Quintumply

If and when you need a cake, be it for a wedding, birthday or similar celebratory event, do you make one or buy one?  Assemble the necessary ingredients and create a stunning masterpiece, or buy a pre-made effort from one of the big name supermarkets?

The reason I ask is because William, a pre-made cake in Sainsbury’s, asked me to ask you.  You see, he wanted to know what us humans prefer in a cake, and to let us all know of the struggle that cakes face every day.  According to William, there are over six cakes baked worldwide every year, and while that is a huge understatement, is still true.  William makes sense.  William is a truly remarkable cake, and wants his time to shine.

This is William, the optimistic cake.

_

Hello, my name is William!  Some people call me Victoria, but they’re just making terrible, obvious jokes related to cake names.  I call these people Nicks, because Nick is the name of a guy who makes makes terrible, obvious jokes.

I’m a birthday cake, for a ten-year-old.  I was baked a week ago, and am feeling the age spread over my icing, like jam on a sandwich.  But I don’t let old age get me down; with age comes wisdom, and a pension!  Although cakes don’t really have much use for a pension…  Oh well, I’m sure it’ll all work itself out when the time comes, in a day or two.

I’ve been sat on the shelf with all the other cakes in Sainsbury’s since my bakeday, just waiting for that eager ten-year-old boy or girl to look up at me and say, “Can I have that one, oh please?  Look, it’s got balloons on and everything!”  I’m quite proud of my balloons.

As you can imagine, being a cake is quite a lonely life.  You have no parents or siblings and can’t make friends, because you have no mouth to speak with.  That’s why a lot of cakes suffer from depression, especially the cakes near the back, and often go stale prior to their marked use by date.  But not me!  I’ve always thought, life’s pretty dull already, what’s the point in adding to it by just giving up as soon as you’re out of the oven?  I was at the back early on, but over hours and hours and days and days, I’ve gradually been brought forward as humans have purchased other cakes, who I like to think of as friends, but aren’t really.

The other thing about cakes is that, because of the lack of talking, we often find ourselves thinking a lot.  We think about all sorts of things, but in the last few hours I’ve been thinking mainly about home made cakes.  What are they like?  Do they have boxes?  Do they taste different?  How long do they last before they go stale?  These questions have been buzzing around my top layer and I can’t stop thinking about them, I’m so curious.  Perhaps home made cakes can talk..?

The only way I’ll know is if I am sold to the right family, one that makes cakes.  In particular, one that makes a cake while I’m in the kitchen, which would be silly really because they’ll already have a cake!

Wha-  …oh, I’m at the very front now!  It shouldn’t be too much longer before I’m sold!  Hopefully, seeing as it’s nearing closing time, there’ll be a panicking family in desperate need of a ten-year-old’s birthday cake.  I’ve seen it happen a few times before.

Well, I think you’re going to have to leave now, it’s nearly closing time.  Unless you need me for someone’s birthday party?  ..Ok, no problem!  Oh, on the way out, if you see any families with small children, could you point me out?  Thanks a bundle!  Won’t see you again, but it was lovely meeting you!  Take care!

Morning.  Afternoon.  Evening.  Night.  What do all of these have in common?  Well, they’re all parts of the day, and rest assured that you are in at least one of them at this very moment.  Wishing someone a good morning, evening or what have you via a blog is rather difficult, as the reader might not be in the correct part of the day for the greeting to make sense.  To avoid this, I am wishing you all four parts of the day at once.  You should feel honoured, like an olympic gold medalist, and happy, like a backpack.

Backpacks are happy.  Yes they are.

So am I.  I am happy today, for things happened that made me feel such a feeling.  I was at work today; I work at HMV, which is, for the uninitiated, an entertainment shop that focuses on music, films and games and the bits and bobs that these entail, such as iPods, consoles and DVD players.  HMV stands for His Master’s Voice, which is also the name of a famous painting.  The painting is of a dog with its ears pricked up, listening to an old record player, thinking that the voice on the record was that of its owner.  The dog has an inquisitive and curious look on its face.  This image is also HMV’s logo, with the dog nicknamed Nipper.  HMV started off as a small music record shop and has since expanded and evolved to become one of the most successful shops in the business, running for well over a century.

WAKE UP, YOU FOOL.  NIPPER WILL BITE YOUR SLEEPY FACE OFF.

Ahem.  Please excuse my slight tangent, and allow me to carry on with my anecdote.

Thank you.

Today at HMV, we were celebrating the beginning of our summer sale by having a themed dress down day.  The theme was, rather imaginatively, summer.   This allowed for all sorts of whoozles and colourful treats.  I went into work in a green and orange striped shirt, unbuttoned to add an air of casual warmth, and a white t-shirt with an orange and black image of an exploded Game Boy, showing all the parts that make it up and all the magical gaming wonder that is locked away inside, in its feather box.  It is quite the t-shirt.  I also wore jeans and Converse, and placed a pair of sunglasses on my head, rather like a cooler and more manly hairband.  Or something.

It was a sight for colour-starved eyes going into work this morning; everyone was all jolly and bouncy.  Especially the lady-types.  There were pinks and reds and greens and blues and oh, oh my, was it magical.  I felt like I was working in a HMV shop inside a rainbow.

Usually when we have promotional-type days of wondercrust, we set up a TV and Wii console on the shop floor so that customers may try out a fancy gamelicious treat.  In today’s case, that game was EA Grand Slam Tennis, a game which supports Wii Motion Plus, the new Wii Remote-enhancing add-on that basically makes the Wii Remote do what it’s supposed to do a little bit better.  They still haven’t fixed the problem of the infrared sensor bar which, if walked in front of, disrupts the infrared beam between the Remote and the bar, which for a console whose “USP” (unique selling point) is motion sensing controls, is rather poor.  Rather poor indeed.

Oh, there go my tangent stems once again, beating a tune on my cortex.

It was a joy to see joyous customers joyously flinging their arms around like drunk sign posts with elbows.  Even one of the Saturday guys had a quick swing-a-ling.  They lost, 0-40.  GRAND SLAM TENNIS, SHE’S A HARSH MISTRESS.

Further adding chuckles and japes to the goings on was the fact that my decorative sunglasses, rather like a star on top of a summery Christmas tree, kept falling down onto my nose.  This made some customers giggle and chortle as they were buying their Michael Jackson album and their copy of Bolt with free plush toy of Rhino, the hamster.

The day was good, and good was the day.  The only thing preventing the day from earning a perfect score is the fact that my Converse shoesies made my feet hurt, rather a lot, despite the fact that they are old and comfy.  Though, when I came home and fed my face, I chilled out, like a fridge in the Maldives.  Beautiful.  I have a cup of tea right now.  The current amount of tea left in the mug is approximately 46% full.

Tea, my friends, is the drink of kings.  That is why kings always have nasty, yellow teeth.

Oh, hello again.  How are you today?  Had any raspberries recently?  I haven’t.

So, I’m posting a new post.  What’s this all about, you’re thinking.  Or, more likely, you’re thinking of clicking the little ‘x’ of doom and going back to your beloved social networking site and/or instant messaging service.  But I urge you to not, for I am about to make considerably more sense.

This is a lie.

But you still shouldn’t leave.

To give you reason to stay, I offer you my humble opinion on a video game I recently acquired from a shop.  It is entitled Rock Band, and has a subtitle.  That subtitle is Unplugged.  Together, the title and subtitle make Rock Band: Unplugged, a new, PSP exclusive instalment in EA’s much praised rhythm-action/party game franchise.  The game is the first of several big name games coming to PSP this year (and possibly next, forgive my lack of research, I’m winging this review) in an attempt to reinvigorate the platform and get more developers interested in making games for it.

For some time, the PSP has been seen as the failing current-gen console, handheld and home consoles included, with many developers supporting every other platform except Sony’s pocket-sized PlayStation (well, at least the PSP Go! will be pocket sized anyway) simply because it wasn’t performing at the desired level, in terms of MONEHS.  The truth hurts, but the truth is also correct, and true.  However, Sony is not giving up on the PSP, and with the help of big name franchises and big name developers, such as EA, Ubisoft, Media Molecule and Evolution Studios, is hoping to throw the struggling platform back into the fray, giving it fresh boxing gloves and giving it motivational words to remember during the fight.

So, we have Rock Band Unplugged.  HOW DOES ROCK BAND WORK ON THE PSP, YOU CAN’T HAVE INSTRUMENT CONTROLLERS ON A PSP, I hear you cry into your cups of tea.  Well, Harmonix have worked around that.  You see, using a mini guitar controller or a mini drum kit would be unwieldy and difficult, and would probably result in even greater RSI than with full-sized peripherals.  Equally, using the regular Rock Band controllers is out of the question because, well, where would they plug in?  The only way to sort that out would be to create some sort of adapter, but that will just waste time and money, two resources no one has much of these days.  Plus you’d have to hold the PSP somehow whilst strumming and it’d just be a mess.

So what have they done?  Well, Harmonix has gone back to its roots, employing the gameplay mechanic from their earlier games Amplitude and Frequency, whereby you use buttons on the controller to play the sound nuggets in time with the music.  Oh, and you also play all parts of the song at once.  Bass, drums, vocals and guitar.  It sounds difficult and hectic, but it’s genuinely intuitive and very simple.

The basic format of playing a song in Unplugged is this: it starts you off on one of the tracks and you play along, hitting the red, yellow, green and blue notes as they come down the screen using the left, up, triangle and circle buttons by default, although you can change them if you feel it necessary.  Once you complete a phrase (a short segment of that instrument’s part of the song) you need to switch to another instrument, and you flick between them using the L and R shoulder buttons.  You then play the phrase on that instrument, and carry on like that until the song is over.  If you do badly at one particular instrument, it fails.  Fail three times and you lose the song.  The rest is tried and tested Rock Band stuff; you collect energy and then unleash it for a double-the-points boost and you earn a rating out of five stars, with success percentages for each instrument shown after the song is complete.  It is wonderfully addictive and never frustrating.

You create a band and play through a world tour, earning things like roadies, tour buses and planes, and employing people for cash and fan boosts.  Earning cash allows you to buy new instruments and clothing for your band, and earning fans gets you into more gigs.  Your rating stars are collected too, and are necessary for certain gigs and sets.  It isn’t long before you start unlocking stuff however, and the difficulty curve is expertly balanced.  It’s like they took a pencil, balanced it on the tip of a thumb tack, and replicated the balance to the game’s difficulty.  It’s grand.

The track list is a mish-mash of the songs available in previous Rock Band games, with a few exclusive tracks to Unplugged.  It’s got something for everyone, from Weezer to The Who to Queens of the Stone Age to The Jackson Five.  There are hardly any duds to make a fool of, and that is a rather good thing in a game focused on the music.

The last game I bought for my PSP was Loco Roco 2, and I hadn’t played on my PSP since.  Rock Band Unplugged has given me hope for its future, and essentially, got me playing my PSP again.  It really is a very good little machine and deserves games of Unplugged’s quality to be released more frequently.  It seems that, overall and thus far, that Sony’s in-house developers are the only ones to really show what is possible on the platform, but EA has shown that big franchises can work, and wonderfully so.  If you have a PSP and even a passing interest in Rock Band or Guitar Hero, buy this game.  It is fabuloso.

Quintumply gives it 9 toasters out of 10.  You can never have too much toast.

Wow.  I never thought I’d be going down this side road again.  That is to say, Blog Road.  I’ve only ever travelled through here once before, and I took a wrong turning, into a dead end.  My first few posts were lifeless and uneventful, much like my real life, only written down and published, for all the world to see.  They didn’t see my blog.  My blog was pathetic.  A cardboard box in an alleyway.

“Stuff this digital diary stuff, I’m gonna go home and do some arbitrary chores,” I remember thinking.  Blog Road was rather narrow, and I only just had enough room in my red Nissan Micra to reverse out and get back out onto the Internet Highway.  There was nowhere near enough room to turn around, so reversing was my only option, and as you can imagine, backing out onto the Internet Highway is no easy task.  But on my way out of Blog Road, I noticed an even narrower side side road.  It was called Twitter Avenue.  ”Twitter, I’ve vaguely heard of that, and people seem to like it,” I thought to myself (and to my pet vacuum cleaner, Ian, who was sitting on the passenger seat, bored) and turned into the narrowness.

I raised my eyebrows, and a small plastic knife, when I saw a ma-hoosive car park as the narrow Twitter Avenue opened up.  I parked, watched the induction video and began tweeting.  I was hooked, hooked like a mackerel.  Twitter Avenue was my new home, it seemed.  These little squips of bloggery were manageable, much like cutting up a steak into chunks of meat instead of attacking it like a dog would.  It seemed I would never need a full-sized blog, now that Twitter was in my life.

But after I got a taste of the blogosphere, I wanted more.  I tasted what Twitter had to offer – free samples of the premium cookies – and craved the whole shebang.  When I said this to Ian, who had been impatiently sitting in the car for weeks, he replied, “She-bang,” and then laughed heartily at his innuendic jokelet.  I told him to go suck himself, something he is oh so tired of hearing, and made my way out of Twitter Avenue and carried on down Blog Road.

It eventually opens out into a gigantic dome-like area, with a large field of thyme in the center.  Out of the corner of my left eye, I saw a neon sign reading, “WordPress.  We do blogs and that”.  Well, I certainly couldn’t think of a better place to start than WordPress, and in my haste, went directly through the field of thyme as it was faster than going all the way around, which would’ve taken at least 46 minutes.  Ian said I was crazy, but then I’ve never really thought that vacuum cleaners were the most trustworthy of inanimate, man-made objects, or that personifying one is funny, so I ignored his cries for help and floored it.  Floored it like a builder.  I’d never gone so fast in my life before, and my Micra was kicking up all sorts of debris; alarm clocks, scarves, hinges and similar bits.  The windscreen became covered in spades of spades, however, as the daily spade-rain began to fall.  This took me completely by surprise, as I was told that the Blogosphere had hourly spade-rain.  As I cleared the thyme field, I came to an immediate halt right outside the WordPress revolving doors and ran inside, embracing as many people as I could.

So here I am, at WordPress, typing fingers aplenty.  The journey was long, painful and super lovely.  I am of course still visiting Twitter.  It’s a fun place full of delicious smoothies.  However, this is my new home, now.  I’ve told Mrs Facebook, my old landlady, to stop calling me, and that I’ll send her a Christmas card every year.  This is, of course, a lie, but she doesn’t read blogs.  She’s more into Super-Poking people she used to know from school but never speaks to any more.