Synchronicity on Monkey Island

I am currently reading "Cabal" (AKA "Nightbreed") by Clive Barker and a priest appeared who is being blackmailed by a ne'er do well and was thing how technology can date both film and writing . The priest says "I burned the negatives" the ne'er do well replies "I made copies". A similar situation underpins "The Righteous Gemstones" except the technology is iPhones and hard drives. That series is wonderful black comedy in which everyone bar none is utterly beneath contempt, absolutely awful in self righteous right wing Christian way.

While going out for a little shopping through hail, snow and rain I decided to play an album I hadn't listened to for many years, "Monkey Island" by the J Geils Band "Monkey Island" was also a favourite game of both my daughters many years ago in the days of efficient code when a game could fit on a single floppy disc.

The album does contain some great songs , "I Do"  is a particularly good rock and soul example and the album features some great harp / harmonica from Magic Dick (why was a harmonica called a harp or a mouth organ) but the title track is nine minutes of epic story telling with an absolute killer chorus. I found a live version from 1977 at Winterland and the intro takes up almost half the song. I think the studio version is better , but this is good.

This is a revisitation of something I know is good, unlike the "Grand Hotel" by Procol Harum which I was unaware how brilliant that still is , so it will be getting a lot of revisitations.

Enjoy , and Monkey Island the game is available on Steam for around a tenner.

Steam Powered

I must say I am very impressed with the Steam Gaming Platform. I know there are so many games that run on this but it's great to be able to play the ones that are my level obviously very retro and they cost next to nothing and actually work as they did when first released.

So far I have bought the Quake and Hexen packs which were lest than a tenner for both of them and am considering Doom which again is  a pittance, but all these are veritable timesinks or time vampires. I also got Civilization III for a massive 74p.

I would not regard myself as a Computer Gamer, I have a Nintendo Wii which I use about every six months, and when I see the latest XBox and Playstation Games I know that there is no way I could even start any of those games. These games now have budgets normaly associated with films, with scored soundtracks by major composers. I cannot see where I could put aside the time to actually take part in these games.

I remember buying a Steam Package which contained some amaging graphical games but just couldn't handle all the controls an dthen decided to uninstall it and forgot what my original account was.

Anyway I am really happy with this installation and it should keep me occupied for the odd half hour  when I need a bit of mental relaxation. So the natural music to accompany this (for me) is "It's A Game" by String Driven Thing which was also covererd by The Bay City Rollers.

Hope your Friday is going well.

Steam Quake Goofle

I was going to write a Christmas Day Free post yesterday but in the end couldn't be bothered. This morning I realised that I had no games on my PC although I had back up disk images of Quake, Hexen and Doom but the inherent laziness of finding putting a disk in the drive kicked in as well as trying to get the daamned things to run on Windows 10.

So a quick Google search and I find that a whole Quake collection is available on Steam for £8.49. It was really a no brainer. I just saw that I mistakenly spelt Google as Goofle. Isn't Goofle just a great word.

I also realised I hadn't played a game on this computer since I got it over a year ago, so booted up Quake in Nightmare mode and got killed almost immediately , I then retried in normal mode and the machine froze when I was half way through Level 1, but I'm not too bothered, I think it will sort itself out. I also got Civilization III for 74p.

I decided to listen to some of my favourite Punk compilation 1-2-3-4, five disks of brilliance and the first compilation that The Clash allowed themselves to be included on. I was playing from my network set up and then got sidetracked and was playing Marcel King's "Reach For Love" from the Factory Records box about six times. It really is one of the best records ever, and is Shaun Ryder's favourite Factory single.

I posted on Facebook that at the moment it's my favourite record ever, so obviously it has to be the Boxing Day song although I am up to "Anarchy In The UK" on the 1-2-3-4 album and every song on that box could probably feature in my posts.

Have a fantastic Boxing Day folks.