When you first come to London the tube system seems great (seriously, cast your mind back, well it did to me anyway)… You don’t really need to know where you’re going and trains arrive fairly frequently, chances are you’re not going to be using it at rush hour and it’s expensive but you only really start to notice that when you use it every day for a month and do the sums. The tube map is an icon for London but I think you only really know London once, having grown to hate the tube and avoid it where possible, you can confidently use its buses, esp since they’ve replaced the geographical maps with Beck inspired spider maps. When you’re on the bus you need to know about distances not just network topology, you need to know about directions and landmarks, no one will tell you when to get off (unless you ask them to in which case they will) and the stops are unmarked, you need a degree of geographical knowledge that you don’t need on the tube (the old maps helped here by giving you a reminder).

It’s pretty sad to admit to having a favourite London bus route but the 31 is my favourite london bus route. Tracing an arc through the Northwest quadrant of zone 2 it crosses some of the cities most salubrious neighbourhoods as well as some of its most deprived.

I secured my favourite place to sit on the bus, front left, top deck for a good view of the passing buildings and down ontop the pavement through 2 windows (secondary bonuses: You can’t see the pacification screens mounted high up on the front window, you can’t stand upstairs so it never gets to crowded) and was able to enjoy the sunset over the city as spent a pleasant hour going from Shepherds Bush to Camden. In my head, ever since I heard the London bus/shipping forecast mash-up on Resonance FM(?) I always think of the buses as kind of sailing through the streets.

Anyway, I celebrated by having a pint in the Elephant’s Head with Nick, before celebrating further with Alex and James at the Lord Palmerston, (now El Comandante).

Celebrated with a couple of pint sat the Shakespeare, before going home to celebrate further with some Coopers pale ale and fall asleep at 9:30.

The end of level bad guys were too much, seriously, there’s much to love about the game, the combo system is simple yet deep, the setting is brilliantly kitsch (gay rock ‘n’ roll cowboys) the special moves are inspired and it celebrates everything that was great about the golden age of arcade brawlers from Final Fight to Streets of Rage, but the end of level bad guys are too much. I reckon that of the 5 or 6 hours I spent on the game about 25 percent was spent replaying boss battles, it’s pretty much the same problem the bosses in Viewtiful Joe had (same dev company, shares about 98% genetic material) i.e you figure out how to beat them, then you need to do the same thing over and over and over until their vast life bar is depleted. A boring and cheap way to increase the games difficulty level which provides no real entertainment or player satisfaction. A shame, though I’ll probably revisit the game in easy mode at some point, once the frustration has worn off.

Celebrated by playing Okami.

I keep thinking, “surely the developers of Twilight Princess must shared a few beers with these guys”, there are so many similar ideas. Aside from the obvious point that the game’s structure is a subtly mutated version of the Zelda template (exploration, map opened up by learning new abilities etc.), you’re a wolf with an annoying little creature riding on your back ridding the land of darkness. The graphics are even more beautiful when moving than the static screen shots suggest (when an area is cleared the resulting scenes of nature returning to ruined lands are genuinely breathtaking), in fact their energy is reminiscent of the high points of Wind Waker’s cell shaded glory with a Photoshop Ukiyo-e filter applied. But the game adds just enough to the familiar pattern to set it apart, so far I’ve not come across anything that obviously resembles the traditional Zelda dungeons with their emphasis on spatial puzzles, and the sub-quests are much more tightly integrated with the main thrust of the game, giving immediate rewards which feed into an experience based (or rather ‘praise based’ as your wolf is a god) character progression system where the player chooses how to beef up their avatar’s skills, which I think is an improvement over Zelda’s more prescriptive upgrade path. Anyway, 4 hours in it looks like this is right up there with the very best games available for any console, the fact that it manages to look so much better than pretty much any game I’ve seen on a next-gen platform should give developers pause for thought.

Celebrated by eating a Pizza at La Smorfia in West Hampstead, which was no where near as nice or as close to my flat as Saraccino, my fave pizza place in the whole of merry old London town.