On Sunday Megan and I got back from our mid-year holiday. We only took three days leave, but we felt like we crammed a lot into that time.

On Tuesday night last week after work we hit the road from Auckland on our way to our accomodation at National Park in the central plateau.

After an early rise (blimmin’ 6am, is this supposed to be a holiday?) we breakfasted and headed off to get skis.

We had been watching the weather forecasts intently as they were pretty ominous. We had been planning on taking a holiday this week, but Megan’s beloved employers had stuffed up the leave arrangements, and so she volunteered to take her leave early. It’s just our luck that this week’s weather was beautiful.

We were soon fully equipped, breakfasted and ready to head into action. Shortly after nine we were up on the mountain ready to get into it.

I was pretty much a beginner (having skied once when I was about 7) and Megan is pretty experienced, so I wasn’t sure how this was going to work.

We did a couple of runs down Happy Valley (pictured below) which isn’t as crap as people say. I think this had something to do with the 1.8m base. I don’t really know what that means, but after looking at some other pics of Happy Valley I think I understand. For instance, this pic was taken at the beginning of the season (admittedly 2004 but I figure valleys don’t change much in two years). The chairlift that you can see in the centre on reasonably sized hill is now almost exactly at the height of slope. So take a reference point most of the way up that hill and imagine snow all the way up and down the valley at that level. What that means is that all the little valleys and slopes that exist in the picture don’t exist now. With a 1.8m base, there is pretty much just one big flat plain to ski down.

But back to the story. After a couple of runs down Happy Valley I was feeling ok about things, and I didn’t want to hold up Megan too much, so I decided I’d give the next level slope a go. The Rock Garden. The Ruapehu ski fields have three categories of slopes, green (easiest), blue (a bit harder) and black (death wish).

As it turns out, Happy Valley is the only green slope on Whakapapa. So I ended up tackling a blue slope when I clearly wasn’t ready for it. I fell on my ass about a hundred times, but worse was absolutely exhausted by the effort to constantly slow down and repeatedly putting on my skies. Not the biggest success.

After trying again with a slight improvement, we decided to break for lunch. By this point I was cold, wet (it had been snowing all day) and exhausted. Luckily, we couldn’t refund the ski passes so I spent the rest of the afternoon zooming up and down Happy Valley and had a great time.

So the moral of the story is, if it’s your first day skiing, Happy Valley is great (much better than the beginners slopes on Turoa) but you should plan to spend your second or third days at Turoa.

On Thursday the weather was crap (I think both fields were closed all day) and Friday wasn’t much better. So on Friday we left National Park and travelled down to Palmerston North to see Megan’s family.

Megans Mum’s birthday is near at hand so Megan and her sister took her to see Swan Lake on Ice at the St James theatre in Wellington. Me and my father-in-law wandered around the Wellington City and Sea Museum, which was pretty interesting.

So Sunday very quickly arrived, and with the weather looking reasonable, we decided to take our last chance to use our ski passes and got up at 5:30 and drove to Turoa.

We had a great day of skiing, and bailed at about 2:30 to head back to Auckland. We arrived at about 8:30 completely exhausted, just the way you should be when you get back from a holiday I guess.

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I honestly never thought that Lord of The Rings: Battle for Middle Earth II would be beaten in the ‘longest game title’ war. However with a measly thirty six characters (not counting spaces) it is trounced by the thirty eight character ‘Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter’.

However, the title length probably isn’t the most significant topic to discuss, so I will continue.

This is another game in a long string of games. I’m not exactly an expert on the history of these games, but I think it has something to do with the Rainbox Six series. I played one of those a few years ago at a LAN, but I felt it was very much an acquired taste. I feel the same about this game.

I enjoyed the demo, it comes with one campaign mission and some level of multiplayer support. I only played the campaign, so can only speak for that.

The campaign kicks off from the chopper you can see pictured above, it’s all pretty immersive and it was a good intro. I like the development of the story around the mission. You don’t just appear, you jump out of a helicopter, very cool.

The differences between this style of FPS and my favored Battlefield series are numerous. This game is designed to be ultra realistic, which can be infuriatingly difficult. It’s not long before you find yourself peering around every corner and scanning every rooftop for snipers.

And so you should, because this style of play is exactly what this game is about.

In a world where PC gaming is increasingly focused on internet multiplayer gameplay, it’s nice to see a game which has put a lot of thought into an immersive single player game. You don’t go into a mission alone, you go in with a team. In the case of the demo mission, you start out with three buddies. The aim is to use them efficiently without getting them killed.

If you follow the game’s advice and order these guys around strategically, things become a lot easier. I guess I’m putty in the developers hands.

For instance at one stage I ran into a heavy machine gun emplacement. No matter what I did, I got killed. Then I read one of the games hints. It told me that I should approach it from one direction and have my squad approach it from another. So I ordered them to do this, and as they drew it’s fire, I ran up from the other direction and shot the gunner in the head. Easy.

I enjoyed playing this demo, and I am really finding it hard to find fault. I guess I would have to have played more of this style of game to be able to make a complete judgement, but it appeared to be a really enjoyable, realistic game. If the idea of sitting in a dark room, spending hours moving at about 2 metres a minute appeals to you, then this game is definitely a goer.

Come to think of it, a timed mode would be quite fun. Either team vs team when one team sets a time and the other has to beat it, or single player vs the clock. Awesome.

8/10.

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I’m going to depart from the normal contents of this blog for a second to hopefully help some other kiwi breadmakers.

We tried making bread a few times recently and found that it came out really stodgy. “Why,” we asked, “was our bread stodgy?”

I found the answer deep in our manual. “Ingredients should be at room temperature, 20-25 degrees celsius“.

Where in New Zealand is room temperature in winter 20-25 degrees celsius?

So, the next time I made bread I stuck the water (a significant ingredient) in the microwave and using a thermometer, heated it up to 25 degrees. It’s important to note that if you heat the ingredients too much, the yeast won’t work, so bear this in mind.

The bread was good, but far from perfect.

The next time, I decided to heat the flour. “But you’ll just cook it,” was the comment from other members of my household (and blog), and yes you will. But the first stage in cooking anything is heating it, and that’s all we want to do.

So I heated the water and flour to 25 degrees in the microwave.

The bread was excellent, but still not perfect.

This was when I realised that if the rooms temperature is below 20 degrees, then as soon as you take the ingredients out of the microwave, their temperature is dropping.

So this time I heated the flour and water to 30 degrees to allow some space for the temperature to drop.

The bread was absolutely perfect.

So, peteandmegan hot tip. If you live somewhere where the room temperature is below 20 degrees and your bread is stodgy, then you need to heat up the ingredients before adding them to the breadmaker.

Mmmmm, fresh bread.

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Some of you will have seen the closeup interview we featured the other week. The premise for this interview was that New Zealand Developer Sidhe Interactive is in the process of developing what may be the biggest selling game they have developed thus far, Jackass.

Apparently this game featured at E3 recently and according to IGN was pretty cool.

When you hear them describe the gameplay you get an idea of why Sidhe may have been chosen. Sounds quite a bit like their successful PSP game, gripshift:

Developer Sidhe and publisher Red Mile have conceived Jackass: The Game as a series of 40 stunt minigames, many of which are directly based on the show and film. Inside each stunt are sub-objectives, unlockables, and other gameplay features to keep you going, and many of the stunt types are playable in multiplayer (up to two on console, as many as four on portable.) 10 Jackasses are here in the game, including mooks like Jonny Knoxville, Steve-O, Bam, and even Weeman (who has his own special set of mini-games — one we saw was Whac-A-Weeman, where the little fellow stuck his head out of holes in a garbage can and you tried to beat at him with a stick.) The director of the Jackass series is also collaborating on the stunt design, making sure that it’s the right kind of moronicness.

I’ll be keeping a keen eye on developments with this game, but when it comes to it, it’s probably not my sort of game. I try not to watch the show. Why would you put a jellyfish on your face?

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