Blog Revival: A Bunch Of Stuff From July Edition (WARNING: May Include Video Games)

It's been around six weeks since I last posted a blog here on Giant Bomb. There are a handful of reasons for that. I think some of them happen to be pretty good, but don't just take my word for it. I'm going to outline them in this blog post, so you can be the judge.

July was a very busy month...

...with most of my time divided between working and attending 'the Tringe'. For the uninitiated, allow me to explain - the Tringe Festival is an annual comedy festival held in my hometown of Tring. Now five years strong, it basically consists of a bunch of comedians (some very well-known, some fairly obscure) coming here to perform previews of their shows before taking them up to the Edinburgh Fringe in August. It runs for the first three weeks of July, and is probably the single best opportunity to experience great comedy in this country without high-tailing it down to London or up to Edinburgh. We're incredibly lucky to have it on our doorstep, and I hope it continues for many years to come.

In previous years I've attended a handful of gigs at the Tringe, predominantly those featuring acts I'm already an established fan of including Richard Herring and Peacock & Gamble. This year, I decided to do something a little different - I bought a Tringe passport, essentially a season ticket granting me access to every show of the festival. I then proceeded to use that passport to attend as many shows as possible. The result of this was that I had no free time whatsoever - a typical day in July meant getting up around 7am, getting into work for 8:30, staying there 'til 6:30pm, then walking the forty-minute journey to our local theatre and watching two hour-long comedy shows back-to-back, before finally walking the forty-minute journey back home, fixing myself some supper, and going to bed to try and get some sleep before having to do it all again the next day.

The Tringe was a fucking draining experience, but also an incredibly rewarding one. I saw a lot of great comedians I probably would never have even heard of if I hadn't gone, and some of them have become firm favourites - including the hilarious sketch troupe Late Night Gimp Fight, to name but one. I was also fortunate enough to see some huge names in incredibly intimate venues, including Shappi Khorsandi, Milton Jones, Mark Watson, Josh Widdicombe - names that probably won't mean anything to American readers of this blog, but should elicit some response from any Brit who's ever watched a BBC panel show. Only one act disappointed, namely Jim Davidson, who stuck out like a sore thumb on the festival's billing and delivered a tired hour of borderline racist, sexist, homophobic "comedy" that only managed to draw a single laugh out of me. The fact he then proceeded to attack one of my friends on Twitter after the show (after actively seeking out criticism he wasn't even tagged in) simply cemented my low opinion of him.

I say I attended 'as many shows as possible', because other commitments meant I did miss a handful of nights. My band Sudden Gunfire opened a local carnival on the second Saturday of the month, a reasonably successful gig from my perspective as a performer, even considering I very nearly fucked it up by forgetting the outro to Metallica's 'Enter Sandman'. Thankfully very few people were there to witness it, because the start time on the printed tickets for the event was a whole hour after we took to the stage (yeah, I'm still a little bitter about that). Perhaps the most frustrating missed show was on the final night of the festival, when I missed Jon RIchardson, one of my all-time favourite comedians, because I was nearly two-hundred miles away in the Peak District (more on that in a bit). I did catch his show back in April, but that was in a thousand-seater theatre, and it would have been amazing to see him in a much smaller, more intimate space. Even in spite of missing some shows, I wound up being one of the festival's top forty attendees, and was rewarded for my dedication with a poster signed by all the performing comedians (pictured right). It's an awesome memento of the month, and I plan to get it framed and up on my wall in the near future.

No sooner had my commitment to the Tringe finished than I found myself being whisked away to another part of the country, for a week's holiday with some friends in the Peak District. Again, for the uninitiated, the Peak District is a national park here in England that sits snugly between the Midlands and the North. It's full of great big hills (hence the name), cliffs, reservoirs, underground caverns and quaint rural villages and towns. It's a beautiful, inspiring part of the country, and I wish I'd been there for more than just a week so I could have taken in a little more of everything. I'll probably end up writing something a little more detailed on my other blog (again, more about that in a while), but for now here's a handful of photos from the trip, all taken by my friend Dean, that say more about the place than I ever could in words:

So that covers pretty much everything that I've been up to in the last six weeks. Except, of course, for the thing that's most relevant to this here website - the video games I've been playing. Yep, that's right - even between work, the comedy and the holiday, I've managed to find a little bit of down-time to play some video games. Which video games, you ask? Let me tell you...

Alice: Madness Returns

I leapt into Alice: Madness Returns after watching an amateur dramatics performance of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland back in June. While the play didn't quite live up to all of its promises, it did leave me eager to spend more time in the weird and wonderful realm of Wonderland, and I chose to do so through the medium of video games. I played the PC version, and even on this humbly-specced laptop, the game ran smoothly and looked great. The lack of free time meant it took me around three weeks to make my way through its fifteen-hour campaign, but although it was a fragmented journey through American McGee's interpretation of Wonderland, it was still an enjoyable one. The gameplay left me satisfied throughout, combining floaty pure platforming sequences with simple puzzle-solving and Zelda-esque combat so successfully that I didn't tire of it at all during my time with the game.

Pokémon Trading Card Game

I spotted this had been put on sale on the 3DS eShop the day before I went away on holiday, and rapidly downloaded it with a view to spending some of my holiday down-time playing through it. I ended up doing just that, beating most of the game's 'club masters' (its equivalent of gym leaders) during the week, then polishing off the 'grand masters' (read: Elite Four) upon my return. It's a surprisingly solid conversion of the actual card game, and despite being fifteen years old it holds up really well. Structurally it's similar to a regular Pokémon game (collect 'em all, beat the eight leaders, get their badges, and take on the Elite Four to prove you're the very best like no one ever was), and It's got a pretty good learning curve that doesn't spoon-feed you every nuance and rule, but doesn't throw you in kicking and screaming at the deep end, either. Card battles are pacy, exciting affairs that fuel a 'just-one-more' mentality in the player that isn't easy to ignore. Sure, it may not look great, but the visuals are functional and do their job well. More than anything, it's got me really secretly hoping that the folks at Nintendo might be testing the waters for a new handheld incarnation of the Pokémon TCG. Throw together a new game like this one with an up-to-date card roster and online play, and I'd be all over that shit.

So only two games beaten in July. A pretty meagre total, but not too bad when you consider the vast amount of other stuff happening at the time. Thankfully August is looking like a much calmer month, with less overtime, less out-of-work commitments, and no three-week, energy-draining, insanity-depleting comedy festival to attend. Under those circumstances, two games in a month looks like a pretty easy number to beat.

I'll be back to writing much more frequently about my gaming time from here on out, mainly because I'm writing more in general. In a bid to re-kickstart my creativity and actually finish my first damn novel, I've committed myself to a programme of daily writing and weekly blogging. That doesn't necessarily mean I'll be blogging weekly here on Giant Bomb, as I've also started maintaining a personal, non-video-game-related blog over on my website, but it does mean that I shouldn't be going through any more six-week stretches without updating you all on what I've been playing. You can expect to hear more from me later in the month, when I'll hopefully have some interesting things to say about Pokémon Colosseum, Fable III and Halo: Reach. Until then, I'd like to thank you very much for reading (especially if you persevered through the first half of this blog, considering it doesn't really have any business being on this website). Take care, and I'll see you around.

Dan

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Currently playing - Pokémon Colosseum (GCN)