Sherlock, The Hobbit and The Best Pound Ever Spent

Fucking Steam Winter Sale. You know that shit? Where you buy dozens of games and then you never touch them? Claire looked through the Steam library last night and found Unmechanical. A charming little puzzler, which we purchased because it was charming and little. Not so much for the puzzle part. I hate puzzle games. A friend once tried to gift Portal (2? I dunno) to me through steam for about a month and I kept refusing until the stupid thing just disappeared or something. I dunno. I guess he gave up. Look, I appreciate the notion and everything, but leave me the fuck alone with those fucking portals. So... Unmechanical:

It's got adorable robots and shit.

We finished the whole thing in one sitting. Easiest puzzle game I've ever played. Which I don't mind at all. I don't enjoy staring at the screen for hours, screaming, "I'M LOOKING RIGHT AT IT!" unable to figure out what to do and all. With the exception of one incredibly dumb, annoying puzzle, which got us stuck for a half hour or so, it was all pretty logical and not difficult at all. But fun all the same. And hey, who knows, maybe I'm just super smart or something. Höhö!

The one thing that seriously bugs me about Unmechanical is its ingame hint function. Hit F1 to get a visual hint, which gives the whole thing away. It's too tempting to fucking cheat your way through there. Which we didn't. But at that one annoying puzzle, which had us stuck for a half hour or so, it was insanely difficult to resist. You know. Hit F1. Better yet, fucking Google it or something. We're so used to having walkthrough videos and gamefaqs and crap, it's no wonder games are getting ever more straightforward and hold your hand all the way through. Why bother challenge people's intelligence when they just look shit up?
What's even more annoying is how you get an achievement for never hitting F1 and we didn't get it. Because during the first ten seconds of the game, a little popup tells you about the F1 feature and it doesn't seem to disappear. Until you hit F1. BAM! No achievement. ARGH!

Sherlock Season 3. Man. What fantastic writing! Never been a massive fan of Sherlock Holmes. Read some of the novels back in school, watched a few of the old movies, Hound of Baskervilles, yada, yada, yada, the basic stuff one would know when at least slightly interested in literature. Which helps appreciate the modern TV adaption even more, of course. Mustache, hat, nicotine patches, I get it. Though I really wish they'd remove those stupid timers with the massive, red numbers whenever there's a bomb. I wasn't expecting to see shit like that on a show like Sherlock.
Why would you even put that there if you were the villain? Either you detonate the fucking thing remotely or you set the timer to whenever you want it to blow up and be done with it. Why would you want a bunch of fucking glowy numbers to remind you? It's not like you'd forget about something as big as the detonation of your own fucking bomb, right? "Aw crap, did I set it to blow up at six? Or maybe it was after Corrie, so I could watch it on the news? I always forget. Better run back and look at the big fucking timer!"

That's the next thing. You're not gonna go back and double-check. You'd put the timer on the remote or some shit. Not the bomb. That shit only exists to help the hero. And to show the audience that shit's about to get real. Which stopped being fun sometime in the 80s when MacGyver did it. "See, I'm gonna push this button here when I want to nuke the damn thing and THEN a pointless 30 seconds timer begins, to give the good guys a chance to defuse the whole thing. Bad guy code, can't break that." It's as annoying and overused as the bad guy, who shoots everyone in the face, including his own henchmen, just to show how badass he is. Yet he only captures the good guy and puts him in some elaborate death trap, which never actually works. Usually topped off with the bad guy revealing all of his plans. You'd think that even the bad guys watch cheesy 80s action flicks and learn from them.

Ahem. Anyway. Sherlock. New season. Fucking awesome! And relatively plausible, for the most part. Sometimes I hate it. Sherlock looking at any random object for about a second and deducting a character's whole life from it. And it all seems to make sense. You're watching that shit, going all like, "Aw yeah, I could do that!" when you couldn't deduct where that piss stain on your pants came from after a night of heavy drinking. Stupid, ridiculously attractive, clever, talented Benedict Cumberbatch. Even his fucking name is fucking interesting. Bastard.

I don't quite understand why they cast him as Smaug, though. His voice has been altered so heavily, he might as well be voice-acted by Coronation Street's Deirdre Barlow. And that dragon bears as much of his likeness as Draco did to Sean Connery (i.e. none). Desolation of Smaug was okay, though, aside from all the shit that has already been criticized to death by everyone. I agree, film wasn't super awesome, but it wasn't terrible. Also, Stephen Fucking Fry. In a shit role, but in a Hobbit film nonetheless. Bastard. I wanna be on the panel of QI just once. I'd be terribly boring and not funny, which applies to at least 50% of their regulars, so I'd fit right in. I need my own TV show.

So yeah, new year's resolutions. Do you have any of those? Ever remember any of them for more than a week? My brain loves to go crazy around new year's eve. Usually when I'm in bed, it's 6am and I'm running out of precious sleep time. And all those crazy ideas seem strangely amazing and brilliant when they come to me. "Dude! We're totally gonna work out from now on! Like, you should totally get up right the fuck now and do crunches! You're not sleepy, anyway! Do like 50 of them every morning, for like a year, it'll be awesome!"
Mhm. Sure. My brain is also trying to convince me that I should merge this whole blog thing and my youtube channel. You know, less writing, more blabbling on video. Be famous. Like TotalBiscuit or AngryJoe or some shit. Eloquence, strong personality, that kinda crap. I dunno. I think I'm just gonna take a nap. Also, fucking bank holiday in Germany. Again. I had no fucking clue. No wonder nobody posted any news today. It's gonna be my fucking job. I didn't know. Argh! Back to work! I'm not getting paid enough for this. Not remotely...

-Cat