I was excited when I found out Dane Cobain was going to send me a copy of another one of his new books after I throughly enjoyed reading a reviewing his Subject Verb Object anthology of short stories. This time, however, Cobain delved into his maiden voyage of non-fiction writing in the form of The Lexicologist's Handbook.

The Lexicologist's Handbook is, as self-described, 'a dictionary of unsusal words'. Cobain wrote this over the coruse of 10 years where he would write down any curious and interesting words he thought of whilst going about his day to day business. These words have been collated into a book of pronunciaations, definitions and examples.

This book at first seems like a dictionary that you may only reference to as and when needed but the true entertainment in this book, to me, comes from the often comical examples Cobain chooses to further explain the words. Never before have I described a dictionary as a 'page-turner' but this truly did capture my attention for prolonged periods of time.

Through my experience of reading large exerts of this book I have discovered new meanings of words I was already familiar with as well as many words I had never heard of before. Cobain challenges the reader to take a new word from these pages and incorporate it into their everyday conversations. I have highlighted some of my favourite new words below (along with some that made me laugh).

Flapdoodle

Pronunciation: Flap-do-dull

Definition: Nonsense

Example: Dave thought that the poliotician's big speech was a load of old flapdoodle. He didn't believe a word he said.

Crampon

Pronunciation: Cram-pon

Definition: A plate of spikes that's fixed to a book to help the wearer to transverse difficult terrain like ice or rock.

Example: Sir Edmund Hillary asked santa for a new crampon for his next trip up the mountain.

Unbirthday

Pronunciation: Un-birth-day

Definition: Any day except one's birthday; a neologism coined by C.S. Lewis.

Example: I didn't want to make Joseph a cup of tea, but I felt like I had no choice when he told me it was his unbirthday.

I won't spoil any more for you but there are some real gems in these pages which I'll leave for you to find. If you pick yourself up a copy of this book, come back and tell me in the comment (or on Twitter) what your favourite words were.

I've decided to take on the challenge to incorporating some words into my everyday speech. With the upcoming UK election, I expect flapdoodle to become much more prevelant.

I can highly reccommend this book to any fan of the English language, lexcologists, or anyone who can read. You can pick up a copy here.

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What is it?

Game Off - Celebrities is one version of a set of games created and promoted by Captain Fats. The game is centred around a group of family or friends having to perform different tasks in order to collect each of the 5 types of card in the game. This version of the game is based around British, or well-known in Britain, celebrities or historical figures. Other versions on offer include Adult, German/Spanish Celebs, as well as of course the original game.

These 5 types are Mind, Body, Courage, Skill and Luck. I won't be listing out the full rules of the game 1-by-1 here but the objective is to challenge someone else in the group, determined by a dice roll, to play against in order to obtain one of these cards.

Each card relates to a certain type of challenge which can be summarised as:

Mind - Coming up with the best idea or answer to a specific scenario.
Body - Doing something physical or in a race against your opponent.
Courage - Performace sort of challenges. Singing, doing impressions.
Skill - Challenge along to lines of draw something, make something, think of something.
Luck - As the name suggests, it's luck. You don't have to do anything to win this card, you simply get it if you beat our your opponent in whatever characteristic is on the card.

The rest of the group take a vote on the person they think completed their challenge the best and that person wins the card. This is why 3 players are needed as a minimum. In the event of a tie, a luck card decided the winner. The first to collect one of each type of card wins!

What did I think?

Now, I managed to play this game with the minimum of 3 people, I would have preferred more but for obvious reasons that aren't workable currently. (Note: If you're reading this from the future, google the history of 2020). Anyway, the game definitely had the feel of a party game.

The rules were quick to pick up and the 3 of us were promptly getting competitive in an attempt to beat out the others. As with most games, of course, some cards offer more fun than the others. My personal favourite that I had to do was the 'Ronnie O'Sullivan Off' where my opponent and I had to take turns hitting the dice with pencils into the game's box, like in snooker. I won this of course.

The Mind cards were especially fun too as they allowed to debate and argue your case, vying for the judge's vote. I can see a few heated discussion cropping up among a larger group of friends and a few drinks.

The game doesn't take too long, it depends on how many players you have and the speed at which you perform the tasks. For our game, it took up about 20-30 minutes since there were a lot more opportunities to win the 5 cards and there was only 1 vote needed to decide the winner each time.

Once able to start-up my group's Friday night table-topping session I will certainly introduce the game to the mix, I would love to see how this plays out among a group of 6+, all of whom are have a 'jolly' time of it.

I believe this game would be perfect for students at university looking for something to spice up their pre-drinks or for a family get together at Christmas.

Due to the nature of the game, replayability is not an issue unlike with question0based card games, making the price point acceptable in terms of how much game time you can get out of the set.

You can pick up the game for the price of £12.99 on Amazon by clicking the link below.

Click here or below to get yourself a copy of Game Off - Celebrities from Amazon!

Note: I was sent this product to review. I try to write all of my reviews as honestly as possible but it's important to be transparent when I was given the product for the purpose of this review.

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I've been aware of the Hitchhiker series from a young age, from both snippets of the TV Series and discussing the show in my middle school English lessons. I'd never had any interest above that in either the series or the book (or the film as I have just discovered) until I saw this Reddit post. It gave me a little chuckle so I thought "Hey, I'm in my summer holidays from work, might as well do something useful" so I got myself a copy of 'The Complete Trilogy of 5' and started on the first book in the series.

The first thing I noticed was how little the book has aged. It doesn't seem dated and its ideas of what futuristic space travel may look like are the same ideas that you would expect from a modern-day space-opera. You don't find yourself laughing at what the author, Douglas Adams, thought the future of the universe may look like as it's very modernly written even though the novel was published in 1979.

“Ford!" he said, "there's an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they've worked out.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

This is the first book I have read that gave me a good few chuckles here and there. Douglas Adams portrays typical British humour through the novel in the form of Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect and Zaphod Beeblebrox. A third of whom are human with the other 2 being alien life-forms. Dent is whisked away from Earth by his close friend, Ford Prefect, who is aware of a plan to destroy Earth in favour of an inter-galactic bypass. The book follows the pair's hitchhiking through space upon escaping the ashes of where the planet earth once was, using Prefect's trusty copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy.

Source

I found myself reading this book for a chapter a night due to time constraints but it was the sort of novel that you could easily pick back up and know what was going on, in spite of a few unfavourable lengthy words here and there. It's a cheery take on an over-done plot in film; the destruction of Earth by alien life.

The ending of the book seemed a bit too abrupt for my liking but since the second novel was published the following year I'm not too fussed as it's sequel 'The Restaurant at the End of the Universe' was published the year after the original novel so I'm sure it was meant to be immediately followed upon in the next instalment. I for one cannot wait to get onto the next book and bring you my thoughts yet again.

There are another four books in the series by Adams for me to read, plus a sixth published posthumously in 2006, so there's plenty more for me to get my teeth into now that I've finished the novel. I plan to slowly but surely work my way through the huge universe that Adams created, which all began from a 1978 BBC Radio 4 comedy show

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel and look forward to venturing further into the series, perhaps having a go at watching the series, film and maybe even the original radio show.

Have you read this novel? What did you think?

Follow @MrAdrianJones

Well, the short answer is “barely”. Our man Keith gives us the lowdown on what footy fans had to suffer before EA’s beast of a game:

In the same way that Sky would have you believe that football didn’t exist before the inception of the Premier League in 1992, Electronic Arts would probably be pretty happy if people believed that football video games didn’t exist prior to the release of FIFA International Soccer in late 1993. We’ve gotten so used to the yearly installments of FIFA (plus the tournament tie ins) and Pro Evolution Soccer over the past two decades that it seems unimaginable that any other football games even existed. However, for better or worse (much worse in some cases…) they did, and here we take a look at just a few of them….

World Soccer – (Master System)

Released in Europe in late 1987, and in the US under the title ‘Great Soccer’ (err, ok…), World Soccer was the first console football game I ever played or owned. At the time, bearing in mind that I was about 7 or 8 years old when I got it, it seemed ok at first. But young Keith soon grew weary and frustrated with this second rate sim. Although the pitchside view and cutesy sprites looked ok, the controls were clunky and unresponsive, there were no free kicks whatsoever (apart from offsides!), and it was almost impossible to score!

IF you somehow got close enough to the opposition goal to have a shot, the direction of your effort was determined by a white arrow that slide up and down the goal line, that you then had to stop in the desired place. You also had to make sure you kept the ball and that your player was facing the right way – this sounds easy in the modern era of responsive controls and pads with 28 buttons, but back then it was a freakin’ nightmare! And that is where World Soccer shall stay – confined to my nightmares.
This is a shocking game and not one that I would recommend checking out, even for nostalgic reasons. Amazingly, it even spawned a sequel! Interestingly, in Scandinavia it was called ‘Anders Limpar’s Proffs Fotboll’. Better title definitely, but not enough to save this game from the soccer sim scrapheap.Many sequels followed, as did ports to various consoles. I played Super Kick Off a fair amount when it arrived on the Mega Drive, and always had a soft spot for it, in part due to the “almost, but not quite” player names. Brian Eclair and Jamie Blueknapp being ones that stand out in the memory!The pace of the game is sloooooow beyond belief; the collision detection is appalling and the shooting and passing so weak it’s ridiculous. Amongst all these frustrations and worthy of a special mention are the slide ‘tackles’ in this game. Go on, give it a try and watch your defender slide halfway down the length of the pitch without getting anywhere near the ball. ARRRRGGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!A true multi-player legend, the action was fast and furious end to end stuff, and the popularity of the game can easily be measured by the fact that it was eventually ported to virtually every console you can think of, including the Mega CD! Sensible Soccer must go down as a classic and in the opinion of many, was the first truly great football video game.

Gazza’s Superstar Soccer – (Amiga, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum)

Endorsed by and named after everyone’s favourite blubbing boozy Geordie, Gazza’s Superstar Soccer is a haunting reminder of how bad things used to be. Bizarrely, it has no scrolling. This means there are three fixed views of the pitch, a side on view of the middle third, and as soon as the ball goes to one end of the pitch it switches to an end to end view where the camera appears to be floating above the centre circle… If this wasn’t distracting enough, the game is also uglier than Gazza’s fellow Geordie and erstwhile England teammate Peter Beardsley (sorry Beardo), and the players all appear to be doing a poorly choreographed version of Riverdance. Michael Flatley must be spinning in his grave. Whats that? He’s not dead? Oh…..

Kick Off – (Amiga, Atari ST, NES initially, everything else later…)

First released in 1989, Kick Off became a huge success, and its developer Dino Dini became a well-known name amongst gamers of the time (in true football style he even ‘transferred’ from Anco to Virgin Games in the early 1990’s). It was another game with a top down view, which worked well. It was quite difficult to get the hang of, and dribbling with the ball took a fair bit of time and skill to master, but this did add an air of realism to the way it played. It was notable at the time for various features such as action replays, players with different characteristics and skills, tactics, injuries and even different referees with different moods!

European Club Soccer – (Mega Drive)

Originally a PC game titled “Manchester United Europe” (I feel sick just typing that…), this sim from Virgin was released on the MD in 1992 and featured 170 teams to choose from, including those from the 1st Division at the time. A classic case of style over substance, this is a very well presented game with decent animation and fairly detailed sprites. However the gameplay lets it down terribly.

It’s a shame as it looks good, there are lots of options (tactics, kits, lots of teams, tournament mode), but the sloppy gameplay and plodding nature of the game suck all the fun out of it.

Sensible Soccer (Atari ST, Amiga, PC… then everything else!)

Developed by Sensible Software (hence the title…) and known affectionately by aficionados as Sensi, this was originally released on the Amiga, Atari ST and PC in 1992. It featured a top down bird’s eye view similar to many older football games, but from much higher up. It was most notable for its aftertouch feature which allowed you to put a crazy amount of swerve on the ball after you had a shot. It was also a departure from most other footy sims at the time in that the ball ‘stuck’ to the player as he dribbled, as opposed to him appearing to tap it front of him as he ran, which was the case in other games. This allowed a greater degree of control and added to the game play immensely as you can dribble round players in a way that had never been properly captured before.

They think it’s all over….

So there you go. We’ve barely scratched the surface of retro football games, as I decided to only cover the ones I have previous experience of, and I wanted to end this article on a positive note with Sensible Soccer. But for every Sensi, there’s a World Cup Italia ’90… Now its over to you. What are some of your best loved/most hated retro football sims? Let us know…

- Keith

The post was originally writen by Keith at Arcade Attack. If you liked the post then please check out more of their content!

Flapdoodle

Crampon

Unbirthday

What is it?

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