Holiday Shopping and Assassin's Creed breaks my heart

Time to celebrate! Its holiday season and its that time of the year when they release new games for PCs and Gaming consoles. So here I am to start my shopping with a wish list as long as the Santa's beard.

This year, I had a chance to get into the stores earlier than usual for my game shopping. Game shopping for me is what Oktoberfest is for Germans or any beer lover for that matter. So it seems to be for most of my gaming brethren. It was like a fest going on in the stores. Guitar Hero III seems to be the flavor of the season. Everyone queued up to play the demo setups in the stores. It indeed is a nice game with cool guitar like controls. Without a doubt, anyone would like it. No wonder everyone's shopping cart is filled with guitars (I mean game controls, fake but nevertheless).

Crysis was another game that was getting a lot of attention. Seems to be a good FPS. I must say that FPS games have come a long way since Quake or Doom. Halo 3 was also going strong. But I am not into FPS gaming. So I'd skip them anyday.

The one game I was looking forward to was "Assassin's Creed". And it was disappointing to find that the game was released only on XBox 360 and PS3. All I have is a wii and its not released for this platform. And the PC version is yet to be released, which I'm sure will not play on my antique desktop. Sux! After Prince of Persia series, this was one game I felt which had great artwork. And as the writers said, the environment was "Organic" which means that you can interact with non-play characters or at least there is an affect if you mess with NPCs. I just hope they release it on wii too :"(. Hope Santa listens to my prayers. I have been a good boy this year and even if I did slip up, I will make it up in the next. Santa puh-leeze!

Where does Mr. Bean get these funny ideas from?

I had taken a hiatus from blogging after someone reminded me that I was being verbose to the point of being ver"bore". Well, then this blog's not for them. Anyways, its one of those weeks again where I ended up traveling some miles. Quite a few miles that is. While doing so, I watched trailers of Mr. Bean's holiday which triggered me to think "where does this man get his darn funny ideas from?" Rowan Atkinson, for that matter, is a very serious individual. I realized that there was someone feeding him ideas. Later, I felt very pained to realize who it was. Me!!

I admit that I am a grumpy traveler. I'm surely not one of those lonely planet traveler kinda guys/gals who just keep smiling and narrating stuff to the camera even if the headhunters of Borneo are about to put them into a boiling cauldron to cook and eat them. And besides being grumpy I'm a perfect klutz. I never travel light, which means I never travel right. Over and above that, I shop while I travel. That's like a snowball collecting snow as it rolls downhill. Recipe for disaster. And then I create enough trouble for my fellow passengers whenever and wherever I can. So if you find me seated next to you, beware! Reminds of that episode in Seinfeld where Elaine's stuck in the coach class. So getting the idea? Mr. Bean, I mean?

The purpose of my travel was to attend one of those meetings where people come dressed up in perfectly cut business suits (no matter what the weather is) and have blackberries (or is it Blackberrys?) glued to their palms and ears. Unnerving. First of all, I don't dress like them because I don't like dressing like them. And I don't have a blackberry (that's because I can't afford it. And most of the emails I get are hate mails which I don't bother to reply, not that it matters). So imagine sitting in such a meeting with an open collar shirt and a sportcoat and no blackberry. Exactly. Embarrassing. You'd stand out like a cranberry, in a bunch of blackberrys. Verry verry un-berry like (bad pun but good rhyme. I'm tired of saying "sticking out like a sore thumb"). Anyways, it didn't end there. The meeting starts and as it is progressing, I end up finding that I have a nice little coffee stain on my sparkling white oxford shirt. What do I do? Being a guy given to his impulses, naturally, I start to rub it off with a tissue. I get so busy with this impromptu laundry that it takes me a while to realize that there is a dip in the conversation around me. I lift my head and see that everyone's staring at me or rather what I was doing to the stain. Seems that while I was busy, someone had directed a question at me. So now, I don't know the question, which implies that I don't know what to answer. Nice. I'd rather be joining those Borneo headhunters in their dinner ritual dance. You see where I'm getting at? Uh-huh. Mr. Bean again. And then, my mobile starts to ring. Earlier on, I was experimenting with the ringtones and had set the phone to play "Jingle bells" for incoming calls (purely a simple mistake. No relation to XMas). Speaking of which, I had forgotten to put the phone in silent mode. I'm sure Xmas came early for some this year but I'm also sure that I'll be left out of my boss's Xmas list. I'm glad that I still have my job. I don't know how much pain Detective Clouseau (of Pink Panther series fame) caused to his boss but mine sure looked like that he had shot himself in the foot by inviting me to that high level meeting. Note to self. Never ever clean your shirt while your phone plays jingle bells in a business meeting. And if you have a coffee stain on your sparkling white oxford, let it be. If you rub it, it just starts to spread like plague all over the white shirt.

So all said and done, I'm seriously considering to enroll myself as a writer to the Mr. Bean series. With the kind of things I get into, I won't run out of ideas for a long time. Might as well make some money out of being a dufus. Are you reading this, Mr. Atkinson?