Living in the Minus World – The Former United States of America

During your time of  economic crisis and inability to run a National Presidential Election, We the Great British Empire have decided it’s about time that to take the reigns once more. We feel that we gave you more then enough July 4th Holidays and frankly the idea that some of your larger companies that have offices here are forcing this upon the people of our great nation is absurd. 

To provide more information on this, our Chief Ambassador to the Rest of the World, John Cleese has provided a written statement on behalf of Her Majesty The Queen. Please take proper time to read and understand everything listed here. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Sir John Cleese.

To: The citizens of the United States of America:

In light of your failure to nominate competent candidates for President
of the USA and thus to govern yourselves, we hereby give notice of the
revocation of your independence, effective immediately.

Her Sovereign Majesty Queen Elizabeth II will resume monarchical duties
over all states, commonwealths, and territories (except Kansas, which
she does not fancy).

Your new Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, will appoint a Governor for
America without the need for further elections.

Congress and the Senate will be disbanded.

A questionnaire may be circulated next year to determine whether any of
you noticed.

To aid in the transition to a British Crown Dependency, the following
rules are introduced with immediate effect:

You should look up “revocation” in the Oxford English Dictionary.

1. Then look up aluminium, and check the pronunciation guide. You will
be amazed at just how wrongly you have been pronouncing it.

2. The letter ‘U’ will be reinstated in words such as ‘favour’ and
‘neighbour.’ Likewise, you will learn to spell ‘doughnut’ without skipping
half the letters, and the suffix -ize will be replaced by the suffix -ise.

Generally, you will be expected to raise your vocabulary to acceptable
levels. (look up ‘vocabulary’).

3. Using the same 27 words interspersed with filler noises such as
“like” and “you know” is an unacceptable and inefficient form of
communication.

There is no such thing as US English. We will let Microsoft know on your
behalf. The Microsoft spell-checker will be adjusted to take account of
the reinstated letter ‘u’ and the elimination of -ize. You will relearn
your original national anthem, God Save The Queen.

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PAX day one was already filled with many awesome things culminating in a huge concert of explosive audio goodness. With that thought in mind we headed out to the events second day with only three hours of sleep, ready for whatever awesomeness could be thrown at us. Tonight was going to be the main event concerts including the Minibosses, who I’d heard about many times over the last few years.

We met up with M.C. Wilson pretty early on in the day and toured around a lot of the show floor. It was this fateful day that we decided to check out Wii Music, something I will most likely never forget. So I was happily watching some nice folk playing around on it for a minute or so then I turned around to M.C. to get his opinion and saw the biggest look of confusion on his face that I’d ever seen. Seriously, I wish I’d got this on camera but it was too late. We were ushered over by the booth guy and explained the premise of the title in as best a way as he could.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t ever going to help the fact that essentially you get a Wii Mote and move it up or down in time to generate some awful MIDI music. You could then send a video of your masterpiece to friends over Wii Connect 24, which they could add to if they so desired. I didn’t get it; as a musician or gamer this made no sense at all. Still there were actually people that really seem to enjoy it I guess so an audience is probably there somewhere.

We attended a great panel on the subject of “Are casual games killing off the core?”, which was interesting, well handled, and entertaining. Unfortunately, this hour long panel only scratched the surface of the subject and could easily have gone on for several times this length and still be unresolved. One thing I guess this did show was that this is a debate that needs to happen and that it is a really multifaceted issue that will need to be addressed sooner or later. I think myself and M.C. are going to have some further discussions on this in the near future.
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So the first thing we did after getting to Seattle and the US ironically was to leave the country for Canada on a little voyage to Vancouver. Border control to get into Canada was out first worry given the usual fun you can expect from a trip through customs, although any fears we may have had were instantly quashed with a 5 minute stop of the coach and a brief chat with the Canadian guard about UK football seeing as he seemed to know about Leeds United. That was it. We got back on way and in spite of the ever deepening rain and low visibility still marvelled at the amazing scenery heading in towards British Colombia.

Arriving in Vancouver I quickly realised that this is a city I could happily live in with no question at all. It had everything I’d ever want; great atmosphere, stunning scenery, clean air, loads of great stores and things to do as well as some great places to eat. We found on the first street we were at had Rock shops, a 6 floor music instrument store, several arcades and a great restaraunt which we promptly visited to stave off the hunger from not having yet eaten since the night before.

We spent the rest of the day wandering the fantastic city before eventually prising ourselves away for the return trip. This was more of an experience with customs than the Canadian side taking somewhere between 45 minutes and an hour with aggressive questioning and thankfully lacked the rubber glove and table I began to fear so much. I think they were genuinely confused with us entering the US for one night then heading out to Canada the next morning and then returning the same day.

So to sum up, Vancouver was as awesome as people had previously said to me and I need to work out a way of moving over there.

Next stop – PAX

We met up with the ever –awesome MC Wilson for some breakfast in Pike Place Market before heading out to explor some of the local Seattle area for a while. I was happy to find a store that sold a variety of different Jesus action figures as well as some special toilet tissues for when you need to wash away those sins. I was also happy to discover the very first Starbuck’s and even happier that unlike some of the others I’d visited didn’t seem to have any issues with giving me a coffee with extra shots of coffee. Add to that a crazy dude with a banjo playing outside and it was a recipe for awesome.

The PAX hall was next up and we became very familiar with queuing throughout the rest of the day. I met a dude doing a most excellent Captain Falcon cosplay and had to get a photo given that I’m a self confessed F-Zero whore. I was immediately struck by the difference in attitude between PAX and E3 – people were chilled out, DS games were beeing played everywhere, there were tournaments of people crashed out on bean-bags on the floor constantly. Overall the atmosphere was far more focussed on being part of a community of gamers- most surprisingly this extended to the actual Publishers displaying games too. We went to a few different panels throughout the day including the QA with the Penny Arcade guys which was hilarious. Red vs Blue was after that and they showed off a new show they had been working on which was a fully animated version of the RVB show which looked to be really freaking awesome.

The highlight of day one for me had to be the concerts though. The One-Ups were simply phenomenal, creating an display of mucisianship, funk and videogames playing a set of 13 tracks from their new CD which thankfully was available to buy after the show (and autographed too!). The selection of songs they played was quirky and beautiful ranging from Star Fox’s Fortuna Theme to Super Mario Bros 2’s Cave theme to Chrono Trigger and Street Fighter 2’s Sagat Stage. There were a couple of techinal hiccups on the visual part where the wrong video would be shown for a few seconds but the band were flawless throughout. I can’t say enough to really sum up how great their arrangements of these classic tracks were. Fantastic.

There was another band after that but I headed out to get some food and drink coming back to see Johnathon Colton at the end of the show. He was pretty decent but to be honest after a few songs I was getting a little bored. He did a couple of really standout peices though obviously including the portal song.

PAX day one was really fanatastic, hopefully days 2 and 3 will hold up just as well.

PAX Diary: Day 1

Hello all, Phil Haymes here. I and a few of the Drunken Gamers UK guys (Liam and Dave) have travelled across the globe from Londonshire to Seattle to attend PAX 08. It’s now 4:37am local time in Seattle and we have been here for about 4-5 hours now after an insanely long flight from London Heathrow. Upon arriving, myself and Dave did the British thing and went for a walk away from the motel (which looks pretty similar to No More Heroes…) in search of the local IHOP.

Thankfully we did infact find one after about a 20 minute walk and made a point of eating their food and drinking their free refill coffee. Most people who know me will attest to the fact that I am a complete coffee whore and the idea of free refills of coffee is probably a dangerous thing. It’s like sending Homer Simpson to an all-you-can-eat place!

So about an hour in we’re heading out for Vancouver by coach and are hoping that we don’t get any issues with customs at the boarder into Canada. My plan to steal a raccoon isn’t looking too good right now given the amount of customs we had to go through to get into the US. Thankfully no tables or glovers were involved yet but I’d like to avoid it.

Providing I can get some software niggles resolved I’ll be getting as much in the way of pics and video for you guys in the coming days in these daily diary updates (assuming I don’t get too lazy for daily).

Philthy out!

I’m back, I’m English and I’m a little concerned over the state of my Country. I’ve been writing this column in various formats for a while now and it seemed a good time to drag it out like the old chestnut it is and give it a bit of Robot Panic polish for you all. So for those who don’t know me, haven’t got a clue what this is all about and stuff… well my name is Phil, I’m an egotistical and opinionated bastard at the best of times and this little blog is my way of venting about a) my life and b) living in this beautiful yet somehow screwed up Country.

So I guess even though it’s the middle of summer and still raining and cold in the UK I feel the time is right to talk about air conditioning, or should I say the lack-of. It’s one of those strange things I’ve come across whilst travelling to various countries over the years – every other country has it and for some reason we don’t seem to care. It strikes me as odd that a number of countries with far worse economies and cooler weather than we have seem to place an importance on this important convenience in life when we don’t. Maybe we’re just too tight. Maybe we’re just too English.
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