Cruiser

Lidl is almost certainly not what it used to be. When I lived in the house of horrors, AKA 69 Bedford Street, I used to shop quite often in Lidl. If it was a weekday and I was off work, and I'd stayed at Annas the night before then I'd walk down Senghennydd Road as a kind of elongated, round about diversion home to buy convenience food. These were the days before there was a Tesco on Sailsbury Road - there was either Robert's Emporium, which was like a glorified indoor car boot sale good for nobody unless you wanted to buy a suit of armour, a decrepit copy of Ludo with no dice, or a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a derivative of a derivative of a copy of the painting with the dogs playing poker, or a rustic scene from 1920s beermat Britain with horses and fox slaughtering depicted in shades of vomit. When Roberts emporium closed, you had a selection of rubble and gravel to contend with to pass the time of day. But yes, Lidl isn't what it used to be. For one thing, it's quite expensive. I spent £20 in there today, and compared to three years ago, I've got very little to show for it. Out have gone the bizarre Eastern Bloc cheese spreads and fungal infected chocolate bars- in come Heinz products, Pepsi Max, Red Bull and roast pheasants. Rubbish. A bottle of Pepsi was £1.49, which last time I checked, was about as expensive as Pepsi gets, without resorting to buying it in Blockbuster. You could probably get more acid barbed soda for your buck in the cinema. £1.49, I spit on £1.49. I did scour the entire steel cage for entertaining freak show consumer goods. and found a few: some soup with a stretched out barcode that looked like the box was melting, a 10 minute excuse for a pasta dinner that screamed 'Funghi' all over the packet, some meatballs with salsa that looked like yak testicles. The rest can fuck off. So far as ruining the world and closing down local newsagents go, I'll be rooting for the capitalism around the corner.


Moving away from the subject of supermarkets - anyone would think I have nothing to do in my life except go food shopping, and write about the last time I went food shopping, and they'd be right - and actually I have got something to add on this topic, which is that I accidentally got caught buying the Daily Mail by the girl in Tesco yesterday, thus shoving any other chances I had of impressing her in a coffin and nailgunning it permenantly closed, but enough of that - let's talk worms. Or rather, Worms. Several hours of the last two days have been spent sat on the sofa under the stairs in my house, listening to live versions or 'Cruiser' by Mark Kozelek and watching my housemates play Worms 3D on the XBox. I can never be bothered to play myself because as anyone who's even been bored enough to ask, knows, I firmly believe videogames died the second they turned three dimensional, apart from a few minor exceptions. I did try and play one, before I moved in here, but I was totally fucking awful at it, and it hacked me off that you had to keep passing the controller around like a oiuja board inbetween each go, and it was far too easy to forget what button you're supposed to press and jump headlong into the sea instead of going to weapon select screen. The second problem has proved disasterous even to hardened players as this evening and yesterday lunchtime, I can begin to count on two hands the number of times I've seen innocent weapon pick ups turn into kamikaze drowning attempts. I wish it was as good as old fashioned worms, but it's just not, it's too glitzy, the worms heads are too big, its too Super Mario, and the weapons are too limited and you don't get enough carnage. At least the one player mode still looks reassuringly shit.


Games since the 3D revolution which have managed to hold my attention for more than two minutes: Goldeneye on the N64, which Martin Jackson had and we used to go around there on Saturday afternoons to absent-mindedly eat digestive biscuits with caramel in, play Goldeneye, and listen to Attack of the Grey Lantern by Mansun and Stamina by The Junket. I forget just how many hours of my life were wasted on this, plus how many biscuits I inadvertantly ate. I remember once the group of us spewed our way through an entire biscuit tin of these chocolate and caramel things. Anyway, the multiplayer mode on Goldeneye was beyond comparison. For one thing, even I was able to play it, although I was obviously hopeless, but it didn't require the memory capacity of a Grand Master to twig which button was 'fire' and which was 'jump'. I always played as Baron Samedi, the voodoo moron from Live and Let Die, purely because seeing his lunatic lanky, gawking frame run across someone elses screen was hilarity in itself. The best special weapon to use is obviously proximity mines, and although the only true way to play was to have to levels randomly selected, the level where you could climb into the air duct above the toilets, and could therefore hide proximity mines in the toilet, both an effective death tactic, and a good, immature I've-just-finished-secondary-school yuk, too. The fact the screen filled up red with blood like you've been shot between the eyes, even if you've just been slapped in the face, was a nice gory touch. The other game is of course, Grand Theft Auto; San Andreas. I discovered this in the summer of 2005, absolutely ages after it came out, surely, and I was off work for the entire duration of the Reading Festival, but obviously I wasn't going because it's rubbish. Mark and Lorna did go, however, and my solution to curing the boredom created by an entire long weekend with nothing to do, was to work out how to wire up a Playstation to the TV in the front room (a 2 hour task), find the disc that went in the empty box in Marks room (another 2 hour task) and then play the game and discover that doing it properly was no fun whatsoever (5 minutes in). I'm so monumentally inept at videogames, especially this one, that I couldn't even get past the drive-by-shooting level, which is like, level 3 or something. Diabolical. Anyway, the fun is quite blatantly in driving around, ruining lives, killing police officers, repeatedly running people over for no reason, drive-by shooting on the beach after hijacking a fire engine, driving massive trucks around pedestrian walkways, driving cars around the skate park - absolutely everything, anything, limitless possibilities of fucking about - anything so long as you don't try and play the game properly. At one point my 'go' had been repeatedly stealing cars and smacking up strangers with a shovel for the videogame equivalent of a week. Amazing. My soundtrack for the time was a load of indie pop CDRs I'd brought back from Winchester - The Constantines 'Tournament of Hearts', 'Set Yourself on Fire' by Stars, The first selt-titled Wilderness album. I also found an album by The The in the house, which I listened to when I took a break to investigate Simpsons Hit and Run. That was shit, but 'Infected' by The The was pretty good.















Post Script. (The) Klaxons completely stole key elements from one of the loading screens on 'Worms' 3D' to make 'Golden Skans'. Fact.