My Scottish Adventure - Part 1

This is a day of firsts. It will be the first time that I've written a blog post from my phone and it will be the first time I've gone on holiday by myself. It may only be to a harbour town in Scotland and only for a few days, but I think it still counts. Here's hoping I can format this post right on my smaller screen...

I've been up here a few days now to offer moral support to friends running the Edinburgh Marathon and had forgotten how stunning this city is. Of course the unusually sunny days have helped, though even on this colder grey day it's still beautiful. My friends have also been astounding, both managing to not just finish their first full marathon but to go out afterwards for dinner and drinks. I'd be a useless pile of limbs, gibbering and shivering, if I'd just run 26+ miles! So bravo ladies - you are an inspiration.

At this very moment I'm sitting in a generic coffee shop, that doesn't pay a lot of tax, waiting for my train to Stonehaven on the east coast of Scotland. I decided to go there after reading about it in a book (as good a reason as any) called Sophia's Secret by Susanna Kearsley and discovering that the ancient castle Dunnottar is still standing. Look the place up on Google and you'll see why I just had to see it.

With a tummy filled with haggis I should br on my way in an hour on the next leg of the journey. I'm hoping for dry weather so I can draw and paint in the open air, maybe with a wee bottle of whiskey in my bag to keep me warm. And Evernote is being used extensively for writing ideas and snippets. Fingers crossed for a creative few days to come.

Xbox Reveal Reaction

Finally adding something new to this ol' blog - my personal reactions to the Xbox One reveal. Watched the live event via the BF's Xbox360 and our core reaction was much the same; "Ooh, the machine looks nice but where are the games?" From the look of the #XboxReveal on Twitter we weren't the only ones. Digital Spy have the full video if you missed it and want to see what's I'm rabbiting on about.

I've been through a fair number of console reveals by now (hand me my cane you whipper snapper), and I don't know if it's the age or rose-tinted specs talking, but I remember console reveals being more exciting back in the PS2 days. Or maybe I was just more easily impressed with FMV than I am now. After the "meh" PS4 reveal I hoped we'd see more from team Microsoft, and they kind of delivered. Sort of. At least we now know what the new Xbox One will look like which is more than can be said of the PS4. I also really like the name of the new Xbox, odd as that sounds. It's nice and simple. I imagine it took ages to come up with though. No seriously, I've been in meetings like that; it probably went back and forth constantly before they decided on the obvious.

Once again there was one core feature that wasn't talked about or shown much, the single thing you'd expect a game console reveal to cover: GAMES! Unless you were a sports game fan (of which there are many, I know) there wasn't a whole lot to get excited about. High points for me were:

• Halo TV show - yay!
• Two women presenting - yay! (seriously the way the industry's been going, it's a welcome surprise)
• The instant way it flipped from TV, to movie, to internet browser, to game, and back to TV again. Very cool.
• The pad looks great (i.e. it looks almost identical to the 360 pad)
• ...The home page looked nice?
• Ummmm....

Yeah. So not a lot wowed me. Sure Call of Duty looks nice and the dog was well rendered but there was no real in-game footage so I can't tell just how good the graphics are really. I'm sure they're amazing, I'd just like to see them in actual motion, rather than in super-duper worked on movie sequences.

Of course the real news that was important to gamers only got leaked unofficially afterwords and it's not good news:

• Mandatory game installation from discs - and that a second user of the same disc would have the "option" to pay a fee to install the game on their separate machine so they too can "play it without the disc". I can't tell if there's an option here to just play from the disc, without installing, but it doesn't sound like it. The editor of Official Xbox Magazine has since said that when you install the game on a second machine it uninstalls it from the first... which means my BF will never let me play his games until he's completely finished it. Or maybe not at all if it affects the save data... I know I wouldn't if it were my games!*
• No backwards compatibility with Xbox 360 disc or online arcade games - bummer, but not entirely surprising. At least the top of the new Xbox is flat, so I can put by Xbox 360 on top of it. Silver linings!

Overall I'm not totally convinced by the Xbox One. Oh, have no doubt - I will get one. I'm a gamer, it's what we do; we bitch and complain about the many ways in which the latest console sucks and then we go out and buy it anyway. It's a like a form of madness that's really expensive and leaves you feeling a bit disappointed but excited all at once. I'll just keep my little fingers crossed that the game line-up is more than just racing/American football/basketball/football games, and we get to see more of them in action at E3. A girl can dream.

*For those of you wondering, we tend to play very different types of games to each other, but I like trying out the ones he has months/years after he's played them. He rarely wants to play my strategy or RPG games for some strange reason...