at any point I made that sound exciting, I apologise.

Tournament mode is worse still, setting you 100 spins to beat an invisible field of CPU opponents. So you sit there and press A 100 times. Brilliant.

Keystone is roulette with dice. Like roulette? Well you’ll like this then. Place bets on certain combinations of dice coming then roll. It’s a tidy enough affair but there’s not much skill to it. I also can’t help thinking that over time you’re always going to end up a loser, because that’s how roulette’s designed to work. Sadly you don’t even get to experience it in the gaudy, timeless world of Las Vegas as God intended.

Fortune’s Tower is the saving grace of the package. A card game that seems like it’s based on some version of patience you never played. Cards numbered 1-7 are laid out in rows, starting with a single face down card as your ‘banker’ card then with two face up cards beneath it. Cards are then laid out in increasing rows below. If the value of a card matches that of either of the cards above it you suffer ‘misfortune’ ie. you go bust. Misfortune can be averted in two ways:

• Your first misfortune card is swapped with your ‘banker’ card.
• A small number of Hero cards also sit in the deck. If one of these pops up in the same row it will prevent a misfortune.

After setting a stake you must consider the likelyhood of matching numbers appearing in the next row and either play on or bank your money accordingly. There’s a bit of thought behind it along with luck, it’s quite good fun.

For 800 points the bundle is just too much. I’d consider 400 for Fortune’s Tower alone, but the less than thrilling Keystone and downright wretched Spinnerbox put a dampener on the whole thing.

Looks like Fable fans will have to wait until October and earn their money ingame the old fashioned way.

Stealing it.

If generating interest is any measure of success then the Too Human demo has done it’s job. Observe my thoughts on the game pre and post demo.

Pre-demo: I know Too Human is some kind of Action/RPG hybrid. I am vaguely aware Too Human has had a very long, multi-platform development history, which usually leads to something decidedly underwhelming. Or worse still, craptacular.

Post-demo: Too human is a fine looking and sounding Action-RPG with a very deep skills/equipment system and a genuinely interesting premise.

To get the basics out of the way, Too Human is 3rd person Action-RPG. straddling two diverse genres and from the demo at least, seeming to keep itself from exploding.

Action: Combat is real time and split between melee and ranged weapons. Melee attacks are based around the right-stick, which takes some getting used to, (”3rd person game eh? Well the right stick will surely be the camera… WHOA! This is crazy!”), but eventually makes sense when you want to cut swathes in massive hordes of enemies without having to mess with the camera endlessly. Combat is really accessible, just moving the stick toward your next target in it’s most basic form, but is actually pretty deep with a combo meter, air juggles and special moves to be investigated.

RPG: Starting with one of five character classes you then level them up as you gather XP via a skills tree. Later in the game you must decide between focusing on technological or organic abilities. Weapons and armour are customisable too. There are shades of Fable/Knights of the Old Republic. The game allows you to change your skillset mid-game which is a bonus. To give a hint of how deep the skills/equipment systems are, I got 3 hours playtime out of my first two runthroughs of the demo. I was still exploring new skills on my sixth runthrough.

In summary I like:

• The premise: Unless Norse cyberpunk is a genre that’s flown under my radar until now, Too Human has a unique premise.
• The presentation: Fine graphics, (dozens of enemies onscreen with lttle/no slowdown), great music & good voice acting all add to the atmosphere. Imagine being a cyber-Norseman running around the Mines of Moria.

I’m worried that:

• The developers concentrate too heavily on the much vaunted co-op gameplay and leave solo gamers with an empty experience, *cough*Gearsofwar*cough*.
• The combat could be muddled through without exploring any of the interesting techniques, like lobbing your enemies into the air with your hammer before player two incinerates them with a plasma rifle.

The best thing about the demo and my final word on the matter is: This game features a weapon called… The Great Bastard Sword Of Pounding.

Must buy then.

I don’t really know what’s going on, but this link contains Weebl, Bob, some snow and a mention of Captain Birdseye.

Plus some wee.

Just a quick bit of rambling nonsense to keep you thinking. I’d like to state, here and now, that double-barrelled surnames are evil. I’m sorry if you have one, but they are. If you were born with one then that’s tough luck; at least you can change your name or get married. If you chose to have a double-barrelled name then there’s something wrong with your brain parts and you must be removed from society. Quickly.

Read the rest of ‘Double-barrelled fools’

Aunty Beeb feeds us another tasty treat in the guise of Mohammed Bello Abubakar, an 84 year old Nigerian man who has an incredible 86 wives. 86 wives! I don’t think I know 86 people, let alone have 86 women betrothed to me.

Apparently old Mo has urged other people not to follow his example and wed so many people. I’ll try not to Mo, thanks for your advice there. I think many legal systems around the world also offer similar advice.

Having read the story of Mo and his biyatches, I have calculated the four primary reasons for his success with the laydeez:

1. His amazing cookery skills. Apparently every mealtime Mo cooks his girls some rice. Just… rice. Thing is, he boils 36kg of rice, which must mean he’s got a really, REALLY big saucepan, and we all know that the ladies love a big saucepan.
2. He’s the smoothest talker in the world. One of his chatup lines was that his marriage proposal “was directly an order from God”. Right you are. No further questions your Almightyness.
3. His hat. Just look at his hat. His hat gets even my loins roaring. It’s quite a tall hat too, which makes me wonder what he keeps under it. One of his smaller wives, maybe.
4. He can conjure money from nowhere. The delicious rice he cooks every day costs him the equivalent of £457. Four hundred and fifty quid PER DAY. That’s £164,250 a year. On rice. Yet he has no job or financial support. I’ve changed my mind, he clearly has magical Midas-esque follicles that produce golden strands of hair. That, or he grows cannabis directly out of his head.

Bravo that man, who has wives younger than some of his children, bravo indeed. Proof that a fancy hat and a huge vat of rice can lead to untold happiness, wedded bliss and incredibly complicated arguments over whose turn it is to do the dishes.

It may have been mentioned once or twice that myself and the Feisty Kim are very much fans of the X-Files. As such, we were jolly excited at the prospect of the new film, The X Files: I Want to Believe. Yes, the trailer was slightly strange and didn’t really do much and yes, the reviews from the United States of the USA were a bit iffy, but we still wanted to see it for that final dose of Mulder and Scully action.

So, last week, we went to see it. The first showing. At 00:01am on Friday the 1st of August. That’s right; whilst you were probably tucked away in your beds, asleep, myself and the Feisty One were sat in a cinema, eating popcorn and geeking out with fellow geeks. Whilst waiting to go into the cinema I did say aloud “Geeks of the world, Unite!”. One geek nearby smiled. I think he liked me.

Not content enough with seeing the first showing of the film, the icing on the fanatical cake was the reward of a free poster. A lovely exclusive edition poster, which only millions of other people around the country will have. The downside of watching this showing at stupid o’clock was that we both had to go to work the next day, refreshed on a fabulous 4 hours sleep. The poster, such was it’s greatness and magnificence, made the Friday at work, with all it’s awful moments of drowsiness, extreme tiredness and inability to concentrate, seem so much more worthwhile.

As for the film, I enjoyed it. It’s not the finest film I’ve ever seen but nor is it the bore-fest that the critics promised. It’s a good, solid 90 minutes or so of X-Files goodness. The chemistry between Mulder and Scully is still there, which, as expected, is the main interest of the film. They still work well together, do old Duchovny and Anderson, and it still comes across after all these years (scarily it’s 15 years since the X-Files began). Billy Connolly’s performance as a former paedophile priest turned psychic is excellent and a little bit scary and no, he doesn’t have a purple beard.

It came as a pleasant surprise that the plot wasn’t too far fetched. I had worried that the storyline might be a bit mental and all tied up with aliens, monsters, spirits, psychics, everything all rolled into one big incomprehensible ball. In the end it was only really a very minor ‘X-File’ type event, the main story being the beliefs of Mulder and Scully and how they apply them to the story. It all felt good and at no point did I ever find myself thinking “Come on, hurry up, nothing’s happening.”.

All in all, a good, enjoyable film. I’d guess that if you weren’t an X-Files fan, or if you’d never seen it before, then you’d leave the cinema thinking “Eh? What was all that about?”. If I’m honest, it’ll only appeal to fans of the show. Without knowing the background of the characters you’d be a bit lost and befuddled by it all. So if you liked the X-Files then go and see it; if not then don’t. Simple advice from Randomlinkage.

Some of you may be thinking of mocking our high geekery at attending a film at midnight when we had work the next day. Mock away, heathens, I shall soak up your words of nastiness! We got a poster. And I ate popcorn at 1:30am. Just two more exciting elements that make up the rich tapestry of my life.

Those of you who do not follow the caffeine-fuelled ramblings of comic-scribe Warren Ellis will not be aware of Edison Hate Future. This irregular single panel web comic event explores the inner workings of the mind of Edison as he bewails the state of the future and has regular mental breakdowns.

It’s much, much funnier than I could possible express and hence me linking to the entire mirthsome series.

Sometimes it’s all too easy to think that Chris Morris has somehow crept into the news team at BBC HQ and is craftily inserting satirical news articles into our unsuspecting eyeholes.

Case in point, the opening paragraph of this article on Patsy Kensit investigating her family tree for a BBC prog. Imagine this being read by Morris:

Actress Patsy Kensit has said she was so upset to find her grandfather was a criminal on TV show Who Do You Think You Are? she stopped washing her hair.

Send doctors immediately, world-reknowned actress Patsy Kensit has stopped washing her hair.

Please try to remain calm as we all pray this hellish situation resolved itself. Donations of shampoo, conditioner and frizz-eaze are being accepted at all Red Cross outlets.

The DS certainly is a versatile console and it really does appeal to a wider audience than other handhelds, but this does mean that there’s a greater chance of truly dreadful games being made for it.

Here’s a list of 5 DS games that I truly never ever want to play. Ever. In fact I’d probably take drastic action to avoid playing them if such a situation were forced upon me; gouging my own eyes out, violent assault upon those making me play the game, choking myself to death on the game cartridge, all would be considered. With that in mind, here’s my top 5 ‘What a pile of stinking cack’ list.

• Baby Pals. A game where you have a virtual baby. I always thought the idea of having to feed and change a doll was a bit weird but now it’s not even a proper thing any more, just a pixellated child on a screen. Stupid stupid STUPID! Don’t even get me started on the special features. Apparently the game doesn’t even wake you up every 2 hours in the night and vomit over you. What a farce. (images)
• Zenses Rainforest. What’s it about? Here’s a bit of official blurb: “Zenses Rainforest allows players to explore the rainforest while playing games infused with rain drops, exotic flowers, waterfalls and giant trees.” I recommend a change to this so it says “Zenses Rainforest allows players to explore the rainforest while playing games infused with deadly poisonous spiders, life-threatening parasites that nest inside your genitals, violent spear-chucking tribesmen and giant crocodiles with razor sharp teeth.” (images)
• Let’s Yoga. No, let’s not. (images)
• M&M’s Kart Racing. I like M&M’s. Quite a lot. I once ate a massive bag of them whilst watching a 30 minute TV show. But a game, of the M&M ‘characters’, racing? It’s not going to work is it? M&M’s are for eating. Just as I don’t want to control the Jolly Green Giant of sweetcorn fame in a game of lawn bowls, I don’t want to race karts with candy-coated chocolate. Have a look at the video for the game (which Joystiq called ‘hilariously atrocious’) and commence open mouthed amazement at the sheer crapness of it all. Approaching sound barrier indeed. (images)
• My Horse and Me. Oh dear. I think the concept should be fairly obvious to you; own a horse, look after a horse, ride the horse, shoot the horse in the head with a shotgun when it breaks a leg. Oh, no, that last part isn’t included. One of the reviews on play.com says “very good its good if you dont have your own horse because it feels real!!!!’. Quite how using a small 3-inch long plastic pen to tap at a screen on a box of electronic gadgetry recreates the experience of caring for a large 6ft high horse that’s capable of kicking of your face right off I’ll never know, but it must work, because it feels real!!!! (images!!!!)

If you own even one of these then you are an idiot and we will find you and eliminate you to stop you spreading your feeble genetic material any further down the human evolutionary tree.

Just a brief, timely reminder of the existance of my Google Reader feed. You can view my picks of the megatubes in three places:

• The last five items are at the bottom of the right-hand menu bar. Go on, have a look now, I’m not lying.
• Google Reader auto generates a ninja-themed webpage for my last dozen or so offererings.
• Finally you can subscribe to the feed itself with your own reader and become much more intimately entwined in the hyper-global-meganet.

Fairly recently Google Reader added the option of commenting of shared feed links. So now I can tell you exactly how funny I find the most recent skater faceplant video.

Spoiler: Very.

A little bit of coding geekery there for our computer-savvy readers. For our normal readers, that means ‘birthday’. And who’s birthday is it today? It’s Mr Trench’s birthday of course!

Happy Birthday Mr Trench. You’re very spritely for an old chap. Bravo for not dying.

In honour of this special day, myself and the slaves, sorry, the ’staff’, had a whip-round and raised almost fifty pence, but alas I accidentally went and spent it on snuff. We then tried to locate you but it appears that you’d barricaded yourself into your room in the West Wing, intent on watching each and every single episode of the new ‘Cagney & Lacey’ DVD boxed set you received in the post earlier.

So in light of your absence, the staff thought that you might appreciate a cake. Unfortunately I was too busy taking potshots at them with my rifle for them to make one, but one tricky swine did escape long enough to locate this picture of a cake for you.

Another of the minions, the Butler chap, thought you might also like this cripplingly intense fight scene between Captain Kirk and an unconvincing monster. Don’t worry, I’ve had him taken outside and shot. The Butler, not the monster.

I hope these humble gifts keep you appeased until I can see you in the lounge later for some sherry and caviar.

Quickly! Observe the bargain ALERT! If I had the knowledge to make a red light that flashed on and off in that urgent way that only red lights can do, I’d make one, but I don’t, so I can’t. Still, there is exciting news afoot.

Our big proper Tesco store, not the little Tesco Express, is selling Freddo’s for… 10p!

TEN PENCE! Happy times friends, happy times! It’s like we’ve gone back in time a few years to when the worlds bestest everest chocolate treat was 10p. The recession will seem like a dark and sinister rumour as we all enter a dizzying chocolate-fuelled high.

Go on, nip to Tesco and buy Freddo’s. Loads of them. Bags and bags of them. They’re 10p! It says 15p on the Freddo wrappers but they only cost 10p! Whereas before you could buy two Freddos, now you can buy three for the same price. How could any sane person resist?

If you want to buy me loads of Freddo’s and send them to me then I shall offer no resistance. Send away.

In a small snippet of news that certainly surprised me, it’s been confirmed that Shooting Stars, the ‘madcap’ and ‘wacky’ gameshow featuring Vic and Bob, will return for a Christmas special.

And there was much rejoicing!

Vic, Bob and Matt Lucas are all going to be there, so let’s hope they can get Ulrika-ka-ka-ka and Mark Lamarr back too and I can spend half an hour regressing back to my youth and spend the next week singing songs in the style of a club singer.

Uvavu indeed!