Sunday In San Andreas

Today, was pretty much more of the same, except for the usual Sunday ritual of the making of the bacon butties, which were eaten while watching "The Lazarus Experiment from the series 3 box set of Doctor Who.

The villain of this story was played by Mark Gatiss, making him one of the few people to have written for and acted in Doctor Who. Mark Gatiss is mostly known as a member of "The League Of Gentlemen", however he is also the writer of "The Unquiet Dead" for series 1 and "The Idiot's Lantern" for series 2 of Doctor Who as well as several Doctor Who novels for Virgin New Adventures and BBC Books.

Afterwards, I fired up the PC and Steam announced that all Grand Theft Auto games for the PC were available for £25ish and that seemed a reasonable enough deal and handed over my credit card details and then started downloading them.

As we were still full from the bacon butties at breakfast, we decided to skip lunch, apart from large bag of thai sweet chilli flavour crisps while watching our movie for today, "Fantastic Four: Rise Of The Silver Surfer", which was enjoyable enough though I prefer the first film.

Not long after we finished watching the film, it was time for my wife to go to her laptop and speak to her mum (or in her case "mom") back home in the USA via skype with webcam. I, of course, headed off to the computer room and tried my morning's purchases.

The first game I tried, after the games had finished downloading, was "Grand Theft Auto: Vice City" which was my favourite of the GTA games for the Playstation 2. Well, the PC version is enjoyable enough, but the mouse control seems to be over-sensitive and the game crashed a few times.

However, most of the rest of the day and evening was spent playing "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" which I also have for the Playstation 2, but as I got it at a point where I hardly wanted to spend my time in front of a console and so have hardly played it. This game is less prone to crashing, though it did once, and the mouse control works a heck of a lot better. I played through a few of the early missions, but generally ate, worked out at the gym and "wasted" rival gang members.

During dinner (pizza!) we watched "42", yet another episode of Doctor Who from the series 3 box set which featured former Eastenders actress Michelle Collins" as the captain of the sun-bound spaceship.

I went back to "GTA: San Andreas", before heading to bed to watch the first episode of the 2nd series of "The Mighty Boosh" and then sleep.

Peggle

How did I get addicted to this? The graphics are utter plop; they look like a VGA DOS game circa 1994!

Because it's bloody good; fiendish yet simple to control!

Peggle Extreme, a cut down, half-life themed (e.g. the unicorn character has a headcrab covering its face) version of the game was given to people who pre-ordered Valve's Orange Box (Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode 1, Half-Life 2: Episode 2, Team Fortress 2, Portal) via their Steam distribution system.

I had a lot of fun with this and as the pre-order also came with an offer of $10+tax for the full Deluxe version, I decided to take them up on this offer.

I installed it, opened it and suddenly it was 3 hours later and way past my bedtime.

I'm actually more interested in playing this, when I get home, than Portal and Half-Life 2: Episode 2! Though I'll try and resist this urge and at least give these games a chance.

There are online playable, downloadable demo and purchasable (about £15) full non-steam versions at http://www.popcap.com/peggle - highly recommended.