Category: Ian

Avatar ‘Frog Detective: the entire mystery’ – mini review

Before the time comes when I have to (metaphorically) throw all of my interests into the loft because of the upcoming childingtons, you won’t be too surprised to note that I have been playing video games.

A lot of video games. I have been pursuing a life of video games because what else would you do in your early forties? Build a shop? Eat some yeast and submit a two star review as it, “wasn’t what you expected it to be”? Complain about the diversity of umbrellas? Take up yodelling? I don’t want to do any of that.

What I want is to live out my dreams of being a detective. I want to solve crimes and make a name for myself without leaving the sofa. Thankfully, there are now a multitude of games that allow you to do that. I chose ‘Frog Detective’ because I had heard it was funny and it was short.

You play as the titular Frog Detective, the second best detective in the land, second best to Lobster Cop. He’s a very busy boy and currently at the top so you’re doing your best to keep up. What follows is three very short vignettes where you “solve” three very short crimes. The reason that important word is in inverted commas is because there’s not really a lot to solve.

The game is played in first person. When you speak to other characters in the game, the camera zooms back to a third person perspective. You get given the case when the supervisor, travel to where you need to and start interviewing everyone. It’s not a game to be taken seriously in the slightest. You’re not a hard-boiled gumshoe here, you’re a happy-go-lucky frog with a magnifying glass. All you need to do is keep talking to people to find out what they want and then go get the item they need. It’s more of a fun fetch quest simulator than anything else.

Luckily, the quality of the writing is what saves the game from being forgettable shovelware. Everyone is a weirdo. You get an intro which shows you all the characters you’ll be meeting when you start the episode. You’ll meet a sloth who is convinced his island is haunted by ghosts, an invisible wizard whose celebrations have been wrecked by an unknown menace and a supposedly sheriff-less town that’s hiding a terrible secret. Every character has an unusual quirk which results in conversations that go places you’re not expecting. At one point I had to find out which kind of dancing a monkey preferred so I could tell the person that fancied her this important fact so they could impress her at a contest. I found an (I think) antelope floating in a hot tub who demanded some food and when I tried to give him the pie I found on the floor he insisted on having a fresh one. When you write it down it sounds like nonsense, and also when it plays out in front of you it’s also complete nonsense.

You can finish all three episodes in under two and a half hours. At the end there’s a secret sneaky bonus game that you unlock which is fun for a while. It’s a very simple game at heart; you won’t find any mind-bending puzzles from the likes of ‘Broken Sword’, ‘Monkey Island’ or ‘Grim Fandango’ here (I know I made the same point in my ‘Lord Winklebottom Investigates’ review but they’re the most recent point-and-click games I’ve played).

If you see it on sale then I would thoroughly recommend it because it’s very silly and guaranteed to make you laugh.

Avatar Logical Dreamscape: that Rachel Stevens dream

Right, it’s about time we find out what’s going on here.

For too long I have wept in the shadows from the trauma of that Rachel Stevens dream from some twenty-seven (possibly) years ago. I need to take the bull by the horns and try to interpret what my brain was trying to tell me at the time in my life. I was young, hormonal, somewhat deranged, floating in a puddle of filth.

When I need explanations I turn to the friend we all need; dreamdictionary.org. Let’s have a brief recap as to what happened:

“I’m somewhere on Garforth main street when I meet Rachel Stevens from up-and-coming pop group S Club 7. She’s a little bit alluring, somewhat flirty but mainly pushy. She’s very, very pushy.

She takes me up a flight of stairs to a fairly plain corridor with only one door and a wooden chair outside. She makes me sit on the chair and goes into the room behind the door. When she emerges, she has a plate of salad and a fork in her hands. She then proceeds to angrily eat the salad making constant eye contact with me throughout the whole experience.”

I hope I haven’t misremembered what could be a pivotal turning point in my life. Anyway, let’s turn to the dictionary for an insight into the troubled mind of a teenage youth.

First, let’s pick out the main points:

  • Street, celebrity / singer, woman, stairs, corridor, wooden chair, salad, anger

Now let’s see what the dream dictionary says:

  • Street – walking along on the street could imply our current life’s path. Take note of what is around you and write down all the symbols because it may have hidden gems that might help you out (I don’t remember anything).
  • Celebrity – this represents our own desires to be noticed or unacknowledged potential that needs to be explored.
  • Woman – According to Jung, a man dreams of his anima; the feminine within the masculine psyche that needs to be integrated. In dreams a women represents wisdom, love and protection.
  • Stairs – there is nothing for stairs.
  • Corridor – there is nothing for corridor.
  • Wooden chair – when we dream of a chair it symbolises our need to take it easy. You need to take a break from you busy schedule and rest. You are working yourself to the bone and this dream is your unconscious tell you to calm down.
  • Salad – there is nothing for salad, there is nothing for lettuce (I remember there was a lot of lettuce in that salad).
  • Anger – there is nothing for anger, I also tried looking for ‘rage’.

Okaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay.

So, by meeting a celebrity woman on a street it meant that on my life path I wanted to be noticed. I don’t think Rachel Stevens represented wisdom, love or protection because she was so enraged with my very presence. If I was doing GCSEs or A levels around that time then the idea of taking it easy would make sense. Wanting to be noticed too does make sense because, shocked as it may be to hear this but, I wasn’t very popular during secondary school.

Huh. Maybe there is a little truth buried beneath the absurdity of it all.

Avatar Newsboost – unused material (part one)

You may or may not remember the Newsboost Twitter account that I started back in 2014. It was a way of force-feeding mega news into the public subconscious via a steady stream. I ran it for roughly a year before abandoning it as one of those Beans side projects that didn’t quite work out as well as we’d hoped.

I still have the same notebook that I jotted ideas in. Most of them were used but there were some that didn’t make the cut, possibly because they were too “radical” for the time or, which is much more likely, because they were utter nonsense that popped into my head for a moment and there was nothing I could do with it.

Anyway, here’s a short list of what could’ve been:

  • A good chair shouldn’t be sat upon
  • Portable sarcasm
  • Pointy beard serving posts (?)
  • Credit card gifts to children for irresponsible parents
  • Broom jacket
  • Aliens have given up on earth
  • Drive by serenades
  • Recycling man caught littering
  • Skeleton career guidance
  • Polar bears stealing chips
  • Tub Barsley promises a marrow for every household
  • Backwards cutlery for dieters
  • THE NOSE IS THE FACE ON THE BODY OF THE FACE
  • Chicken on drums
  • Slowest tortoise keyboardist fired
  • Big ass television comeback
  • Growling slippers
  • New number set to debut this Autumn
  • Chronic pigs

I’ve listed this as ‘part one’ because after turning over the page there’s so much more and one month where I’m not particularly feeling it, I can whip this out again for a quick win.

Proof that not every idea is a good idea (but every invention is a good invention).

Avatar ABOFB 38: Depressing Food

Ey up Beans fans, we’re back again, right on time, like Black Box but spelled right. This time Chris asks us about the most depressing foods we’ve eaten, we discuss…

  • Generic Fried Chicken
  • Headrow Shopping Centre Food Court Pies
  • Not Roast Potatoes
  • Bad Burgers

Avatar Last minute rush

“… so nobody eat the mushroom cake because you could come out in a rash.

Moving onto our last race of the month, we see the “young” McIver slapping together whatever nonsense that could constitute as a post in order to fill his quota of four. It’ll probably have numerous spelling errors, make very little sense and be as disposable as any film created and released by Netflix.

Chris “Consider Me” Marshall, once the dark horse of the beans collective, now demoted to digging holes in his back garden and filling them with water just to get some attention. It’s a shameful practice and hopefully one that will eventually peter out because what the crowds want is more bathroom art and weird things he sees on the train to work posts. They ALWAYS go down a storm.

We finish, if you can call it a finish due to the unpredictable nature of the man, with the scant offerings of Kevin “Podcast pirate” Hill. Will he slide in with another podcast shortly before the end whistle? Will he be too tired to edit and post one? Does he have enough thumbs for the process after whittling so many wooden spoons? Only time will tell.

It’s going to be a scrabble however you look at it. Still we should all be grateful that these titans of men, these pillars of hope keep generating enough content to fill a website. Where others have fallen, they continue to get back up. I know I never get sick of reading it.

Anyway, onto Purdy’s prediction corner!”

Avatar ABOFB 37: This is Your Life (Movie)

A Breath of Fresh Beans returns from the loo, with a lovely ponderance from Ian about who would play each of us in the move adaption of our life stories. We discuss…

  • Kev’s manly physique
  • Chris becomes arousing
  • The many stages of Ian
  • Alternative castings… No Crossovers!

Avatar The return of…

As the ravages of time affect us all, I stare into the mirror and I am greeted by a face that looks both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. There are traces of the young boy who once flapped around gurgling nonsense about loins and chagrins mixed with those unavoidable lines and bags around and under the eyes. It’s always the eyes that give it away.

I am awash with melancholy. Has it been twenty years since Reuben was born? Almost twenty years since I moved to Newcastle? Coming up to twenty-three years since finishing sixth form? Where has the time gone?

I look back through the photos in my phone to make sense of the madness, to try and find a firm grip on the rockface of life. I must shackle myself to something tangible because I will go out of my mind if I do not. My most recent photos are of the Florida holiday: cheery blue skies, sunshine lollipop backpacks and rainbow cookie wonderlands. All of it warms my soul to see it once more like an old friend visiting. Then I see him:

SERIOUS IAN?!

He’s crept into one of the photos. He is pushing boundaries this time because, sat in a tiny car going around the Toy Story ride at Disney, shooting at aliens with lasers for points with his technicolour space gun, there he is. The irony is delicious. When did he turn up? I didn’t see him flipping through t-shirts trying to find one with Launchpad McQuack on. I didn’t witness him stuffing burgers into his grill and then finishing up with a strawberry milkshake, pretending that in a way it would count as a “balanced meal”. He must have snuck into my suitcase when I wasn’t looking.

About halfway through the holiday I caught what felt like a bad cold and needed to rest more. Was it me that woke up every time or have I been myself less and less? Could it be:

  • Maybe he tiptoed out to watch the Superbowl at some aggressive masculine sports bar and put a huge wager on one of the teams to win, watching the TV with a pint and a grimace as he realises he’d backed the wrong side
  • Maybe he walked around the vacant tourist trap landscape, shaking his head about the silly offers in the windows of souvenir shops, muttering to himself, “this country used to mean something.”
  • Maybe he complained to the hotel because the swimming pool didn’t open early enough and that it should be available shortly after the time he usually awoke at 5.45am
  • Maybe he told the family in front that they needed to calm down and that it wasn’t the “real” Mickey Mouse that they were waiting to greet.

I mean I’m not Fight Club so that probably didn’t happen but if he can creep out when I’m living it up abroad then it means he can appear anywhere. Literally anywhere? Literally anywhere. You’d best watch out.