Mansions of Madness

Now, this is what I call a board game. Cards, tokens, plastic figures, a die with 10 sides and a huge thick book of rules. Fortunately for us number one son was able to act as the one controlling the scenario, although fortunately might be going it a bit, as most of the time he was happily sending zombies and axe wielding maniacs our way.

The Mansions of Madness game is different each time you play it, with a set of different levels to work through. While this limits the lifetime of the game a bit, in that once you’ve played a level once you’d not want to play it again, it does make for quite a rich experience, and if you price it out in evenings worth of entertainment it starts to look good value, even if the game itself is quite expensive.

I played a gangster with a Tommy gun and a down on monsters in general, but with a quite astounding lack of physical ability, as evidenced by my knack of throwing exactly the wrong numbers consistently. However, with help from a typewriter wielding companion we managed to solve the gruesome mystery and get out alive. Towards the end things got really tense, as I struggled to shoot a zombie and avoid being burnt alive, while at the same time hunting to uncover the awful truth.

One good thing about this particular game is that although it is necessarily quite complex, the games themselves don’t take around a week or so to finish, we ended up having a couple of hours of fun, which is just about right I reckon. A good, social, alternative to watching the telly or playing video games methinks.

Get Portal 2

I’ve spent a reasonable amount of time over the last few days watching number one son play Portal 2. I quite like watching other people play video games. Whenever I play most of my time is spent being dead or otherwise inconvenienced. Number one son does not seem to have these problems, although in Portal the nice thing is that you are not actually under threat of sudden death most of the time. Unless you do something stupid in one of the puzzles that is of course. And there are a lot of puzzles. Along with the sing-song voice of the psychotic computer and another computer who also records adverts for a bank and works with Ricky Gervais. Or something.

The game is really good. Really good. So good I might just invest in a copy myself. Apparently if you get the PS3 version you also get a token allowing you to download a copy for your PC or Mac, which is nice.

I think it helps if you have played the previous version first, you can pick that up as part of the wonderful “Orange Box” compilation for most platforms.  

SS Great Britain

The SS Great Britain was one of the first large propeller powered vessels.

Up until the SS Great Britain nobody thought much of making ships out of metal. Especially iron, what with its well know lack of floating ability. Isambard Kingdom Brunel reckoned it would work though, and built an enormous ship to prove it.  I wish I’d thought to have given one of my kids the middle name “Kingdom”, but I digress.

Today we went round the first “modern” ship ever built. Instead of using wood, with lots of internal bracing and strengthening, Brunel decided you could make a perfectly workable boat out of metal plate. Moreover, making it really large would mean that you could carry enough coal on board to power the thing on long journeys.

And it worked. The ship had a long history, from carrying 200 passengers across the Atlantic in absolute luxury to carrying 600 would be gold diggers to Australia in conditions that must have been a lot less comfortable.   It ended its days as a gently rusting wool store in a bay in the Falkland Islands. Fortunately, after a lot of fund raising and effort it was brought back to Bristol, its spiritual home, and you can now go around and beneath it.

Well worth the trip. While it is sad to see the state of the vessel now, which must be mostly rust, it is very encouraging to see the work being done to keep it alive, and the imagination shown in making a look round as interesting as possible. They even have an “Isambard Brunel” wandering around in full Victorian dress, sideburns and stovepipe hat that you can chat to.

The weather was very kind to us, and I took loads of pictures which will find their way onto these pages over time I’m sure.

Source Code Movie Review

In between shopping and helping to build furniture we managed to fit in a trip to the movies. We’d been meaning to see “Source Code” for a while, and everyone was glad of the trip. There seems to be a glut of “mystic” movies at the moment, what with “The Adjustment Bureau” and that one with Robert De Niro I’ve forgotten the name of.

Anyhoo, Source Code requires a bit of belief suspension, but once you get into it the film is really rather good.  Everyone plays their part very well and the action zips along at a nice pace, with one or two twists along the way. Worth seeing.

Heading for Hols

Having a few (hopefully well earned) days off this week. Today we headed down south to visit number one son for a few days. It is rather nice when your kids reach the age where you can go and stay with them. He is claiming to have a really fast network connection, we shall see.