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Below is a scattershot list of things I did and didn't do, some of which paid off and some of which were incredibly stupid. It's not a complete list, but it's a decent slice of things I've discovered from bouncing around the place. Some of it may be useful to you; if none of it is, then I am a terrible human being but I still won't be all sweaty when I get off the second plane after eighteen hours. So there's that. 1)  Getting where I need to be the day before. If a company is sending you somewhere for something, acknowledge the fact that you're no use to anybody looking a mess and smelling of aeroplane sweat. Turn up a couple of days before whatever it is you need to do. If someone is paying for the flight, it's going to cost the same whether you're there for two days or twenty. By the same token... 2)  When whatever it is that you went there for is done, leave. Abandon ship. Get out of town. You don't need a few days to wind down or see...

Below is a scattershot list of things I did and didn't do, some of which paid off and some of which were incredibly stupid. It's not a complete list, but it's a decent slice of things I've discovered from bouncing around the place. Some of it may be useful to you; if none of it is, then I am a terrible human being but I still won't be all sweaty when I get off the second plane after eighteen hours. So there's that. 1) Getting where I need to be the day before. If a company is sending you somewhere for something, acknowledge the fact that you're no use to anybody looking a mess and smelling of aeroplane sweat. Turn up a couple of days before whatever it is you need to do. If someone is paying for the flight, it's going to cost the same whether you're there for two days or twenty. By the same token... 2) When whatever it is that you went there for is done, leave. Abandon ship. Get out of town. You don't need a few days to wind down or see t...

I finished Sleeping Dogs today, and I'm here to tell you that you should probably go out and buy it. If you ever wondered how Shenmue 3 would pan out, this is pretty much it assuming Ryo turned into Jackie Chan: Supercop and started mashing heads into freezers. As someone who has spent a reasonable amount of time wandering around Hong Kong (and also wrote an altogether too long dissertation on the politics and symbolic imagery of 90s HK cinema back in Uni) I was dying to see how this would pan out. After an hour or so of playtime, I was close to being overwhelmed at how damned Hong Kongy everything was. That first walk around the market? INCREDIBLE. I think the devs went for trips to HK to record the sound and capture general observations, and it shows - everything from the ding ding the shops make when you walk in / out to the perfectly replicated noise of the pedestrian crossings is all here. My opening game highpoint was jumping up onto some rooftops and suddenly hearing a...

Sleeping Dogs is a very good game indeed. The music is phenomenal, and a curious mix of jazz, classical and straight up Bruce Lee 70s vibes . You haven't lived until you've staked out a drugs bust with that tune playing in your car while sizing up the best way to take down 18 or so heavily armed goons down the nearest alleyway. I wasn't familiar with the artist linked above, and did a little Googling. Sure enough, the album containing that track (and a bunch of others from the game) is available to buy for 69p in the UK , and (from the looks of it) $9.99 everywhere else. It is fantastic . You know what to do... / 2016 update : NEW LINK .

What's amazing about the latest videogame fiasco isn't so much the latest tipping point (" girlfriend mode ", just in case she holds the controller upside-down HAHA) as fact that it keeps on happening over and over again in the first place. Steps for success: 1) Say something anybody with ten seconds experience in talking publicly about stuff could tell you is a bad idea on the grounds of it being a) silly b) offensive to a decent slice of your paying audience and c) silly 2) Watch as it becomes the focal point of said article, exploding across the internet at a million screaming people an hour 3) Ensure the head guy says something that suggests he hadn't actually seen the article in question before weighing in 4) Dig that failtrain all the way down to Chinatown in a horrible, horrible example of "it's broke, so I did the exact opposite of fixing the shit out of it". There is a time and a place to use the "...but, but..." de...

Watching a movie together when you're 7,000 miles away is tricky, but not impossible. Step 1 : Syncronise watches. That kinda helps. Step 2 : Find places that are a) showing the movie you both want to watch at the same time despite the difference in timezones, and b) are likely to play roughly the same amount of adverts and other junk before the movie. This can actually be somewhat problematic - if one of you is watching a regular screen and the other is in IMAX, the IMAX pre-movie garbage is likely to be twice as long as they spend about 40 minutes beating you over the head with how awesome everything is (and even then, some IMAX screens will vary drastically depending on the cinema chain). The most we've been out was about twenty minutes or so for Spider-Man (look ma! A hyphen!) and something like 2 minutes difference for The Dark Knight Rises WHICH I AM PRETTY IMPRESSED WITH, BY THE WAY. The seven (and, sometimes, eight) hour time difference requires a bit...

If you told me I'd be doing nothing but grumbling about a new Max Payne game, I'm not sure I would have believed you. However, here it is and here we are. If you don't want to read this long dissection, then you can summarise a lot of the frustrations by clicking this link . If you're still with me, then here comes a rather long, somewhat spoilerish ramble. I also spoil the ending to Splinter Cell Conviction, but I don't think anybody will care about that. I should also add that the soundtrack for this game is fantastic, and well worth buying. Where is Max and what have you done to his bullet time? Anyone familiar with the early games knows Max is not a guy to screw around with - a quick tap of the button and he dips into bullet time which is typically the most efficient way to take out a room full of goons waving uzis. Max Payne 2 deepened and enhanced bullet time by making Max plunge into a more bullet timey state of mind the longer you blasted bad guys, cu...