So I went to the first (and hopefully, annual) Kapow Comic Con fearing the worst. And in retrospect, I shouldn’t have.

With ticket sales capped at around 5,000 for each day, there was a nice element of keeping things low key and dare I say it mature, though the trend for women with large breasts in tight clothing in comics at the moment probably belied that maturity. While there were a couple of cosplayers when I was there (a dedicated day for them was on the Sunday, which I didn’t attend) there were certainly no “huggers” there that I could see. In fact, if there were any there, I get the impression they’d have been stared down pretty quickly. That alone probably helped elevate the status of the event in one go.

While the main floor itself wasn’t necessarily the biggest, it certainly packed a lot in and was really well laid out, which certainly made a  change from the MCM Expo’s more “throw it all in the same room and hope for the best” mentality. Also having the talks and events in a seperate area away from the floor of the show certainly helped too. It meant there wasn’t quite as mad a build-up of people as with MCM, although Moon & Source Code director Duncan Jones certainly drew a crowd when he did a Q&A and signing session on the IGN stage when I was there at around Midday on the Saturday.

And on a personal note, I certainly appreciated the gaming section there. It was nothing spectacular and it certainly wont be troubling the likes of E3 any time soon but having someone like IGN on board and them bringing the likes of Portal 2 & Dirt3 along certainly improved matters compared to other aforementioned events.

However, there are a couple of things to take forward for next years event.

1) Why was there not an event program in my “goody” bag given to me when I arrived at the hall? While it’s nice to know that Rutger Hauer is playing a hobo and that he has a shotgun, knowing that there were talks and events that I could attend would arguably be of more use. In fact, it wasn’t until I picked a program up on the way out that I realised I’d missed them. Yes, I could have picked one up earlier and yes, I could have asked about them while I was there but how many others missed out on the talks because they weren’t given a program to begin with? Just me then. Ok, but I like to think I have some kind of valid point about this.

2) While the event was certainly well laid out & certainly some considerable effort was put into securing some high profile guests, it was also pretty small compared to the MCM. While as a 1st event, I can see that they deliberately kept things low key in the hope of selling the event out, thankfully proved correct. But a Kapow organised event in a hall the size of the MCM would, frankly, be superb. Particularly if they can squeeze in as much goodness as they did with the event in the few hours that I was there on the Saturday.

Still, for a first attempt, I must admit that Kapow certainly impressed me and has masses of potential for the future, especially if next years event is as well organised, attended and booked as this years clearly was.

A short Flickr set of photos & a video from the event can be found at my Flickr site. Should anyone wish to use any of the photos, could you please contact me via the comments section before using them. Comments are moderated before posting, so any personal details or addresses will not be published on this site.

Laziness
Boredom
My iPad
Easy access to Internet pornography
Laziness
Roy Hodgson
Tom Hicks
George Gillett
Laziness
Boredom due to my iPad
Laziness
Wordpress iOS App not working
Ill health
Boredom because of my iPad
Roy Hodgson, Tom Hicks & George Gillett (as a group, not just on their own)
Mass Effect 2
Taking my job too seriously
Twitter
Addictiveness of Twitter
Easy access to pornography on my iPad
Laziness

Ok, I’m bored now.

Oh, one last one. Boredom. That’s about it I think.

Let’s get one thing clear from the start; I love Test Drive Unlimited 2. More so than the first one, which is saying something. Just the addition of another island was enough for me but it’s a better looking, far more “focused” game than the first one which was, at times, something of a sprawling mess.

However, there is one particular aspect of the sequel that is annoying me immensely.

No, it’s not the fact that you have to drive by a dealership, car wash etc to unlock it (mainly cause it gives you impetus to go out and find things, which given that there is so much more to do this time around, is a good thing)

No, it is not the fact that you have to find all the roads in Hawaii/Oahu again (ok, this is slightly annoying but understandable to a degree as unlocking all the roads would kill the progression somewhat)

No, it’s not the myriad of bugs and “oddities” that seem to litter the game. A game this massive is bound to have a few bugs in the system. And there are a couple in there, to say the least. I seem to have avoided some of the worst so far, thankfully.

No, the most annoying aspect of this sequel are the characters who all seem to be the most vacuous, hateful group of people I’ve encountered in a gme for a long time. Sorry, that’s unfair. They’re not vacuous and hateful. They’re smug, vacuous, annoying, cliched, one dimensional and hateful. That’s better!

And it doesn’t help either that every single one of them looks absolutely identical. It’s almost as if two people have populated the entire populations of Ibiza & Oahu themselves. Ok, maybe I’m being a bit harsh but when you decide to base the whole game round these 8 or so people, you would at least except some kind of plot or characterisation, otherwise what is the point?

I guess that leads onto another point about how every single game now MUST have a plot of some kind to somehow justify it, in much the same way as every single game a few years back MUST be a open world game, merely because that’s what everyone else is doing. If there is no justifiable reason for it to be in the game, then it shouldn’t be there. Or if it must be there, then put some effort into it.

Anyway, if you’re after a game to sink the best part of 300 hours into then you can’t go wrong with TDU2. Just skip every cutscene and turn down the character voices, ok?

And that’s a shame. For me at least. Could have got so much done over the last 6-9 months but alas it was not to be. One thing I think I will be doing from now on is posting more of the random videos (and rants) on here and far less on Twitter. Though I think I’ve said that about 47 million times in the last 18 months and I still post on Twitter like a mentalist.

Anyway, nice to see they’ve updated the WordPress app, none the less. I leave you a picture I’ve decided to randomly attach to see how the photo adding bit of this works.

There are many, many well known electronic artists on there and my current personal favourite is West Country legend, legally denied Jedi Knight and all round genius Tom Middleton who’s uploaded many of his remixes, both official and unofficial to the site. But two of my favourite pieces up on the site at the moment are at both ends of the musical spectrum and show just how much variety there is on the site.

First up is something done by my friend Tim Maughan over at his eponymous site Tim Maughan Books. Here he’s done a mix under his pseudonym Shinohara Heavy Industries, which I’m sure is a reference to a particular company from an Anime. Better ask him, he’s the expert after all, something you’ll realise after a visit to his site. He’s put together a deep house techno mix with just a hint of minimal here and there, so gets a solid thumbs up from me.

Girls and Mechs and 909s – Part 1 by Shinohara H-Industries

The second one is perhaps slightly more well known in that it’s been linked by every man and his dog on Twitter but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worthy of even more exposure.

Here’s a thought. What if we took this guy and slowed him down to 1/8th of the speed so that one of his songs took 35 minutes to play? Would sound awful, no? Surprisingly not. The whole track was stretched using a program called PaulStretch, something that was used to create the 9 Beet Stretch project, one which played Beethoven’s 9th Symphony stretched out over a 24 hour period. Which I’ve heard and is an odd experience, I can tell you. This however, is beautiful and just about the right length.

J. BIEBZ – U SMILE 800% SLOWER by Shamantis

The bit around the 21 minute mark pretty much stopped me in my tracks. Well, it would have if I hadn’t been sitting down but it’s still pretty epic.

So there we are. A wide world of music out there and all of it free to listen without adverts. One in the eye for Spotify I think. And Mr. Tim Maughan shares a blog post with that Beiber Boy. He’ll be so thrilled.

Probably.

He also seemed to spend his time doing a weak impression of one Mr. B. Obama, weak in the sense that all he thought he needed to do was say the words “hope” and “change” at some point in every sentence and that would secure the vote for him. Of course, it didn’t and we all know what happened next…

So, to my surprise, I received a letter in the post the other day from The Conservation Party Foundation asking me if I’d like to make a donation. Given that I’m not currently a made man in the business world ie the Average Tory Party Donator, I found this quite surprising. However, as I looked through some of the material provided, I noticed that perhaps the Conservative party hadn’t changed quite as much as it thought it had….

The Conservative Party "Spectrum"

LOOK! A WHITE MAN! AND A JEWISH WHITE MAN! AND IN THE MIDDLE THERE! A WOMAN! Who says the Conservative Party isn’t making strides to be all inclusive in the 21st Century?

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, everything they sent me went straight in the shredder. I didn’t vote for them, so sure as hell not giving them money.

Expect of course it wasn’t. Someone at The Star had clearly been on the Something Awful or B3ta forums and decided that someone’s mock up was a real game and ran with the story, without first bothering to do anything important like fact check. The story was pulled from the website within hours of publication but not quickly enough for Rockstar Games’ lawyers to ask the Star for an apology.

What’s most interesting about the apology (link here) is the bit at the very bottom.

The Daily Star. A "news"paper, clearly?

If ever there was a more appropriate use of punctuation, then I’d like to see it.

Which while on the one hand is a bad thing, it does mean that their are some fantastic “fake” vids on YouTube. A lot of these videos contain out of copyright material with Boards tracks over the top, which given that the band themselves are named after the National Film Board Of Canada, means that there is a wonderful symmetry to the whole thing.

One of the best is this wonderful video for one of their earliest released tracks, Everything You Do Is A Balloon. It also happens to be one of their most beautiful too and I played it lots when my cat passed away last year. Thought I’d share anyway.

Paris is generally considered to be one of the most beautiful cities in the world and having just had the pleasure of a few days there, I can understand why. It’s not the first time I’ve been there but it is the first time in nearly 20 years and the first time I’ve ever been there on my own and had the pleasure of using Paris’ wonderful Metro system. Which makes London’s Underground system seem like the lap of luxury.

It may well have only been for a couple of days but with 75% of Paris being within walking distance of my hotel, getting everywhere on foot seemed like the right thing to do. The metro may well take you everywhere but you don’t get the flavour or the ambiance that you would by walking around.

There are 4 Flickr sets to look through;

First is the trip to the world famous Louvre, famous of course for having the Worlds Most Boring painting, the Mona Lisa (Pictured above, as underwhelming in this photo as in the flesh);

Second is a very sunny trip to Sacre Couer and Montmartre, famous for being the location of many french films including the ending of the seminal short film C’etait un Rendez-vouz. Though it was alot busier when I went there than in the ending of the film (embedded below). Probably didn’t smell quite so much of piss either back in 1974 (homeless people are very visible in Paris, more so than in London and New York)

C’etait un Rendezvous – Watch more Funny Videos

Thirdly, The Eiffel Tower, which shouldn’t really need any explanation and offered arguably better views than those at Montmartre;

And finally, everything else which includes one of my new favourite photos, something which someone has now dubbed Picard BC. One for the geeks/trekkies out there…

All in all, a very nice few days but much like everywhere else you need a good week to really see everything. But on the basis of this trip, would happily do so.

The MCM expo is bi-annual event held at the Excel arena in London. It is billed as an event for Movie, Comic and Anime fans but it should probably add cosplayers to that list too, given how a good half of the the people there were dressed up for the occasion.

It had a rather interesting atmosphere to it, not being too focused on one aspect or another and having that rather British feeling of being “cobbled” together and trying to fill as much of the exhibition hall with as many things as they could find. I’m sure that certainly wasn’t the case and the organizers spent many months trying to get as many people to exhibit and appear there as possible, but that wonderfully British feeling was still there. And I liked it.

The day itself was a bit of a blur and while at the time I wasn’t keen on staying there too long, I would go back there without too much hesitation. Probably not as a cosplayer though. Certainly whets my appetite for going to something like E3 in the States but not any time soon.

I would just like to say a big thanks to Tim Maughan over at his eponymous site for getting me in on a press pass. Didn’t perhaps get me anywhere “behind the scenes”, mainly cause there weren’t any, but it meant that I had a hassle free time getting in. Which given how many people were there and the line for the queue to get in, is definitely a good thing. I’m pretty sure a few of the pics in this set will appear over on his site in due course. And rightly so.

To view the full set yourself, please follow this link go to the Flickr set. Enjoy.