I read this article on Rock, Paper, Shotgun this morning and got to thinking about my own Dad’s attitude to video games.

My dad was a big fan of “Populous” (1 and 2) on the Amiga and I vaguely remember watching him playing “Zaxxon” and “Nemesis” on our old MSX machines in the 80s but despite working in IT professionally, for a long time that was it as far as games went.

My mother, on the other hand, started playing games when we got our Amiga and she bought herself a copy of “Lemmings”. She completed it, then bought “Oh No! More Lemmings!”, then “Lemmings 2: Tribes” and pretty much every game with the Lemmings moniker on it since, regardless of the quality or lack thereof.

Her other great love is platformers and she’s played and completed loads of them – “Jak & Daxter”, “Tomb Raider” (all of them, as far as I know), Mario Brothers, Sonic – you get the picture.

Anyway, one day my sister gave her a lend of “Ratchett & Clank” which she promptly started playing. My Dad watched her playing a few times and started getting frustrated with her because she keeps making a balls of certain parts. One day, in a strop, she shoved the controller at him and told him that if he’s so bloody good, why doesn’t he do it. So he did and soon they had this tag-team thing going on whereby if she got stuck on a certain bit, he’d take over and get her past it.

My mother progressed to “Ratchett & Clank 2″ and he started “Ratchett & Clank” anew, playing through the whole thing himself. Again. And again. Until he’d collected every last bolt and unlocked every last weapon. Then he did the same with “Ratchett & Clank 2″. The guy hadn’t played a video game in about 12 years and to the best of my knowledge he’d never even picked up a console controller in his life and yet here he was obsessing over “Ratchett & Clank”.

But only “Ratchett & Clank”. Suggest that he has a look at “Jak & Daxter”, a similar game? Nah, not interested. How about this “Call of Duty” series, eh? You like reading about World War II Dad. Nope, not bothered.

They’ve mentioned buying a PS3 purely so that they can play “Ratchett & Clank 3″. I’ve thought about pointing out that there’s not much else out on the PS3 and that he should really think about buying a Thrixty if he’s going to go current-gen but then I think “what’s the point? he’ll only ever play that one game anyway!”.

In July of 2006 I made a post about a fantastic Half-Life 2 single-player modification called MINERVA. I’ve just discovered that an updated version was released in October that contains the next two chapters in the ongoing saga. I haven’t tried it yet but intend doing so once I’ve gotten Half-Life 2: Episode 2 (talk about a clunky name) out of the way. That said, based on the previous installments alone, I’d be happy to say that if you’re into HL2 and would like some more Combine-killing action then you’d do worse than to check out MINERVA.

The page that I linked above contains links to a direct download (or transmission, as the author has it) and a torrent. The download contains the previous chapters as well as the latest so don’t worry if you haven’t played through them yet. To be honest, it’s so long since I played them that I’ll probably just start at the start and work my way through again.

The dawn of a New Year is traditionally a time when people resolve to do new things or to stop doing things or even just to do the things that they’re supposed to be doing anyway. I’ve decided that this year I’ll set myself some realistic, achievable goals so in that spirit I’m going to make good on my “photo of the week” goal.

The rules (which are self-imposed, obviously) are that each photo must have been taken in the same week that it was posted. I’m aiming to post every Wednesday which means that for this purpose a week runs from Wednesday to Tuesday of the following week (having the week start on a Wednesday means that I can take a photo right up to the posting deadline if I haven’t already done so).

The only other ‘rule’ is that the photo should satisfy some nebulous notion I have about compositional and lighting aesthetics. In other words, it has to look good to me (which is a given, really) but since my primary motivations for doing this project are a) to get more use out of my camera and b) to learn more about photography, I’m open to any constructive criticism that anyone wants to give me.

So without much more fanfare, my first installment:

Taken at the annual St. Anne’s Fun Run on New Year’s Day. More pics of my nephews from the day are available here. I came third in the Men’s Senior category, incidentally.

PotW on Flickr

My first proper post of the year and it’s also my first video post, recorded with the camera that my beautiful wife bought me for Christmas.
[flv:/flv/daniel.flv 480 270]

…changed the site back. The old ones are the good ones.