The Triumphant Return

Readers, non-readers, fans and casual web-browsers searching for the final page of the internet (here's a pointer...search banana homunculus), prepare to have your collective brain exploded semi-orgasmically by my monstrously incredible words...

I. Am. Back.

And here to tinsel-up my return: the high-calorie ranch on the low-fat salad that is my life, Stas Shvetsov, has his opinion on the recent release of Call of Duty Black Ops...

Stas Speaks: Call of Duty Black Ops

Unlike many people, I haven’t been counting down the days until Black Ops was released. Nor was I drooling over its high-octane, action-packed trailers. I have in fact tried to completely ignore the whole ordeal, hoping that soon it will all blow over and the game will not randomly pop-up into EACH AND EVERY conversation I happen to take part in. Of course, I was totally and utterly kidding myself.

When Black Ops was released, the world seemed to have opened up a vortex that sucked in

everything mildly decent about people around me and spat it back out as turd. When I met my

friends on the 9th of November 2010, they seemed to have changed. They were like... zombies!

Zombies that don’t have chunks of flesh missing or bone sticking out of their disfigured bodies or the constant groan of ‘braaains’ escaping their mouths like you see in video games but the kind that have a constant blank expression on their faces and respond negatively (or not at all) to your attempts to change the conversation’s subject. As I approached them, distinctive yelps and exclamations of things such as ‘he was just lying the hard-scoping everyone’, ‘THEN right, get this, I got game winning kill with an RC-XD’ and ‘FAMAS sprays like a bitch’ could be heard and although I had anticipated something like this as I lay in bed last night, counting down the minutes until the apocalypse began, it still scared me to no end. I came up to them awkwardly and sat down, awaiting the question with dread. It came almost instantly. ‘Have you got Black Ops?’ The ugly words immobilised me as I silently shook my head, praying for an event big enough to overcome this. Maybe things would shift a little if a huge spaceship landed above us and aliens ran out and took us all hostage. I looked upwards at the sky. Alas, no such thing. My ‘friends’ looked at me, expressionless, and the silence was broken with ‘I’m almost first prestige now’.

I realise that I may have rambled on a little. I’ll therefore cut to the chase. My day was a disaster and I didn’t fit in at all. Finally it had ended and I rushed home, switched on my laptop, opened Steam, found Black Ops and paid the enormous sum of 40 Great Britain Pounds in order to obtain it. I had done all this is a trance and once the transaction had been completed, I realised what hideous deed I had just committed, sank back in my chair and died a little. They had won. I had lost. I could see the headlines of some crappy newspaper/magazine now; ‘Stas Shvetsov driven to extreme measures by peer pressure’. It was horrible. I was a complete and utter failure and my willpower had been shattered into a million pieces.

I spent the rest of the evening slouching around in misery until finally, quite some time after, my

laptop bleeped to inform me that it had successfully downloaded and installed Call of Duty: Black

Ops. I approached the thing warily, sat down at my comfy revolving chair and looked at my two

options. Call of Duty: Black Ops or Call of Duty: Black Ops Multiplayer. I figured the first would

contain the campaign and the gloriously acclaimed ‘zombies’ mode. I yawned and thought about

it for a second. It didn’t take me very long to realise that I was, by gaming standards, a ‘noob’ and therefore online play would only result in mockery and humiliation. Hence I decided to start myself off easy and double-clicked the first option.

This is where my escalating hate for Black Ops really began. It’s not fair to say that I despise the

game. I don’t. It has its good points (which I will get to) but they are easily overcome by the bad

ones. Anyway, on with the review/story.

Seconds after double-clicking the icon, my game launched. For a few seconds my screen flashed a

blue Black Ops introduction and then it all went black. I waited patiently for about 20 seconds then began to hit buttons. First the windows key – nothing, then a volley of other random keys. Finally I gave up and pushed Ctrl-Alt-Del to return myself to the desktop where my laptop helpfully informed me that Black Ops was not responding. Duh! After a couple of attempts to re-launch the game, I got so frustrated with the world around me that had psychologically forced me into spending 40 quid on a big, square error message that I contacted Activision, described the problem and left it to them to sort it out. So the single player review will come later, along with the zombies. I then tried the multiplayer which surprised me immensely. By working. I looked at all my blocked options which I had yet to unlock, then decided to waste no further time and launched myself into a Team Deathmatch. Needless to say, the first couple of games I got slaughtered. I was surprised at the fact that people were already so good at this game (NERDS!) despite it only being out for 2 days. The game play itself didn’t really ‘wow’ me at all. The guns looked like they were taken out of a manga cartoon and the graphics were average at best. Having played Modern Warfare 2 before, I can safely say the graphics on that overpowered those of Black Ops. I did however, like the little burst of blood as a person went down and the amusing kill-streaks (a little remote-control car with explosives attached to it that you steer into your enemies and then detonate it). However, that was just not enough. The game play felt stale and often left me feeling frustrated to the point of quitting thewhole thing and living through the next month as a social reject. Some of the customization options are cool, like having your emblem or clan logo picture on your gun and changing the background of

your nametag however this, as well as EVERYTHING else in the game costs money which you get by doing well, earning achievements, fulfilling contracts and generally not sucking at the game.

Therefore I spent what little money I was rewarded on things that I simply had to have in order to get more kills (kill-streaks, attachments etc.).

The maps had little detail and were generally too big for the concept in hand. I did enjoy playing

through the map ‘Launch’, purely for the ability to launch a huge rocket standing in the middle of

everything that then kills everyone underneath it. But that was unfortunately my only highlight. I generally kept to the map ‘Nuketown’, the smallest of the lot, to avoid spending half of my given time running around in search for people to kill or get killed by. At least in Nuketown as soon as you lean out of a corner you get sprayed with bullets from about 5 different players. A welcome change from the other maps.

Unlike MW2, Black Ops can also get surprisingly boring, surprisingly quickly. I am unsure of why this is but it really is a big downer on the whole thing. In some ways, it’s quite a good game, in others it is awful and in short it is a step back from Modern Warfare 2. So I was a little surprised at the praise it got from my mates, who went on about the damn thing non-stop for the next week. Needless to say, it is not a game that I will spend much more time on. Until Activision sort themselves out and fix my single player, that is.

UPDATE: SINGLE PLAYER

Activision amazed me by replying to my email (and the 4 after that) and telling me what to do in

order to fix my problem. After a while, I did manage to get my single player working, thanked them and with a heavy heart went straight into it. The first thing that I found interesting was the start menu itself. It was a menu where you could actually move the camera (a.k.a the view from your characters eyes) and see what’s around you. All the options are on a TV screen mounted in front of you so if you’re extremely lazy, you didn’t have to do move your mouse at all but I liked this little extra feature. I went into the campaign first. And I find this very difficult to say but it was amazing.

It starts with a cut-scene. You wake up; you’re in some sort of interrogation room. There’s a small amount of blood on your shirt and on the floor beneath you. You’re wired to some sort of electrical device and there’s a TV screen in front of you that’s flashing a chain of numbers. Despite it being a cut-scene you can look around the room freely (as well as skip it) so immediately there’s a small difference from most other games. You hear a distorted voice. It begins talking to you, it asks you several simple questions (such as your name) and when you don’t reply an electric shock is sent down your body, hence you being wired up. Eventually, you begin to tell it what it wants and, from the memories of Mason (the leading role of Black Ops), we are plunged into the storyline. After this the cut-scenes are very similar, often coming at the end of a level or at some point through it. The levels are always action-packed and, as with most previous Call of Duty games, kept interesting through twists and an intelligent plot. As well as this, there are many points where it isn’t just an all-out shooter. Many times you are required to take out your enemy using stealth or simply not take them out at all. Sometimes, you find yourself walking through hordes of enemies that either don’t see you or simply consider you one of them. It’s these little features that keep you playing instead of discarding the game (as I did a while back with its multiplayer version).

Many idiots don’t even start the campaign, ignoring it completely and going straight to the (crappy) multiplayer. However if you have an attention span of over 30 seconds, which will be useful for watching explanatory cut-scenes, I would highly recommend the playing through it. So much in fact, that I’d suggest getting the game simply because of it. I myself have spent only about 3 hours on it but from that time, I can construct a pretty powerful opinion of it.

The zombie mode was nothing special. Unless you were looking forward to Black Ops SO much,

you decided to spend an extra 30 pounds (or in some extreme cases, 90 pounds, for the collector’s edition) on the Prestige edition, you only get one map to slay zombies on (an extra 4 for the Prestige edition and Collector’s edition). The map is reasonably large and offers a variety of weapons, but eventually running away backwards from hordes of disfigured zombies while firing your shotgun into them does get tiresome and you wish for a change. If you’re REALLY good, apparently a zombie boss will come after you, mad that you’ve killed all its friends. But that never happened to me. So eventually the repetitive, running, shooting, dying technique (unless you’re the kind of person that prefers sitting in a corner, in which case it is the crouching, shooting, dying technique) bores you and you quit, unhappy that you’ve wasted so much time doing something so pointless.

You may ask ‘Why Stas? Why did you just write all that? I thought you clearly stated that Black Ops was not your thing, that you were not a sad little weirdo who gets home, runs to his console and plays until he falls asleep. Then why write a review about the bloody thing?’ And being honest, I myself am unsure why. I guess it may have been that, in a state of boredom, I sub-consciously began typing and then decided I may as well continue. Or that I wanted to just put some points out, state my opinion, stay individual. All that jazz. In any case, if you feel like you have 40 pounds too much money and you don’t mind spending that much hard earned dosh on something that will only last you about 8 hours (Single Player campaign, I’d advise you to ignore the rest) why NOT buy Call of Duty: Black Ops?

Well I Give In...

Apparently it's easier to get readers if you write short, pithy posts rather than giant paragraphs (see below) so here you go, a random little point with no massive speculation. I mean what am I, a teacher? I don't need to keep prattling on to keep your attention. No. Something short and swift will do. Here it is.

I have posted above a video. To see more of this and more of much like it, hop over to http://www.youtube.com/user/beelsebub2196

Why I'll never get anywhere...

From here on in and out and up also, I've nonsensically realised...my career is ruined. I've reached a cul de sac from which there is no escape. Even the little path down the side where the cats live is grown over with weeds with bits of bottle in them.

Metaphors aside, this is a serious problem. I've reached an actual, factual dilemma within my line of work. The thing is...

People don't take comedy seriously.

Not any more at any rate. There's too much of it! You couldn't go around congratulating the creators of every last little tease on facebook, every chuckly text spam starter. Unrewarding. So no, comedy is what nobody wants any more. Case in point: PhoneShop, e4's latest comedy, promoted to the max just to fall short at the finish line, because it was poo.

And if that's what they're pushing out in the comedy line at e4, the most fantastically modern of the twelve and a half (they can't count for a whole if they're only active for three hours) channels available to me through freeview, then the genre has surely been cut off at the source, left floating in a crevasse full of piss-flavoured reviews and slipping quickly to the murky depths.

Which brings me to my dilemma: With comedy moribund what in Christ's name am I going to do? The mildly amusing and the amusingly mild are my expert areas. I try writing serious from time to time, and as a comedian I'm something of a barely hatched duck, but take a genre out of the picture and you're blowing me out of the water, with nothing but a few scraps of singed debris to cling to.

The solution of course would be for TV to buck up it's ideas and start pushing out some serious commo-gold, but sadly this is 2010, and all the jokes are gone. There is literally, from this point on, in my opinion, nothing worth laughing at that doesn't hark back to the yesteryear. This is the jokepocalypse, laughageddon, et cetera (I was going to put a variation of judgement day here, but it's three am, I've just watched 5 episodes of Nathan Barley back to back and my brain's as fried as insert fried thing here)

Pack your bags, kids, and smash the TV. They're here. They're coming. And if you're craving those last few laughs before that awful cold silence, head over to my house, we'll have a 1900 film fest like you would believe (2000-2010 included of course).

Screw the ratings TV dudes, you've had my envisage, hang up your pens and call Morris or Gervais or something. And hurry, my carpet wasn't laid to suit these sort of chuckles...

Escape from the Tower

On Monday 25th of October, Robbie Cleary, along with his mum and his sister and his mate, set off upon a gruesome journey, the trials that awaited him both arduous and nerve-wracking in their nature. His sole aim: To test a recently developed iPod application.

The day began...damply. Not promising. But five hours and four train rides later it had brightened up, and I was standing on the threshold of the Tower of London. If you can call it a threshold. It's more of a giant bridge with an intimidating gate, adorned with glass-covered fourteenth century graffiti. Around me slouched my crack team of testing personnel, a mixture of new-age boffins (me, Jahan and Stan), sprinkled with innocent sugars and spices (my sister and Stan's), baked with a vintage, old-style gas oven (My mum, John and Constance). I don't know why I've set us out as a recipe. I'm hungry, okay?

After a quick brief, we bombed up to the boardroom and got our pods and phones set up. Because my device was of the pod variety I had to take a nonGPS route through the application, which meant I had a little less down time because (having ignored the brief) I spent most of my boardroom time pretending to be Lord Sugar and trying to work out how to operate the system.

In the end I found it was rather simple, and I was ready to go seconds behind the others. We bundled down to the entrance, while the vintage team struggled through some hiccups in the GPS location.

That aside, we were presented with four prisoners to free, and for the sake of politeness, we all decided to choose the same one (the polar bear), and were thusly thrust - at different paces - upon the same mission across the tower. I took the lead, investing a certain gamer's enthusiasm in the format, and we rendezvoused at the end of that mission by the tower gate, at which point we fumbled through a little pop-up quiz, then received our reward for our errand-running. For some reason though, a ghost in the machine extracted a large quantity of my friends' money, and I was left the pompous landlord, milking his Apple iCashCow.

I've forgotten to mention that I was filming the entire thing, and juggling a map, an iPod and a camcorder was getting to be tricky, and continued to be tricky throughout. But it was fun enough to justify some strains and bumps, the characters loveable and ridiculous enough to keep you going, even though when you looked back you realised the majority of what you'd been doing was walking and tapping. Because while you knew that, you also knew that you'd enjoyed it, and that along the way you got to see some neato historical structuros, perhaps scrounged some advice from the odd guard or even a beefeater, learnt a thing or two and kept the kids from puncturing your skull with their horrible little voices for a couple of hours (except if you're me, in which case you only have to open your mouth to be wrenched back to the joyous world of childhood). After ambling through 3 of the 4 missions we packed up for lunch, then munched our way back to the boardroom. We wrote up reviews and did several pieces to camera.

Overall, a definite "experience". I can't say word-for-word what I said to that camera but I think you'll find an approximation of it above, along with an enormous recount of the day. From that I hope you can make your own opinion about how well the app works. I, for one would like to say that it definitely succeeds in its objective, that being to distract the public from the terrible prison of overpriced tedium that is the Tower of London. No but really, it's a great place, you should go.

Robbie out.

You like that? That's my sign off.

Paranormal Activity 2

I'm not sure, and I'm hardly motivated enough to check, but I may have reviewed the first film on this very blog, if so, then you're probably better off reading that review, as I find my talents, unlike my good looks, but very like my general lifestyle, tend to deteriorate with time, much in the way that a hot lump of damp biscuit withers in the winter sun.

In case I didn't review the first film, here's my impression of the film, hot off the collective printing press formed by the connection of my brain and the internet. Although I suppose the actual connection would be my hands? Or the web? Or maybe my laptop? You see what I mean about deteriorating?

I'll start with what happened when I walked in the cinema, generally that can get laughs. And I need laughs. This is meant to be a comedy blog. So I walk in, buy my tickets, and then we go in and sit down.

No wait, I missed the funny part. I bought the tickets illegally! (audience laughter) I'm actually only fourteen years old, whereas the certificate for this film is Fifteen! (further laughs) Stupid bastards! (awkward silence, several audience members leave) Stupid...bloody...(gunshot)

Anyway, I went to the showing at cinema de lux, having decided to treat myself, and since no one else was available, I took Jahan, one of my less conventional friends. Unfortunately this caused multiple problems because:

A. He looks about twelve (apart from the moustache and arm hair)

and B. It's his first time with horror.

The first problem meant I had to use my parents in order to purchase our tickets (crime just isn't cool when your mum and dad help out), and the second meant I had to put up with him squeezing every available part of my body at regular intervals throughout the film.

The film itself I found to be lacking in originality. The jolts where still there, along with new faces to be dragged around the room by scary demons, but it seems a lot like more of the same from my perspective.

I'm not saying I wasn't scared. Tomorrow's stance will testify that I won't sleep tonight. The only problem was that I'd seen the first one, and was able to figure out - through the similarities between the scary moments in either film - the formula. It is as follows.

Normal stuff. Normal stuff. Little gag. Normal stuff. Normal stuff. Slightly worrying occurence. Buzzing noise. Something scary. Repeat until end.

In contrast to it's predecessor (which is also its sequel, though ends up fitting somewhere in the middle) PA2 has more characters, and is therefore more able to create contrasting characters and narrative arcs. There's the woman, who comes off as maternal and caring and anxious throughout, and there's the man, who's big and brave and won't take any of this ghostly shit seriously, then there's the girl, who comes off just about in the middle, and is therefore picked up as the protagonist, and there's a dog and a baby.

I don't know what it is about these kind of bonds, it's something I tried to pull off in my short story I posted a few weeks back, that surreal connection between two opposing things, the great beast and the innocent child. Anyway its tangible in some of the scarier scenes. The dog's never far from the baby's side, standing guard while he sleeps on. It's a beautiful bit of silent acting between two barely sentient beings, but its pulled off immaculately, and of course the baby doesn't just contribute with his existence. There's also the crying. I don't know what the hell they did to that baby to make it cry so hard, maybe they just punched it, but the fear come off in a very real sense, and in a sort of raw sense as well, from something with no language and no knowledge. The baby controls the film in a way. Sort of. Do I know what I'm talking about?

In summary, (because my thighs and fingertips are starting to ache, and there's only so long you can not revise before the guilt starts messing with your bodily functions) the film gives a believable background to its ancestor, with some of the scares we came to love from the first film, and some extra stuff chucked in too. First time PA goers are in for a shock. Second time fans, it's still worth going. But expect a touch of the de ja vu with your spontaneous incontinence.

Robbie out.

Another Apology

I'm sorry guys! (again)

I've failed you! (again)

I did announce on my facebook - that wondrous bundle of knowledge - that I would be reviewing The Event, but I found my heart wasn't in it (Blair Underwood is though) and I ended up engulfing spoonfuls of sugar upon the edge of my bed, being lulled to sleep by never-ending reruns. I had become what I had ridiculed in my second ever post, donning my Homer Simpson shorts and Matrix shirt (both ridiculously underworn and overused) and surrendering myself to the television in a desperate act of attempted self-consolation.

Thankfully though I was saved. In a blind fit of nostalgia I rang a long-lost friend (who lives about two hundred metres away) and she convinced me to come over and blub in person.

On doing so (having changed out of my unsuitable attire) I felt considerably more human, and was able to drink coffee and stave the night away listening to her endless problems, and feeling slightly more humorous about mine. Until her parents politely asked me to leave at nine. Then again, slightly less politely at ten. Then again at ten something, at which point I realised it was in the interest of my safety that I left.

So I'm back, sort of.

Not that I ever left.

Er...

Look, I'm here, okay?

Phone shop (again? really?)

Shock humour.

Is that it?

Jesus.

I can do that. I do do that. Who hasn't shouted fuck and giggled in the classroom? No one.

I've run out of things to say.

This never happens.

Why can't this show deliver?

Why have I nothing to say about it?

Nothing should be said.

Bury this.

Burn it.

Kill it. Eat it's children.

Bury it.

Late night panic

You may have realised over the last few weeks that I have "sold out" in many ways. Posting short stories, plays, documentaries, basically anything that I bother to knock out when I'm bored, no pun intended. Whereas what I should be doing is entertaining and enthralling with my comedy style reviews! Doi!

But I'm scared.

For possibly the first time in my life, ever, one of my nonsensical reviews is going to decide my future, in just a dozen or so hours, when I stride elegantly into my english classroom (to the sound of gasps all around as my classmates take in my dashing masculine beauty, cursing themselves for having gone whole days without it over the weekend) I will be forced to sit down, possibly quite damply, and scribble out 600 or so words in an actual factual test.

If you like this style of post, head over to http://www.disney.co.uk/DisneyMovies/high-school-musical-3movie/ while I nervously attempt to work up the courage to defenestrate while I'm still young. (Look up "defenestrate" and use it on your friends! They'll be amazed!)

Why everything feels wrong...

Oh e4,

Beautiful, pitiful e4,

I see you there, amid the remnants of your shattered dreams,

you were hip, funny, flashy,

you had that voice-over guy,

oh e4,

where are you now?

Beneath the tattered robes of some late-night high-budget flop-out sitcom,

rolling lavishly in recycled drama, caught up in the ratings storm?

I see you e4,

and I'm not happy.

Yes I'm afraid it's time to denounce our beloved channel for all but the occasional repeat of our favourite sitcom, and perhaps a bit of inbetweeners but NO MORE! For e4 has failed us, yes you e4, i see you watching, come over here it's okay, come on. Yes you have failed us. What were yuo thinking? A phone shop? Ooh look at me, I'm a little man pretending to be David Brent surrounded by scary gangster people WRONG! Yes I have hit you. Well I'm just making a point. Shut up, I'm not finished. And Ugly Betty? Drop that stuff! Drop it like it's hot, and covered in gaudy TV vomit. Drop it into a vat of something unthinkable and then walk away. e4, you know I love you, but you're bringing me down. What's that? It's okay? Why? A new series? Of what? Desperate what? Oh. Oh god. Oh spare me. Oh jesus I promised myself... I'm sorry e4. Don't look at me like that! I'm sorry! I'm switching to sky1.

If you're anything like me, which I doubt, this'll be the drama playing out inside your head too. But if you're female e4 will be a big brute man with chest hair and a chiselled physique, whereas in my brain e4 is a foxy mistress, with flowing blond hair and a gigantic wardrobe and... and... oh e4 why? WHY!?