Tag: Hitman

What I’ve watched this year

*Oooh, I did it last year too!*

I got a big hard drive in December last year, exclusively for storing videos on. I haven’t needed to delete anything all year, but I will have to quite soon. The upshot is that it’s really easy for me to list what we’ve watched this year, because it’s just anything that’s on the hard drive that we didn’t watch last year.

On the one hand, I can look at this list and think “wow, that’s quite a lot.” But on the other hand, if I’m able to list nearly everything we’ve watched on TV this year, then it can’t be that much.

Shows that Karen and I have watched together

* Blackadder (series 1)
* Criminal Justice
* CSI (series 1 to 8)
* Doctor Who (series 4)
* Gavin and Stacey (series 1 and 2)
* Heroes (series 1 to 3)
* House (series 5)
* Merlin (series 1)
* The Mighty Boosh (series 1 and 2)
* That Mitchell and Webb Look (series 2)
* Outnumbered (series 2)
* Peep Show (series 5)
* Respectable
* Sapphire and Steel (series 1)
* Spooks (series 3 to 5 and 7)
* Torchwood (series 1 to 2)

Anything that we started watching last year, and continued watching this year, is not listed a second time. Likewise, anything in the above list that we haven’t finished watching, will not be listed if I do this again next year.

Shows that I watched on my own

* 3rd Rock From The Sun (series 1 to 6)
* The Mighty Boosh (series 3)
* My Name Is Earl (series 4)
* Red Dwarf (series 4 to 8)
* Spaced (season 1)
* Top Gear (series 12)

This section should probably actually be entitled “things that I am watching on my own”, because with the exception of The Mighty Boosh and Red Dwarf, I am in the middle of a series for all of these.

I also watched the first three episodes of The Brittas Empire before concurring with Karen’s assessment that it is unwatchable shite.

Films

Again, we’ve probably watched 30-40 films. And they’re all on my hard drive, so there’s nothing to stop me giving you an exhaustive list. Haha.

* 12 Angry Men
* American Gangster
* Big Fish
* Boyz N the Hood
* Casino
* City Lights
* Crash
* The Dark Knight
* First Blood
* The Fisher King
* Gandhi
* Heavenly Creatures
* The Ipcress File
* Juno
* Knocked Up
* Leon The Professional
* Mr Smith Goes to Washington
* National Treasure
* No Country For Old Men
* Notorious
* Once Upon A Time In The West
* The Prestige
* Rebecca
* Rocky
* Taxi Driver
* There Will Be Blood
* The Third Man
* To Kill A Mockingbird
* Vertigo
* Walk Hard The Dewey Cox Story
* Zorba The Greek

(We also managed to get about 5 minutes into Metropolis before giving up because it didn’t have subtitles)

And these are the ones that I watched on my own:

* Cloverfield
* Crank
* Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
* Dr Strangelove
* Futurama – Bender’s Big Score
* Futurama – The Beast With A Billion Backs
* Futurama – Bender’s Game
* Hitman
* Resident Evil Extinction
* Stardust

And, as Karen reminds me, this is the one that I’ve watched with Karen and Bernard:

* Ratatouille

Categories
Gaming

When did I stop enjoying computer games?

Okay, perhaps I’m being a bit melodramatic, but I feel like there’s been a shift of some sort.

I used to play games all the time. I liked racing games (eg Gran Turismo, Midnight Club), action games (eg GTA, Hitman, The Getaway), survival horrors (Silent Hill, Resident Evil), adventure games (Tomb Raider), FPSs (Half Life, Max Payne) and text-based online RPGs (Urban Dead, Nexus War). Quite a wide variety, really.

But these days I find playing games to be quite an unfulfilling experience. I’m playing a little Tomb Raider lately, it’s true, and I have picked up the controller to play Gran Turismo 3 (to unlock more of the arcade mode tracks) but for the most part, I find that the most enjoyable part of the gameplaying experience is the relief that I feel when I finally turn the bloody thing off.

The advantage of this is that I can make a single game last me for many, many months (I’ve had my PlayStation 2 for more than 5 years, and I still only own 9 games for it, 4 of which I have completed in their single player mode. I’ve also rented a few games over the years, but that still only bumps the total up to 12, and I’m not sure if that counts because each one only occupied one weekend. So gaming is not an expensive habit, for me.

I’m not really sad to find myself in this situation. Gaming was never exactly a passion of mine, just something that I enjoyed doing.

Y’know, maybe I’m just overthinking it. Maybe I enjoy gaming as much as I ever did, but excessive introspection is just highlighting the cracks. That aside, the facts don’t lie: whereas I could once play a game for six hours at a time, I now get bored after half an hour. No bad thing, you might say. I’d be inclined to agree.