I guess swapping those DVD's is just too much for some people - in a somewhat pioneering digital distribution move you can now buy the digitised history of the New Yorke pre installed on an external hard disk. They say it's USB, but it's pictured with a Firewire cable, I should hope that at $299 for an 80 gig disk that it'd support firewire.

Another great rock track that Skye sings along to, mainly because she knows most of the lyrics - with a chorus that chants 'happy-happy-happy-happy' it's a song that remains within reach of her limited vocabulary. The Aliens formed in 2005 after The Beta Band split with John Maclean and Robin Jones re-teaming with original Beta Band founder Gordon Anderson. So, I could predictably point out how great Scottish music is etc etc, but I've got work to do so you'll just have to imagine another page of my ramblings instead.

After resurrecting classic SNES titles on my PSP I got to thinking about other classic games from my gaming history and how good I was. The first games I really spent a lot of time playing were on my friends 2600, and in those early days the concept of 'completing' a game wasn't what it is these days, there were maybe a few steps you'd take, wipe out all the beasties get some bonus points and then get thrown into a slightly harder version of the same game. I spent a long time playing Combat and Asteroids but neither of those were completable. Later I started playing games on my Sinclair ZX Spectrum, some of these did have an ultimate goal that could be reached to complete the game, I think the first one of these I played was 'The Hobbit' an adaptation by Melbourne House that attempted to fit the classic book into 48k of text and a few simple graphics. I spent many many hours trapped in the Goblins dungeon, listening to Thorin singing about gold but I eventualy grew bored of the repetition and moved on to other things. Later I did return to the game armed with a solution published in some magazine, and I managed to kill the dragon and return home, even though I never scored 100% I was happy (Supposedly it's impossible to get 100%).


No the first game I ever completed was a little known space shooter written in basic and going by the title 'Timegate'. The objective of the game was to fly through space in pseudo 3d (advertised as 4D because of the time aspect) looking for timegates to take you back in time to the birth of humanities nemesis and wipe them from the face of the galaxy before they can become a threat to life as we know it. This game of course skipped over plot points such as the obvious predestination paradox and the question of 'if we can do this to them, why aren't they doing the same thing to us?'. So after navigating my way through the game and shooting an armada of alien ships I reached their prehistoric home world and showed no mercy in my mission.



So any other gamers out there remember what the first game they ever completed was?

You know I really wanted to have something cool to say, but you know, my life is just so centered around family life that I'm just not cool any more. The other day I wore my old Zooropa Shirt - from 1992 - and a few random people commented on the vintage of the shirt. Orion on the other hand clearly has no respect for the past and managed to pee all over it, even though he was wearing a diaper at the time, he must've discovered how to quantum tunnel pee and decided he'd best just get it out of the diaper.

So, MTV is 25 years old today, there's plenty of coverage in the american media regarding this now essential part of youth culture, but this anniversary comes a couple of days after the last episode of the BBC pop music show 'Top Of The Pops'. Top Of The Pops has been broadcast every week since January 1st 1964 and played selections from the UK top 40. During it's heyday in the 1970's it would attract 15million viewers every week watching the glam rock acts of the 70's playing their hits.

TOTP had a policy of always playing the number one record, and if the act couldn't make it to the studio the record would be presented with a dance troupe filling in. Since TOTP was so essential to selling a record music companies began to produce promotional films since these were preferred over the dancers - most famously Queen's video for Bohemian Rhapsody was played for almost 3 months on the show. So, the music video caught on as a marketing tool in the UK before it became popular in the US thereby giving MTV the bulk of its early video line up. Of course the advent of 24 hour music television ultimately helped kill TOTP and it'd been fighting a losing battle for audience ever since the late 90's.

The last episode was presented by Jimmy Saville, the man who introduced the first show, and also the man who's frequently credited as being the first ever DJ... but that's another story.