13 Apr 05
If you’re ever down in Australia and feel like a ‘resort holiday’, I can highly recommend Heron Island. Five nights there felt like a month’s break. I also managed to fit in six dives on the Great Barrier Reef, and the highlight was encountering two huge (at least 2.5 metres from wingtip to wingtip) manta rays, slowly circling above a coral outcrop 15 metres below the surface.
The island, at least when we were there, swarms with birds chattering away all day and all night; a bit noisy when you first arrive but you soon find the calls relaxing, and it sure beats traffic noise. Every evening we went down to the beach (a complete circuit of the tiny island takes about forty minutes) to watch baby turtles crawl out of the sand and make their desperate rush to the sea. Truly the cutest baby animals on the planet, the staff know them as ‘sea biscuits’ because of the unfortunate fact that just about every form of wildlife in the sea or flying above it loves to snack on them. Only about 1 in a 1,000 make it to adulthood. Trying to improve the odds, we would protect them from gulls and, at least for a little way into the water, small reef sharks and eels.
The city seems a mad, noisy, smelly place after a tropical island. Check out some shots on the Photos page.
PS. Sorry for the lack of updates. I’ll back in the swing of things soon.
Stuff
11 Apr 05
Wreck of the Protector, Heron Island.
Travel Barrier Reef
17 Mar 05
Last thing before I go—I’ve mentioned before that I’m the drummer in a band called The Telltales. Well, the first major review of our second album Haymaking has just been published, in Sydney music mag Drum Media, and it’s a beauty.
Reviewer Michael Smith says “More tales of quiet loss and love, sadness and hope from a band that should be much more widely known and appreciated than it seems to be at the moment … great melodies, intelligent playing, thoughtful arrangements and insightful lyrics—what more could you ask for in a pop record?” and makes comparisons with McCartney, UK Squeeze, Travis and Coldplay.
You can read the full review, listen to samples of our music, view our two video clips (and of course order the CDs) at www.thetelltales.com.
Music Telltales
17 Mar 05
No updates for a couple of weeks folks—I’m off to Heron Island for a holiday, and I don’t intend to come within a bull’s roar of the internet, but instead commune with fishes under the sea on the Great Barrier Reef and relax until my head falls off and my body melts into the sand. More Headless Hollow fun when I return, hopefully fully refreshed and revitalised!
Site News
09 Mar 05
When I played the first Thief game several years ago I was immediately impressed by the fact that you could find yourself, as the laconic thief Garrett, standing in the shadows of a corridor for minutes, carefully memorizing the rounds of castle guards to calculate the ideal time to creep forward and cosh one over the head. The ‘stealth’ genre had been born. The atmosphere was thick, and far from running about blasting everything in sight, you spent the game avoiding combat at all costs, instead hugging the shadows and sneaking about to accomplish your objectives.
I recently finished Thief: Deadly Shadows on the XBox after playing it off and on for months. On the whole it was enjoyable, though the game suffers from many of the problems that plague computer games in general. For one, it was too long. You rarely hear this complaint in computer game reviews, but if you’re over fifteen and don’t live at home, you just don’t have the time to play these games all the way through.
Once you’ve learnt the mechanics and completed a few missions, the gameplay tends to become repetitive. Personally I think games should be half the price and half the length, so you could enjoy a game to completion and then go try something new. Is it just my attention span?
Secondly, games tend to run out of steam as you approach the end. They should be designed backwards, so the production team is full of energy and inspiration at the end of the game and exhausted, overworked and empty of ideas by the beginning. Having worked on The Omega Stone for a year, I know how long the hours can get as the deadline approaches. A common solution to this syndrome is to suddenly increase the difficulty level in order to stretch out the gameplay, and Thief falls into this trap (excuse the pun), so much so that I resorted to a walkthrough at the end just so I could finish the damn thing.
The next and always the biggest problem is story. The Thief series has developed an interesting world with a detailed background, and there is a story in this game. Unfortunately however it makes little impact to your progress—the sequence of missions is linear, and you can pretty much ignore the cutscenes—done in a nice, dark noir style by the way— and it would make no difference to the game. It’s a shame, because as a result you don’t care about the characters, or a feel a real urgency to complete the missions.
Thief makes few big changes to the series formula, but this game does feature a third-person view which I found myself using throughout—it’s just too much fun seeing Garrett sneaking about in the shadows (and a little easier). The reactions of the many characters you meet—guards, priests, zombies, feral-hippy types—seem quite intelligent until you realise that it is actually quite easy to fool them. For example, several times I found I could run with impunity through a building disturbing everyone on the way, then just settle into a dark corner and wait for everyone to calm down and go back to whatever they were doing. Surely the general alarm would have rung and everyone would now be more alert?
In general however, Thief is a cut above the average game of this type—until you start getting tired of doing the same sneaking about.
Three and a half water arrows out of five.
Update: I should also mention the long loading times, a common problem when playing games ported from the PC to XBox.
Update: Fascinating Game Developer’s Rant that touches on some of the reasons for the kind of gameplay problems mentioned above.
Computer Games
07 Mar 05
A lot of people around my age grew up with The Goodies. For those of you who missed out, they’re a trio of comedians—Grahame Garden, Tim Brooke-Taylor and Bill Oddie—who were part of the Cambridge University Footlights theatre of the sixties that also nourished the careers of John Cleese, Graham Chapman and Peter Cook. I’m not that long in the tooth, but every afternoon as I was growing up in the late seventies/early eighties, just before Dr Who, The Goodies was essential TV viewing. The opening strains of “The Goodies, goody-goody yum-yum” meant a brilliant half hour of surreal, slapstick fun.
It’s because The Goodies was replayed so many times on afternoon TV that they are so hugely popular in Australia—apparently far more so than in England, where the show was played at a late timeslot. And Saturday night at the State Theatre you could certainly ‘feel the love’, as The Goodies took the stage to share some memories from those years, play a few clips from the show, and give us some insights into the making of the series. I and my friends hardly stopped laughing the entire evening, but then all Grahame Garden had to do was stand in front of a cardboard box on a table and mention the words ‘vampire bat’ for us to start laughing our heads off. Garden, in particular, still has that incredible comic timing that makes the simplest joke hilarious.
The evening was lightly structured around the three taking turns reading out questions they’d received from their fans about the show, which was as good a framework as any for a chaotic, fun grab-bag of memories and sketches, including a reading from the old pre-Goodies I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again radio-play days. I would have left out the ‘encore’ lip-synching performance of Funky Gibbon, which I never thought was very funny or Goodies-like, but then it was their ‘hit song’ after all.
Four giant kittens out of five.
PS. I went to buy the just-released second DVD compilation the other day and was disgusted to see that HMV were charging $50, double the price of the first DVD. This smacks of greedy opportunism—I for one won’t be buying until it comes down to the right price.
Theatre comedy
28 Feb 05
Keanu Reeves isn’t much an actor. There I said it. I mean, someone has to say it, right? Surely the only way he has become so successful is due to some form of mass hypnosis?
He seems like a nice guy, and he does try in Constantine (“hmmm, I’m a chain-smoker, so I better make my voice extra gravelly this time”), but he just can’t carry it. It’s a shame, because a better actor could have brought far more gravitas to this role, and done better with the flashes of humour in the script that Reeves flattens. Ewan McGregor springs to mind. John Constantine is an interesting character with a lot of potential—a chain-smoking exorcist who ‘deports’ half-breed demons back to Hell. This film version is loosely based on a comic character that first appeared in Swamp Thing who looked like Sting and was of British working-class background (I told you it was loosely based).
First-time film director Francis Lawrence, whose previous experience has been in music videos, does a good job, refraining from hand-feeding us the story and bringing Constantine’s dark city streets to life. But the film is too long, dragging out the final denouement long past the point where we know what is going to happen. As a result I felt forced to sit and watch the last surprise-free, talky fifteen minutes play out, which overshadowed my enjoyment of the rest of the film. It’s a shame because most of the elements are there. The effects are excellent and not overplayed, there are some nice ideas and the world of the film feels consistent. Rachel Weiz does a good job as the woman trying to save her twin sister from eternal torment, but Tilda Swinton in particular shines with androgenous beauty and abrasive wit as the archangel Gabriel.
The film has been repeatedly compared with The Matrix because Keanu walks around in a black coat, but the real reason is that John Constantine seems like Thomas Anderson all over again—only with a more gravelly voice.
Three bugs out of five.
Movies and TV
25 Feb 05
The atmospheric Mayan ruins at Tulúm on the Caribbean, Yucatán, Mexico.
Travel Mexico
21 Feb 05
Us Australians laugh at the cliche that the country is swarming with deadly beasties with the capacity to kill a human with a single bite. I’ve seen a few television specials that really pump up this angle, going into great detail about shark attacks, funnel-web spiders, snakes, stonefish, crocodiles etc etc. You’d think they’re jostling for space down Pitt Street in Sydney (along with the kangaroos). Your average Australian has a good laugh and plunges back into the surf or embarks on another bushwalk.
My girlfriend and I were swimming at Soldier’s Beach on the Central Coast on Sunday, however, and for the first time since I was about six I was stung by a bluebottle. That’s a Portuguese Man-of-War to you overseas readers; a small blue jellyfish with long, streaming stingers that is often washed up onto Australian beaches by westerly winds. It’s also an integral part of the childhood of anyone who grew up near the coast.
Unfortunately, my girlfriend was stung as well, and considering she’s not 100% comfortable in the surf and I was slowly encouraging her to be more confident, I was surprised by the bad luck. Despite the press, you don’t often get bitten or stung here in Australia. Fortunately, it was a minor ‘attack’. A bit of ice to the stings eased the pain, though I have a row of itchy red bumps down my right wrist as I write (note to forgetful self: don’t scratch bluebottle stings).
In a way, it was good she was stung. It’s like a rite of passage in Australia, getting stung by a bluebottle. Everyone should try it.
Update: I’ve changed my mind. You shouldn’t. She’s fine but I’m suffering rows of itchy red welts on my arm, leg and foot. Guess I’m allergic to bluebottle stings as well as mosquitos…
Stuff
17 Feb 05
Looking back at my review of Hero, the last film by Zang Yimou, I see I gave it a rating of four … well, I may have to posthumously up that to four and a half, because House of Flying Daggers, while not quite as stunning as that film, is still certainly worthy of a four rating.
House of Flying Daggers is set in 859 AD, during the declining an corrupt Tang Dynasty. Local deputies Leo (Andy Lau) and Jin (Takeshi Kaneshiro) are ordered to capture the new leader of a mysterious group called the House of Flying Daggers who are stealing from the rich to give to the poor. Jin follows a lead to the local brothel and there encounters Mei (the beautiful and talented Ziyi Zhang), a blind dancer who is not all she at first seems. Ziyi Zhang spent two months living with a blind girl and observing her mannerisms, and the research pays off in her performance.
There a quite a few twists and turns in the ensuing story, and sometimes the melodrama typical of this genre threatens to overwhelm it, but if you enjoyed Hero all the same delights are here to be swept up into: the stunning balletic action sequences, the beautiful cinematography, the spectacular colour and movement. Because of their similarities it is difficult not to compare House of Flying Daggers with its predecessor, and it is perhaps not as perfectly stylised and the plot not as engaging as Hero despite the love story centre stage. Some of the tragic ‘will I or won’t I’ moments could have done with editing. I left the theatre a little unsatisfied as was hoping for everything to go up a notch from Zang Yimou’s last film, but perhaps that’s asking too much. House of Flying Daggers is still an incredible achievement from a master of the Wuxia (martial arts) genre.
Four giggling courtesans out of five.
Movies and TV
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