tl;dr

I’ve struggled with this in the past, usually getting the quantity of water/stock/time/heat just right. Last night I tried this recipe from Delia Smith and it worked flawlessly. Here’s exactly what I did:

1. soak 275ml of Basmati rice for 1/2 hr in a few changes of water (Delia says this is not necessary)
2. grind 2 cardamon pods, 3/4 tsp cumin seeds, 1/2tsp coriander seeds
3. using a large frying pan with a lid, toast the spices for 1 min over a high heat
4. reduce heat, add 1tbsp groundnut oil and one small finely chopped onion, fry for 3 min
5. add rice to pan and toss to cover the rice in the oil
6. add one pint of boiling water with one chicken stock cube dissolved in it (supposed to make 3/4 of a pint, so it’s weak stock)
7. add one bay leaf and a 1 inch piece of cinnamon stick
8. stir the rice just once, gently
9. put the lid on (I wrapped it in a teatowel for a tight fit) and put on your smallest hob on the lowest heat
10. after 15 min, all the liquid was absorbed (40min for brown rice says Delia)
11. it’ll keep with the lid on like that for a while
12. before serving, fluff the grains with a fork

Delia says this serves “four to six”. I say it serves three, maybe four, because I am fat. It could probably use some saffron or yellow food colouring for cosmetic purposes, but it tasted very nice. Compared to what I did in the past, using a broad frying pan and not stirring it were probably the reasons this came out better.

Food, Games

Goozex is a new website — well, new to the UK anyway — offering online game trading service. So far, I’ve managed a two-for-one swap from it (I’ve traded in Gran Turismo 5: Prologue for the PS3 and received Dead Rising and Rainbow Six Vegas 2 for 360, all for the sweet, sweet cost of £free).

EDIT: (adding this 28th April) — my initial good impressions have been reinforced. So far, I’ve disposed of a dozen older Xbox1, PS2, and Gamecube games through Goozex, and received several much newer Xbox360 and PS3 titles instead. I’m definitely impressed with this service. You get a much better deal than you would trading games in on the high street.

I recommend you check this out with all due haste. Here’s how it works.

You go on the site and register all the games you might want to get rid of, and all the games you want. You’re put into a queue and every game has a points value. The site constantly works to match games people want to trade with games people want, and every game you are looking for with people looking to trade games. When it finds a match, the point value of the game is deducted from the buyer’s account, added to the seller’s account, and the seller is given the address of the buyer. The seller bungs it in the post, and (hopefully soon) can use his points to buy a different game from someone else.

Goozex take a small fee (€1) from the seller for each transaction, but apart from that the only costs are your postage fees. As such, it seems to offer considerably better value than selling games on Ebay or trading them in at a high street store. All transactions are guaranteed by Goozex, so you are insured against games that don’t arrive and suchlike.

If you’re a gamer, I strongly encourage you to sign up and take a look. You will get one free game purchase and 100 points just for signing up, which is enough to buy any one of a number of older games for free.

(Disclosure: that’s a referral link and I will get a small number of points from Goozex when your first trade goes through. This doesn’t cost you anything, though.)

Games

The inevitable result of too much Rock Band drumming. That’s the little finger on my right hand, with blisters on the finger itself and on my palm. I think perhaps I hold the stick too loosely.

Games Games, Photos

A few weeks ago, I was frantically drumming away when I was confronted by a really loud CRACK from my foot. These Rock Band pedals are basically a pretty weak design; the return spring pushes against a point about halfway up the pedal, and the orange plastic insert (see the picture) weakens the black plastic baseplate because it fits into a cutout. Lots of people report the pedal snapping at that point, and the v2 Rock Band drums have a steel reinforced plate instead of plastic.

Fortunately, mine was only cracked, not broken right off. Lacking the time (ok… the patience) to return it, I bought a £3.08 mending bracket from B&Q and forced the self-tapping screws into the pedal with some brute force and ignorance. In the foreground of the shot you can see the Victorinox Swiss Army cybertool I used. Et voilà, one reinforced pedal!

Games Games

Yet another Xbox succumbs to the inevitable RRoD. It’s always amusing when it happens to a demo one though. “Hey, please buy our… remarkably unreliable console!”

Games Photos

Sainsbury’s are selling this for £29, if you don’t have a copy and are looking to get one today. There is a pic of my marked up copy here if you want to to a pricematch somewhere else.

Games Games

Just a little reminder that Fallout 3 is out on Friday!

Games Games, Photos

UPDATE: I no longer trade any of my games in at high street stores — the nifty new web-based game swap system, Goozex, has launched in Europe and I’m getting a much better deal from there. Read my thoughts on Goozex for more details or take a look at the site yourself.

Original article: As an experiment, I scooped up a pile of no-longer-played games and took them to four major stores to compare their trade-in prices.

The games:

• Assassin’s Creed (Xbox 360)
• The Darkness (Xbox 360)
• Ghost Recon: Advanded Warfighter (Xbox 360)
• Phoenix Wright: Ace Attourney (Nintendo DS)
• Phoenix Wright: And Justice For All (Nintendo DS)
• Meteos (Nintendo DS)

The quotes were (total for the six games):

• CEX – £40
• Game – £30.90
• Gamestation – £26
• HMV – £40

Firstly, I think it’s interesting that Game came out ahead of Gamestation. Historically I have always found Gamestation to give better trade-in prices, and I expected the firms to normalise when they merged last year. But today, at least, the prices were not only different, but Gamestation was the lower of the two.

Secondly, I wasn’t surprised that CEX came out on top, as they specialise in trade-ins and have always offered the best prices I’ve seen. They are also the only firm to publicise stock levels and trade-in prices on their website, which is very useful. However they didn’t have any stock of the game I wanted to get in return for the trade-ins (Dead Space). This is always a weakness for CEX; as they only sell preowned games, it’s never going to be the place to go for very recent releases.

Thirdly, HMV’s prices are interesting. HMV only launched their trade-in and preowned service, Re/Play, last week and I theorised that they would be very competitive, at least initially, because they have no historical pricing information to derive trade-in prices from and so have to guess. I suspect they are guessing (deliberately) a little high in order to create a good first impression. Also, I suspect their pricing algorithm has a stock level weighting built in, and of course they have very little stock right now. It will be interesting to run some more price comparisons in the months ahead to see how these prices change.

In the meantime, if you are trading in games (or DVDs for that matter), you should certainly consider at HMV. Note that the service is not available at all HMVs though, but only 160 of the larger stores.

Games Games

Sometimes, in EVE Online, corpmates will test their guns on each other. You need to be very careful when you do this though, because if you are too slow to stop, someone gets asploded by accident.

It takes a long time to hit F1, F2, F3, through to F8.

My Destroyer has eight guns.

These things are related:

Games EVEOnline