A game of Time and Typing

Blogging has gotten away from me lately. Lots going on at work and lots happening at home too...

Sadly not all of it productive. I got addicted to Age of Empires again... oops. I bought Age of Empires 3 Gold and the extra add on too when they were like a tenner in a sale about a year or two ago, they hadn't even been opened but a free weekend cropped up and well, time literally became history. Another game that had been neglected - sat unopened - since my birthday was Monopoly for the Wii. We've certainly made up for that though and become somewhat addicted to it too... thankfully those games tend to be quicker than the real life version... our longest games being around two hours and the quickest a mere 47 minutes.

In other news the Crues played Fulham in Europa League Qualifying last Thursday which was brilliant. I still hope to write a big post on all that and the new stands etc at some point so I'll not go too far into it but in the revamped Seaview Stadium, Fulham put out a strong first team featuring 8 players who started in the Europa Cup Final in 2010. Crusaders lost 1-3 in the end but not before giving their fully pro and highly paid counterparts a good scare. We're really looking forward to our trip to London to see the away leg at Craven Cottage on Thursday night. We have our one for pride already so nothing will dampen our spirits, even the chance of rain :)

I finally got my hair cut (hurrah!) and totally unrelated we also had Gentlemen prefer Blondes night one weekend where we took both the food and the TV outside.

That was followed by Star Trek night the next weekend which concluded the first ever El Presidente's film festival.

I have half posts already written about those (not my hair cut mind though it was noteworthy in the speed of it, totally how it should be!) so hopefully when I can drag myself away from football and collecting resources and taking over maps I hope to get back to keeping up recording events as they pass. The problem again (as always) being the more that happens the more behind I get with the list.

Along those lines, well, mainly due to my old phone being a brick (albeit an amazingly indestructible brick!) from the last millennium - I dipped my feet into the murky waters of a contract phone and got an almost up to date handset. So I now have the ability to use apps, browse the web on the go and write a text message with a qwerty key pad. I never did learn how to use predictive text and now I never will - One small step for mankind, one giant techno-leap straight over a decade of unfortunate wrong wording for Simon.
Victory is mine!

So yeah, I'm going to have to use that blogger app at some point and give this a go on the move now I have no excuse. I'm not too sure how easy it'll be to add photos and they'll be mobile phone quality but I might give it a try and see how much of my data allowance it eats up if I can't find some free WiFi kicking about.

So that's my quick update, apologies for being an absent blogger so far this month, as far as social media goes I've probably written more words on Twitter than I have on my blog which is slightly worrying given my usual length of posts but enough about what I have or haven't done for now. Sleepy time, night all! Catch you soon.

The in my Pants Game: Song Title Edition

The 'In my pants' game was reignited into our consciousness at the weekend. For those who might not of heard of this game, it's just one of those random fun time wasting games (perfect for a long journey) where you take it in turns to think up the funniest answer you can that can precede the words.. 'in my pants'.

I've probably mentioned the movie title version of this game before and this version is exactly the same concept, however, instead of inserting movie titles before the 'in my pants' - include a song title. Sure, it's childish and it's generally rude, but it's good fun and as innocent or dirty as your mind allows... muwhahahaha

Here are a few examples...

- Please don't let me go in my pants!
- Gotta get thru this in my pants.
- I believe I can fly in my pants.
- If you're not the one in my pants?
- Crashed the wedding in my pants.
- Little things mean a lot in my pants.
- Teletubbies say "Eh Oh" in my pants.
- Wake me up before you go-go in my pants.
- Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree in my pants.
- Oops I did it again in my pants.
- The Streak in my pants.
- Things can only get better in my pants.
- 99 Red Balloons in my pants.
- The Drugs don't work in my pants.
- I want to wake up with you in my pants.
- Defying Gravity in my pants.

And my personal favourite...

- I'd Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That) in my pants.

Any suggestions?

Gaming at Catalyst Arts, Belfast Festival 2010

Norngirl pressed the bell. Having never been here before (let alone down the street we were on) we thought we had maybe arrived at a time when the place was closed. We knew it was the right place though as there was a big poster on the door. Puzzled, we were starting to doubt ourselves a little but then at the last moment the door opened and a friendly, smiling lady led us up a few flights of stairs into an art galley. The main attraction wasn't any regular art though, this was the world of Gaming, to be more specific - Catalyst Arts Gaming, an event put on by the organisation for the Belfast Festival.

So there we were on a rainy Saturday being introduced to an art gallery full of games we could play. There were retro video games and classic board games. On our left, Giant Draughts (checkers), Chess, Scrabble and other games. To our right several games consoles (a Sega Megadrive 16bit, N64, Dreamcast, PS1, PS2 and Gamecube) set up on individual TVs. Behind them a Foosball table and on the walls; game posters and game themed paintings.

The place was quite quiet, just a couple of other people around so we pretty much had a full choice of what to do. Our first choice was the Foosball table. Table football/foosball or whatever you want to call it can get quite frantic and as soon as we had started we were both struggling to keep one hand on the goalie and like crazed organists waiving our other hand back and fourth between the remaining handles. We tried our best to keep that little ball heading away from our goal but it was a futile endeavour. Lucky for me though I finished victorious, muwhahahaha.

Once our game was at it's end we moved on to the video games. On the Megadrive is was a game of 2 player Sonic the Hedgehog 2. I have to explain at this point my wife Norngirl has completed Sonic on the Sega Game Gear several times so before the excuses continue - Yes I lost.

In my defence I'm a Nintendo child having played on my cousins as a kid from an early age then eventually I was lucky enough to get a Nintendo Entertainment System as a joint birthday and Christmas present when I was about 8. After that my next console came when I saved up my pocket money for a few months and with Birthday money to top it up I was able to buy myself a 2nd hand SNES - that was about 1997 when they were starting to wind down making games for it. I love the SNES, it's my favourite console and ever since that day I've collected 2nd hand games for all Nintendo Consoles, so I am indeed a Nintendo nerd and totally addicted. Sadly, I only ever played Sega at friends houses so never found my way around the 3 main buttons of a mega-drive controller, an odd number of buttons in a line on a control pad just doesn't seem right to my fingers. At one point as Knuckles was already checking into an overnight hotel recuperating for the challenges of the next level, I had Sonic stuck in some pinball purgatory and ended up timing out to his golden ring dropping death.

Moving on and sadly Goldeneye on the N64 wasn't up and running at the time and I didn't want to start messing with it or know if it was the console or the cart or the TV but at any rate I didn't have my tools with me if the console or cart needed a clean (If you collect things that are old and dirty you get used to this). So we moved onto the other consoles.

I headed for Tekken 2 on the PS1 whilst Norngirl tried Space Invaders on the PS2. We tried the other games, one was a Warner Bros game, maybe Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck or on something on the Gamecube. The other a game on the Dreamcast that I'd never seen before, some shoot-em-up at any rate.

After losing our numerous lives in many amusing ways, from being popped by orbs of energy to falling into the abyss that always seems to be a never ending pit at the bottom of a screen, we headed to the oversized floor draughts (Checkers) and had a quick game. I ended up winning though a little unfairly given Norngirl wasn't too clued up about the rules before we began to play. Understandable too given we don't own a board and she hadn't played for a longer time than many of the consoles in the room had been in existence.

Winning or losing we had a good time and were very glad we went along. As a display I would have loved a SNES or a NES there, there was oddly a SNES game on the table so maybe they have one? I dunno. but whichever it was still pretty awesome to have such a venue set up to play games. The lady who had shown us up on the way in kindly gave us a quick overview of the Art Gallery and explained that normally it is contemporary art on the walls and they planning on a move down to a lower floor which will undoubtedly given the amount of stairs improve access.

I didn't know this at the time as we only heard about this free event through word of mouth but it turns out that Catalyst Arts have been providing a cultural outlet in the city for 16 years and per their website they are a non-profit, members-based organisation, good stuff.

If you might be interested in heading along to play some games, do head down to the 2nd floor of 5 College Court Tuesday to Saturday between 11am-5pm next week (it finishes on the 30th October) and press the buzzer if the door isn't open. Good times and more buttons await those who do :)

Earth: Empires - free social web game

I try to stay away from promoting something directly in my blogging but this is something thats been a part of our lives for almost a decade and like Stephen Fry and his iPhones, sometimes you just have to share - unlike iPhones though, this gem is totally and completely free!

Earth: Empires is the game I'd like to share with you all. It was its predecessor Earth2025 which originally brought the world of online gaming to our CRT screens (at least for me and Norn Girl) and we enjoyed just about every minute of it.

Earth 2025 had faded from our lives after the game stagnated due to its ownership maybe not giving it the treatment it deserved. Thankfully though, when the doors finally closed on that Earth2025, the community and 15 years of History wasn't lost. For up stepped some dedicated members of that community who had the required skills and resources to do something about it.  They created a game familiar to that of the old but with changes we had all been wanting and waiting for for so long. Earth: Empires was born. This was all only last year and the new game is still in its infancy but the main thing missing now is new players to grow the party to be the best 5 minute distraction of the day again like it was back in its hay day.

So what is it?

First and foremost its a web browser game, it can be played anywhere you have web access.
The concept of the game is to build a country and try to grow it as big as possible in the time period (familiarly known as a set) that each game is given (usually 2 months for the main clan based game) measured in Networth. Alternatively you can build a country ready to go to war and to take on others, usually in co-olitions of clans because reducing a country to rubble by yourself is not an easy task.

Earth: Empires is comprised of many screens where turns can be used to perform various actions such as:

• Exploring for land
• Building various types of structures on that land
• Researching various technology
• Cashing turns to make more money
• Adjusting the government (type, tax and production levels)
• Buying and selling military, comodities and technology privately or on the public market.
• Allying, spying and attacking other countries in various ways - some to benefit your own country, some just to be destructive.

Other than this, players can join together to form clans in the team based games and this is largely where the community is to be found.

Close to a decade ago, to me, the clan structure within this game was somewhat comparable to what social networking is now, though obviously more restricted. In that respect, the various clan sites still hold their own as a great place to meet people you'd maybe not get to know through the likes of Facebook. For,  if you're like me, you'd not readily start chatting to people from other nations from all around the real world because you tend to mix socially with people you know in real life. The game is something we all have in common that spanned international boundaries and breaks those barriers of social networking. Inter clan relations have developed over time to the point where there is some political infrastructure in place and conventions that have developed within the game. Thankfully unlike a lot of other games of its nature, due to the fact the game is text based, in this the generation of instant gratification gamers, the game isn't over run with 12 year olds. From my experience, its generally higher education students and people with full time jobs who play, though obviously there are people from all walks and stages of life.

Its also a game that doesn't take up much time or eat into real life too much because of the way the turns are given out and able to be played at your own convenience.The game is real time but the turns used to perform actions are given out every so many minutes and are stored up to a certain amount, usually around 2-3 days worth. That means you can go a day or two without logging in if you so desire. Not only that but you can put your country in a protected vacation mode if you're going to be unable to play for longer.

What can eat into your time is the social aspect, but like blogging or social networking, connecting with real people and making friends isn't exactly a waste of time.

It might not be for everyone, those who like instant gratification in games might not enjoy it but for fans of Strategy games its one of the hidden jems on the web... hopefully not hidden for too much longer though as there is talk it might make it to Facebook at some stage in the future.

If you'd like to read more, take a peek at the Earth: Empires Wiki and if you would like to give the Earth Empires a try head over to http://www.earthempires.com

On a side note, the Clan we were always a part of is back in action, its name, The Fist of Odin. If you would like to come join us and enhance the experience you'd be more than welcome and we'll teach you all we know about the game.

Here is The Fist of Odin site, hosted by Boxcar (created by another section of the Earth community) which is mainly a forum that is tied into the game with tools to aid us. If the ride is anything like our experience with the game so far, it'll be worth your time :)

Anagrammed Northern Ireland - Hand Linen Terror!

This account of an evening out in Belfast from earlier in the week has been hijacked by anagrams. Can you work out what the real story should be? (Answers at the bottom of the post - and yes I was quite bored!)

'Main File For Hand Linen Terror' trip to the Cinema

On Tuesday night in 'Stab Elf' City there was a trip taken by 5 people to see 'A Demonic One' within 'Caves Roar I Quit'. The feature film was 'Heirlooms Privily Oil Up' a love story starring 'Gnome Grew Car' with 'My Rice Jar' .

It was a film based on a true story and was quite tragic really, but very funny never the less and well worth seeing. Once the movie was over we headed out of the screen and into the hall. It was whilst there that we waited on a few who couldn't hold it any longer and had to take a trip to the 'Ham Robot'.

On the walls were posters for up coming shows, one was for 'Dandy Hag Knit' starring 'Most I Cure' and 'Domain Craze'. We tried to work out if the silhoutes in the poster were to scale in regards to one another and guess their heights. According to IMDB 'Erotic Sum' is 5' 7 and  'Amazon Cider' is 5'5½", the silhoets in the poster must have either been taken at different times or edited.

I don't think I'll be going to see that one, I'd rather watch Newry's 'Reliable Sticky Hen' on The One Show or Belfast's 'Hen Rang The Bank' in Much Ado About Nothing.

With everyone together again, we headed out into the cold, rainy night and out onto 'Their Erect Chests', down past 'Bitch Alley Flats' and the soon to disappear ‘Webfeet Halls’, to our bus stop.

We were soon flying past 'Yoga Trek'. I thought about writting this post then fell asleep and probably dreamt of 'Manhole Omens'.


Answers:
Hand Linen Terror - Northern Ireland, Main File For Hand Linen Terror - A Lifeform in Northern Ireland, Stab Elf - Belfast, A Demonic One - Odeon Cinema, Caves Roar I Quit - Victoria Square, Heirlooms Privily Oil Up - I love you Phillip Morris, Gnome Grew Car - Ewan McGregor, My Rice Jar - Jim Carrey, Ham Robot - Bathroom, Dandy Hag Knit - Knight and Day, Erotic Sum/Most I Cure - Tom Cruise, Domain Craze/Amazon Cider - Cameron Diaz, Hen Rang The Bank - Kenneth Branagh, Reliable Sticky Hen - Christine Bleakley, Their Erect Chests - Chichester Street, Bitch Alley Flats - Belfast City Hall, Webfeet Halls - Belfast Wheel, Yoga Trek - Yorkgate, Manhole Omens - Eamonn Holmes