Shopping, Nintendo Wii, Gideon's Way & The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol. 1

PARSLEY'S COMMLOCK

Retail watch: Post-Christmas shop watch
I am no fan of Tescos, but I feel I should let you know that Dalek bubble bath is there for £2.50 and Häagen-Dasz is 2 for £5. Such great items are only there to get us in and buying other things, so be sure not to buy anything else, and ideally offer your clubcard points to the person behind you in the queue, to confuse their customer profiling.

Argos are sporting a range of bling/kitsch products including a complete suite of 'Playboy' logo items for girls, and various items with 50's style graphics with 'barbed' text. One that caught my eye was a breakfast tray with a picture of a lady and the text 'I only have a kitchen because it came with the house'. This has a beanbag on the bottom of it, so that it sits flat when it's on your lap.

Gadget Review: Nintendo Wii
My friends Steve and Julie got this for their kids for Christmas. As I only ever saw signs saying shops were 'out of stock' of it I asked Julie how she'd got it. Turned out she had put her name down in October and had been regularly chivvying the shop ever since. Was it worth it? Well I don't know if you can put a price on your kids being able to go into school saying that they've swallowed the corporate hype and got the same 'must have' toy that everyone else has...

In case you didn't know, Nintendo Wii features a wireless handset which interacts with games by the way you move it. So, for instance, your real live movement of the handset can be translated into swinging a golf club or rolling a bowling ball. In terms of user experience I was able to be portrayed on screen as having dark eyebrows, which isn't as realistic as having, say, Sony's Eye Toy game take my picture and display it. Bowling was reasonable fun & at least the game seemed to behave consistently. Of course, this is quite unlike real bowling where you can do what feels like the same action, and one time get a 'strike' and the next time end up in the 'gutter'.

As the handsets were immediately out of stock we only had the one that the game came with to play with, and so had to constantly pass it on and strap it on to avoid throwing it into the TV screen (as apparently several punters have already done). I would say that its price per amusement ratio was pretty low compared to the box games that my Mum found at bargain prices in a local charity shop. Nevertheless, Nintendo are to be applauded for coming up with a video game where the users do experience some physical movement. I also felt that it would be nice for very young players to get an introduction to bowling, away from the noise and impatience of the real bowling alleys.

DVD Review : Gideon's Way
Didn't remember this police show from 1964, but risked getting the DVD box set because I'd enjoyed the 50's 'Robin Hood' so much. Stalled on watching it, because the first episode (featuring Derren Nesbitt as a man on the run) was so slow moving. Anyway, I can now declare it a bit of a gem.

Episode four ('The Rhyme and the Reason') featured Alan Rothwell as a young mod accused of the murder of his girlfriend by stabbing. I remember him as a presenter on schools TV, and I think he was later a middle class heroin addict in soap opera Brookside. The scene where he declares 'I'm a mod', and that the police have found him guilty because of his clothes and style, is absolutely cracking. Of course these days he would instantly be found innocent because there's no way a mod would have risked getting blood on his smart clothes. If he'd been a hoody though, the scene would have played out just the same.

The stories probably have too much emphasis on Gideon and his family, and sometimes the flow seems slow and other times quite abrupt, but as a fantastically detailed document of life in the sixties, they are amazing to watch and I highly recommend them.

Graphic Novel : The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol. 1 (Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neill)
This has been out for ages, and I'd seen the film, which annoyingly hijacked some of the ideas and made them more American. However I did enjoy the film, and I have to say the book is a great read. For anyone unfamiliar, it takes several fantasy characters who are out of copyright (Dr Jekyll & Mister Hyde, the Invisible Man, Captain Nemo and more) and teams them up for new adventures.

It creates a futuristic view of a Victorian world, as the likes of H.G.Wells had imagined it (and it was portrayed in some sixties films such as 'First Men In The Moon'). The end result is a cracking read, and also a pastiche of the 'Boy's Own' approach to story telling. Highly recommended.

parsley@gardenrecords.com [www.gardenrecords.com]