true absinthe arcadia crimes..

So, at the weekend, I had a dream. The dream was, if we hung out at our friends' house long enough and drank some of the delightful absinthe they had procured from, uhh, Spain or somewhere, then magically, the Japanese magazine Arcadia would become affordable, as opposed to the current $15 per issue at the finest Bay Area Japanese bookstores. Actually, that wasn't really the dream, but my goals became conflated after a couple of glasses of said absinthe, which didn't really make everything look like Alan Moore's Promethea or all attendant females morph all pre-Raphaelite, as I'd hoped, but was extremely strong, with the bonus of being liquorice-flavored (mm, Pernod!), and gave off an attractive, not easily replicated buzz. Mmm, attractive, not easily replicated buzz.

After the absinthe hijinks, I settled in with the Official Playstation Magazine demo-disc for this month, which I was a little excited by (well, piqued enough to buy, that is), not least cos of the True Crime demo. Well, it turns out the demo itself is tiny, but it shows enough to work out that the game is a reasonably/above averagely competent GTA clone, and that's, well... good, 'cos weirdly, nobody's really got round to cloning GTA yet. Elsewhere, Roadkill is a sadly substandard GTA/Twisted Metal clone, Ratchet And Clank 2 does all the right things, looks great, but still lacks a spark of soul in the character design, and SSX3 is more of the same, which is good, I guess. I'm actually buzzin' cos I kinda got seduced by my rental of Downhill Domination, from the 'please let us make a game that somebody will buy' world of War Of The Monsters developers Incog Inc., and which is, basically, SSX with insane courses and mountain bikes, and oddly more exciting than the 'extreeeeme trrrrrrickiness' of the SSX world - stack it up next to Wakeboarding Unleashed as 'great game based on not immediately exciting-sounding sport', willya?