Vote for a King, Vote for the NLCALP!
A general election is looming, and the debate is heating up. Our three main political party leaders are battling it out on TV every week to win voters and grab the top spot, but ultimately, these parties will all fail our country, our economy, and our people. They’re all the same thing, with a different name and colour of tie.
Me, I’m somthing different. I am founding the NLCALP, the National Liberaly Consevative And Labourers Party. We’re the party who does what it says on the tin. We’re the Ronseal party. We’re the party that just say’s NO. I mean seriously, check us and our key policies;
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MEET MY CABINET
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Free Tea & Biscuits for the Elderly
Old people spend the majority of their time sat indoors eating custard creams, slurping tea and watching Countdown. Did you know that nearly £240,000,000 of state pensions are spent on tea and biscuits every year? This is a huge void that needs to be sealed. Our proposals are clear on this pivotal issue; Nationalise the biscuit and tea industries, and make tea and biscuits free for all people over 60. All biscuit and tea manufacturers will be amalgamated into two companies, British Biscuits and British Tea (Note: “British Telecom” will be renamed “British Phones” to avoid confusion. “British Petrolium” will become “British Stuff That Make My Vroom-Vroom Go!” in turn). All tea and biscuits will be excempt from tax, and all profits will go into the research and development of products, with a percentage returning to the national coffers. I will be provided with an unlimited supply of biscuits and tea.
The £9.99, £19.99 notes and 99p coin
It takes no dummy to realise the real cause of the economic crash; and that is people loosing their change. The economic upturn caused a surge in pricing down among retailers, resulting in various “99p”, “£9.99″ and “£19.99″ offers. The resulting wave of shrapnel entering the economy has been unprecidented, with nearly £240,000,000 of 1p coins being lost in shopping centre fountains every year. Millions more are lost to grids, the backs of sofas, and piggy-banks that are never opened. This money needs to be recirculated into the economy, and fast. These new denominations will prevent the wastage of change.
New National Bank Holidays
44 new bank holidays will be introduced, in addition to the curernt 8, making 52, to cover the various religous and 
historical events that should be celebrated in Britain. These will include; Man Day, Eating a Bionic Limb Day, Fish With Three Eyes Day, One Time Pad Day, Radio Manchester Day, My Lordz Day, Eating a Nappy Day, Woman Day, What’s That Boy? Day, Mug Day, Monday Monday Day, Good Lord is That The Time Day, Sunday 2.0 Day, Can’t Be Arsed To Day, Boy Day, Fire Me I Dare You Day, Not Getting Out Of Bed To Day, Girl Day, Chocolate Day, Cake Day, Biscuit Day, Toffee Day, Candy Day, Food Day, Burger Day, Hotdog Day, Bread Day, Brandie Tschauner Day, Carbon Fibre Day, Instant Gravy Day, Saussage Patte Day, McDonalds Straw Wrapper Day, Cracked Floor Tile Day, Traffic Cone Day, Plastic Bottle Day, Flonger Day, One Stop Knocking Shop Day, Protectatron Day, Baby Day, Rapture Day, Jim Ross Day, Fire Evacuation Drill Day, Tiling Grout Day, Sellophane Wrapper Day, and Inconspicuous Cloud Shapes Day.
Investment in Green Technology
White Goods will be renamed Green Goods in order to help create a greener technological landscape for Britain. All white goods will be green by the year 2014, a year that was arbitrarily picked by a “think tank” because it sounds close but far away simultaniously. All electrical goods and personal electronic devices will be green by the year 2016, which is a bit further but still, just the round the corner so, it’s real change, real quick, y’know?
Benefit Reduction Scheme
Benefit funding will be cut and several initiatives will be used to force the unemployed back into work. These include various pilot schemes, including, forced labour, slavoury, iron cuffing, mame and slaughter, and bycicle pump. Should these initatives prove sucsessful in their pilot regions, they will be rolled out on a national basis. Those who are “on the sick” or claiming incapasity benefits will be taken away, locked in giant warehouse, and plugged into a giant supercomputer, which will be used for mundane everyday tasks that you don’t need to concern yourself with.
Our Other Policies Include:
- Re-opening Jillys Rockworld
- Opening a Subway on every street corner.
- Mandatory playthough of all Sonic The Hedgehog games every year.
- Reduction on taxes for video games.
- AceyBongos from Xbox Live to be replaced with a robotic version of Sting.
- NHS to offer additional “services”.
- Mortgages to be written off and replaced with a complex bartering system involving Jaffa Cakes.
So forget the other parties, and vote for the NLCALP on May 8th. I mean 4th. Or is it the 6th? Yeah, 6th, better go with that one. AND MAKE BRITAIN, OURS AGAIN!
Sponsored by Doctors Assosiates, Inc.
Retro Review: The Oregon Trail
Line up, line up, come one and come all, it’s the Retro Review, the column that likes to take the best of the worst, chew it up, regurgitate it back out and present it on a plate for your enjoyment.
Today we’re looking at The Oregon Trail, Third Edition for Windows 95 Pentium PC and Macintosh Power PC. I first played this game in 1997, on what was then my state of the art Windows 95 machine with 133mhz processor, 16mb of ram and a 4GB Hard Drive. The fact that my wristwatch beats these specifications today however should not detract from one important fact; at the time, the graphics on this game were the shit. And by that I mean, shit.
The box for this game makes many bold claims. “Top Selling”, “Used in Schools”, and, most interesting of all, “Internet Linked”. The internet was just starting to become a household thing, but online play and interactive applications were still in their infancy.
The Oregon Trail 3rd edition was no exception, however, since all it really did was create a shortcut in the Start Menu to a website, the contents of which have long since been washed away by the tides of Internet change and are to be anybody’s guess.
So, after installing from the 3 CD-roms (Yah. Why this game is 1.6GB in size is anybody’s guess. DVD’s didn’t exist at the time.), the game proper begins. We start out picking our team of five intrepid explorers to join us on this quest to Oregon City.
This basically just involved creating five people with rude names. There was no real skill to the selection, no special abilities or powerups, merely a choice of name. Cockface, Dickhead, Arsewipe, Buttplug and Jane however, are missing one thing. Supplies, of course!
Any game worth it’s salt needs a shop to buy upgrades, items and junk from, and this game is no exception. The EMH from Star Trek Voyager seems to run the ”general store” at the start of the game, which makes me wonder from the offset weather this is just a holographic simulation.
All manner of interesting items could be purchased from the Doc, including, but by no means limited to, the 5 month package, and the 6 month package. The contents of these packages remain a mystery, but supposedly they contain “basic supplies for the size of your party and the trip you’re travelling on.” I wish my local Co-Op was that comprehensive.
Oh, and for those who like a challenge, you can opt to “No Thanks” and attempt the trip without any supplies whatsoever. Clever.
So, now we have our band of intrepid explorers, miscellaneous supplies, Large Farmwagon, and four random Oxen that appeared from nowhere, we’re ready to set off on our trek across America. The game promises “human drama” which unfolds with events such as “dust storms”, “thirst”, “bartering” and “cholera”.
Say what you want about Modern Warfare 2, it just isn’t in the same league without a cholera feature.
One of the first obsticals to overcome is a river. There are several techniques to this, which including caulking the wagon and trying to float across, waiting for a ferry, attempting to traverse the shallow parts, or just praying that oxen make good life-rafts. This part of the game is generally quite annoying, since the ferry option is usually too expensive and your team die of starvation due to spoilage and dysentery before it arrives. Caulking the wagon is your best bet, and the only real option, however 90% of the time this fails and you’re greated with several messages telling you Cockface, Dickhead, Arsewipe, Buttplug, Jane, Danny, and Four Oxen have died.
Should you be lucky enough to get across the river, you’re ready to go hunting! That’s right, this game promotes to young children the need to mame and slaughter young animals for food with a shotgun. To be honest this is a bit more like Duck Hunt than a hunting simulator, as rather unconvincing sprites of lions, deer, birds and so forth move across the screen. As the difficulty increases, the animals move quicker and quicker until they’re so ungodly fast that it looks like the animal kingdom’s version of an acid party.
Still, what food you do gain is quickly lost to spoilage anyway, and things like broken axles, food poisoning, thives, drowning, broken legs etc. se
rve to make this game unrealistically difficult to complete for anyone, nevermind someone “Age 10+”. Ultimately this leads to the untimely deaths of your crew to various forms of illness, the most popular of these being;
- Dysentery
- Typhoid
- Cholera
- Exhaustion
- Measals
- Snake Bite
- John Cena Championship Match
A funeral is then held for the poor dearly departed, until eventually there’s nobody left to bury you. Strangely, you always seem to be the last one to die. Misfortune clearly being on your side, dying lonely and from the shits in the middle of the American desert.
I’m not entirely sure what happens if you make it to Oregon. I’m not entire convinced you can make it to Oregon. I did manage to get to a random fort once, where I discovered, to my amazement, that the Holographic Doctor had somehow beaten me there.
This game is actually kinda fun though, and of course, it launched a thousand T-Shirts. Which is always cool.
DANNY’S RETRO RATING:
20 minutes to save the world, and all I have is a Post Office. And it’s shut.
Wha-wah-wuh? What is this place… oh, wait wait no, I remember, thingimebob, urm, yes! Yes! That’s it, the internet! I remember now! Man, it’s been ages! I’m surprised the internet has coped to be honest, but I guess it just goes to show the strength of the place.
There’s so much catching up to do now, it’s going to take me a few days, but rest assured I’ll have all my Twitter, Facebook, websites and YouTubes all up-to-date in the coming days, weeks, months, or whatever.
So, what’s new? Well, I’ve completed Bioshock 2, which was the last thing I blogged about, a few times over. Sonic and Sega All-Stars Racing has been and gone too, which was a very fun game. Perfect Dark came out for Xbox Live, that’s an awesome game, and I’m currently playing through it along with Dante’s Inferno, which is another pretty awesome title.
Work-wise, well, its very busy. Mobilising to new areas, end of year reports, external audits, its been busy and this is primarilly the source of my missingness in the last few weeks. I’m glad to be having this Easter weekend off to actually get some time away from it all and do stuff like this, or chill out, or go for a beer.
Ah, there’s such a huge list of things to go through that I didn’t blog about at the time, its hard work right now. Maybe these things will just have to go unblogged. Never will we read about the exciting streets of broadway, Sonic 4, my various railway adventures to parts of the country, winning half a months wages in the bookies, a certain girl getting locked out of the office for a whole day, that chicken sandwich I ate, or Dawson missing WrestleMania because his phone was stolen. Perhaps some things are best left buried.
Nah. I’ll write about these things and more shortly. In the meantime, stay safe, be cool, and don’t forget, the rain falls up in Australia.
Oh yeah, the new Doctor Who that was on today is awesome. Matt Smith is a great Doctor. This brings that very old post about him I wrote ages ago full-circle or somesuch, the one where I buried him for no justifyable reason. Sorry Matt, all is forgiven.
In the Garden we are growin’….
Obligatory thoughts & views on Bioshock 2 follow. Please stand by.
So, Bioshock 2 came out last Wednesday, and as I’m now on my second playthrough, I have to admit, this game is just as good as the origonal. The story is class, the character development still there, and the atmosphere and attention to detail in the underwater world is just, well, amazing.
So the single player portion delivers in buckets and spades. The gameplay upgrades feel natural and enhance the game from the previous title, and the new weapons and plasmids are pretty awesome.
Couple things wrong with the single player mode though; there seems to be a Gene Bank station on every wall; and as such there are a lot of Gathers Gardens around too. One of the challenges of the first game IMO was coming across these things. There are also Ammo Bandito machines sprinkled liberally, moreso than the first game, where they weren’t very obvious at all. The Circus of Values were always all over the shop, so that’s no surprise though.
Health stations suffer from the same problem, actually. There are also aren’t a great deal of security cameras, auto-turrets or other electronic defences compared to Bioshock 1. Multi-part quests don’t even pop up until the very end of the game. When a box pops up to teach you a gameplay element during the final boss, you know it’s been underused.
Big Sisters on the other hand a goddamn hard and fun to fight. There’s nothing better than a nicely sculptured female body in a diving suit doing extreme parkour and using telekanisis to throw doors at you.
The multiplayer element, though, is not so good. The fact that everyone essentially spawns in the same room at the start of the match, and subsequently respawns in the same room 90% of the time, means that the fighting generally concentrates in one small area, with large bits of map not very inhabited in smaller games.
This also means that this game is a camper’s dream. Just sit in the corner with your granade launcher, and wait as person after person appears in the same general area.
The idea of having to use research on bodies to do well in multiplayer battles, and the story driven level based gameplay, is actually a fresh idea that I like. But unfortunately the sides are let down by the core product.
The spawn points need spreading out. Like, srsly now.
But all in all, a brilliant game that I really can’t fault. A 9 out of 10.
Now, Sonic & Sega All Stars racing…. the demo for that game is pretty awesome. I’ll be picking that up next week too…. stay tuned.
