Opera.

No, not that wonderfully pointless web browser.

Opera, as an art form is an acquired taste, like Marmite. When given the choice of going to the Opera or chewing your own feet off before pouring honey all over yourself and unleashing the legion of man-eating ants to finish the job off, you can pretty guess which one they go for.

Which explains why you only ask people to go, whom you don’t like.

You see, the whole thing about it, is that when it’s mentioned, you instantly have thoughts of heavily obese people bellowing out or “singing” words in some nasty foreign language, about someone dying or eating a pie, who knows, it’s in a foreign language. The high notes are hit so often, that the glass factory twenty miles away self destructs.

Not so long ago, I was asked if I wanted to go to see a production in the center of town and use it as an excuse to dress up like a homeless person.

Now, this was as the result of asking countless people it seems, all of whom would prefer the aforementioned ant fate except for myself. Personally, if you’re going to laugh and berate something, you have to at least experience it once. Except for things like Bungee Jumping or jumping out of a plane. Remarkably, it’s very easy to laugh at those things while on the ground drinking a bambochino or whatever new drink Starbucks has invented in the last 60 seconds.

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And so it came to pass, that the Eurogamer 2010 show was at the court of Earl over the weekend, and once more, the march for providing a dribbling crowd with a taste of wares to come over the next year had begun, in one case, more than a year, given that Gears of War 3 had been postponed at this point till Christmas 2011.

Though the majority of games were already out or going to be out for the run-up for Christmas, such as Fallout New Vegas, Dead Space 2, Brink, Fable 3 and a whole raft of others.

This year, given the success of the past two years, an even bigger venue was chosen and also the event was spread over three days this time as opposed to just one, which gave rise to the fact that most of the presentations you would want to see, you would more than likely miss out on, except for the biggest one of all, RAGE being the biggest crowd puller seeing as Id Software haven’t produced anything for something, let alone a new title altogether.

Let’s briefly go through a few like we did last year and mock them all to hell;

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In a bad attempt to link last week’s post about The Wire, and to highlight one of the pitfalls of PC ownership, I’d like to talk very very briefly, before the return to proper service tomorrow about wires.

Seriously, why so many damned wires required for all the bits and bobs of the modern PC? It seems that everything from the mouse to the speakers come with at least 17 different wires in order for you to enjoy all the wonderful wonders of modern technology.

The only machines which are coming close to getting it right, I hate to say it, are the Apple Macs. Or more precisely, the IMac. Pretty much everything is in the one package, the mouse and keyboard are wireless, and then you’ve just got the power lead and maybe also a lovely shiny network cable.

But this doesn’t translate well to full blown tower-based systems, where the machine requires its own power plant, and UN weapon inspectors often wander around tutting about various safety procedures being ignored.

Surely people in the PC world such as it stands today, can do much better, maybe wireless cabling for the monitors as well as the mouse and keyboards, which have to be honest, have not been the best in the world, owing to such dwindling battery life, that you’d be better off trying to raise the dead, rather that type another word as it dies in agony.

This concludes today’s lesson kids. Join us next time, where we learn that mixing old people’s drugs is not always funny.