delmorpha.com

Well I’m officially back to work after an enjoyable 27 days off on paternity leave and I can’t say I’m glad to be back. Straight back into the deep end, I’ve been reminded hard why I was looking for another job prior to Ethan being born and I think the hunt will be back on sooner rather than later. Fingers crossed and post Xmas, I could be officially teaching Game Design at Preston College… that sounds utterly more awesome than answering phones to Ballbags ever could!

And speaking of games, I officially broke the Achievement Point 40k barrier whilst baby and mother slept, proving that my addiction to gaming can officially withstand the birth of a child. But of the games I’ve played, a few minor summaries would be:

Civilization Revolut’n : Awesome… buy it now!

FIFA Street 3 : Annoying but fun in brief periods

Bee Movie™ Game : Surprising deep for a movie game, great game engine

Virtua Tennis 3 : Brought back memories of the Dreamcast because this game could be called Virtua Tennis 2+, Now with New Douchebags

Beautiful Katamari : Great but very, very cheap of Namco to rerelease a PS2 version and then nickle and dime XBL for the new levels…

SEGA Superstars Tennis : Frustrating as hell yet sometimes brilliant…

EA SPORTS FN 3 : Give Me Geekpoints… not a bad game though… worth a play through

LEGO® Indiana Jones™ : Amy liked this a lot more than I did in Co-op mode… I found myself getting annoyed with her wandering off…

Battle for the Pacific : Wank… and I still completed it…

LEGO Star Wars: TCS : Completely cheap if you’ve already played through Star Wars II as its just bolted that onto the first three chapters

Top Spin 2 : Meh…

Halo 3 : Eventually played through the entire game on Normal after beginning it on Legendary and after a few Near Joypad Destruction Experiences, reduced the difficultly to Heroic, then down again to Normal….

NHL 2K6 : Fucking game… I did the damn score a penalty achievement on All Star and I didn’t give me the achievement!

I also got my ass down to Morrisons today in my lunch break, to get Viva Pinata : Trouble in Paradise. Normally I would be ashamed to step foot in a Morrisons but for this week only they have all the Top 10 games for X360 and PS3 for £25, most Wii games for £15 (including Mario Kart with Wheel) and DS games for £12.

Other than looking after baby and gaming though, I haven’t been up to a great deal… a bit of Nintendo DS demo coding to show potential employers, some humorous eBaying and some grilling in the rain. Nothing exciting really!

This update was more to make sure I could still log into my blog than anything else…

Back in March it was announced that Ninja Theory had been dropped by Sony (or vice versa) after the £25mil game failed to “wow” cretinous PS3 owners and sales of the game failed to “wow” Sony shareholders.

It came as no surprise though, and had I not have signed a Non Disclosure Act with the company until the game had been released, I could’ve told you this 18 months ago. You see I interviewed with Ninja Theory back in January ‘07 and after being definitively bored by there technical wankery of the PS3, I turned down the chance to work on Heavenly Sword in favour of eating my own fist more money at my previous employer.

* I can see you wondering whats brought me to talk about this today, so it was this post on UK:R about Games 100 best games of all time.

Anyway, I knew they weren’t for me within the first 5 minutes of the interview, when they questioned the “favourite games” section of my CV. My choice of Shenmue was almost mockingly scoffed at, like I knew nothing about gaming and had picked some 2 week old title like GTAIV…

In fact, fuck them… looking back they were mocking it, the cunts!

Unsurprisingly the interview progressed to them talking about Heavenly Sword and what type of game it was. My comment of “so its a bit like Golden Axe then with only the female character to select from?” didn’t go down particularly well but ironically, I was completely right… it is a fucking hack ‘n slash after all. Nothing more, nothing less… it just looks “pretty” and cost £24.9mil more than it’s 1989 arcade father.

I also came out the interview feeling slightly violated after they jotted down my ideas furiously like I was the fucking Dali Lama of Video Game Design. I’ve not played HS so I can’t comment if any of my input translated to the game but whatever. I’m sure something from that free labour brain storming session we had got brought up elsewhere.

Anyway, back to what I wanted to discuss and that was the Top 100 Greatest Games of all time, not according to Game or the children they had participate (seriously, the winners idea of the best game being Killzone induced coffee being spat on my monitor in a definite WTF moment). I just want to make a few points for future lists so they get a little bit closer to the mark:

• Anything in a Greatest X list has to be more than three years old. In video gaming I’ll let this slip to 12 months at a push, but titles that fall into this category had better be fucking amazing.
• Just because Sega don’t have a current gen console, doesn’t mean you can forget about their games. This also counts for Lucas Arts (they did more than Monkey Island) in the software platform.
• Arcade games count so stop leaving them out
• If the list doesn’t have Castlevania Symphony of the Night on it, it instantly fails

Call of Duty 4 is good, but above Zelda Ocarina of Time… you’re having a laugh aren’t you?!

Amy called first thing this morning to tell me GTA4 has landed this morning, so needless to say I’ve been bored fuckless for the remainder of the day trying to kill time.  I’ve done the following to avoid work:

• Updated my sites to the latest revisions in Fantango - I haven’t touched Oh For Fucks Sake yet though for fear of breaking it after it failed on another Drupal site
• Post a blog on OhFFS about Norton Internet Security and how wank it is…
• Wrote the following complaint letter to Kenco in an attempt to get free coffee out of them:

Just wanted to register my dissatisfaction with the sachet sizes for Kenco based products. I wouldn’t say the cups we use at our company are too large, in fact I would argue they were slightly below the “national average” yet the colour and flavour provided by a single use sachet was less than required to make the perfect cup of delicious Kenco goodness.

They come as a massive disappointment given their obvious benefits that the sealed retention of flavour gives as we often find ourselves using a 3 for 2 ratio to get adequate flavour and strength into our mugs. The coffee inside is always delicious, we just thought you should consider reviewing the portion sizes..

40 minutes to go….. for fucks sake… GTA4 better be awesome…

Thought it was about time for a face lift of sorts… I’m a lazy bastard and far too busy with projects online and off to find the time to create a theme of my own, so I picked the first one that looked decent and new and installed it. It needs some tweaking but I think its a bit better than the last..

Does it mean I’ll be back to posting more regularly? I doubt it but the thought is there if nothing else!

How Do,

As some of you may know of me, i’m a first aider in our workplace. Not a qualified doctor, not a paramedic, not even a nursey….just a first aider.

Though first aiders are trained in all aspects of ‘initial treatment’ from bandages and plasters right through to CPR, I very rarely get much interesting to do apart from the odd severed finger (please see previous post, a finger of fun…).

Anyhows, i’m going off track here, what I want to tell you is that I got sent on a course last week. Because i’m trained as a first aider I should have been sent on a 2 day refresher course but because my boss paints us all with the same brush, he thought I must be a spaz like the rest of my colleagues and sent me on the full, initial 4 day course for begginers.

Although I was pissed at the prospect of ‘re-learning’ I favoured the following points…

• 4 days out of the factory (paid) is much better than 2 days out of the factory (paid).

• I was getting petrol money for the journey to and from every day, even though the training centre is closer to my house than my actual workplace.

• I got to be a swot!! I fully remember pretty much the whole course from the first time around, so theres not going to be anything I didn’t know……

…..WRONG!

Though the basic bandages and shit were still white, still cheap and still the same to put on, which I excelled at while the security guard I was paired up with for the week kept dropping his then running after it while it unraveled along the floor like a fucking andrex puppy with a pissing labotomy, the main bit- the important bit- the lifesaving bit- the CPR (mouth to mouth and chest compressions for some fucker who’s not breathing incase you don’t watch casualty) has changed!!

It used to be “3 rescue breaths into the mouth, then 15 chest compressions, then 3 rescue breaths into the mouth, then 15…etc”

We all sat on the floor with our rubber, ‘dead’ dolls and the retired biddy nurse taking the course (who looked like she needed some urgent fucking medical attention) said

“Now who has read their books and knows what ratio of rescue breaths to chest compressions we give?….” looking around like a smug Aunt Fucking Bessie

Books? Books? Phhht….I’ve been here and got the T-Shirt love. I’ve put fucking plasters on cuts, me. I have washed countless bits of shit out of my mentally handicapped colleagues eyes. I wiped my arse on the book after my morning shit this morning, Pensioner love, because I know everything about first aid..

So Florence Knightingale here puts his hand up…..and made a proper cunt of himself!

“Yeah, it’s 3 rescue breaths to 15 chest…”

Mother Theresa stopped me mid-sentence, “NO, NO, NO, NO, NO!”

“Ya fuckin’ what?” I replied, almost like I had just recieved an ASBO.

“It is NOT 3 rescue breaths to 15 compressions, it’s….”

She looked around the room at the rest of the people sat at her feet and lifted her arms like a mass hypnotist. The entire room (apart from me who was red as fuck after my chav-like outburst) all chanted like Fucking schoolkids “2 reessccuuee bbrreeaatthhss ffoorr eevveerryy tthhiirrttyy cchheesstt ccoommpprreessiioonnss”

That wasn’t a typing error, they just all said it in unison but dragged it out like kids in a classroom say “ggoooodd mmoorrnniinngg mmrrss ssmmiitthh”

This made me feel even more shite. I was the one trained first aider on this course and the rest of the shit for brains knew more than me!

So, I took a deep breath and politely questioned, “I thought it was 3 to 15?”

Biddy nurse replied “It used to be but they changed it 3 years ago…it’s more effective this way.” And smiled as if she were the fucking fountain of knowledge itself.

I then questioned again, “I’m sorry but if this is the way we are trained to save a life, don’t you think it would have been a better idea to try and get it right the first time? It seems like something you don’t want to try experimenting with too many times…”

HA HA!! One all!!

“W e really don’t have time to discuss past failings! If you notice on your dolls in front of you…..”

And it was over. I think i’ll try and swot up the next time I think I know more than everyone else. As it happened, I passed the course nice and easy so I couldn’t give a shit now.

Biddy Theresa got one more kick in the dentures, however, when she spoke to a wood worker (who wasn’t unlike Lenny from ‘of mice and men’ ie- a retard)  in the ‘wrong tone of voice’ on the last day and he started crying, put his coat on and walked out. This had never happened to her in her years of training and, subsequently, she lost the St John Ambulance a lump sum of government funding for failing to pass a pupil.

(I’m gonna call that 2-1 up! - cheers Stuart)

I hope she dies soon!

Keep bleeding same-heads, Horseys got the plasters!!

Till next time peeps,

H.