I have a fairly simple rule about eating in restaurants: for me, the experience is worth it if they can do something I can’t do at home. Now, I’m no great chef, but I know my way around a kitchen pretty well and can knock together pretty decent versions of a good range of dishes; so, if I’m going to a restaurant, and I’m going to be paying 65% over the cost of the ingredients for a meal, there’d better be a good reason for me to do so: it could be something I couldn’t easily cook at home, something with difficult to obtain ingredients, something prepared with more skill than I have, etc.

Broadly speaking, the same kind of thing applies when I go and see a band. If I’m paying money to see some people play some instruments, I want them to be better – or at least different or in some way more interesting – than the sort of racket I make at home when strumming my Les Paul (not a euphemism). Again, I’m not exactly Eric Clapton, but I can at least strum a competent tune.

Sadly, the two support acts we caught last night fell into the “Not As Good As Me” category. In fact, they fell into the “Never Likely To Ever Be Any Good At All, Actually” catgeory. Neither band had learnt, for example, the twin fine arts of “Tuning a guitar” or “Singing in tune”. Worse, they believed they were good; they, um, weren’t. The first band had a lead singer with the kind of public school pretty boy face that just ached to be given a good kicking combined with the sort of faux-laddish behaviour you get when kids first come to University and discover an endless supply of cheap alcohol and no parental control. The second band didn’t even have that, as their parents – a depressed looking pair of 40-somethings wearing the look of “Oh God, What have we created?” – were in the audience, presumably waiting to take them home so they could be tucked up in bed ready to go to sixth form the following day.

At least, therefore, the support bands did their job of making the main act look better. Or they would have done if any of the audience (other than ourselves) had actually hung around to watch Shuriken. Which is a shame, because they were actually pretty good – certainly, they’re all competent musicians, they can carry a tune, the drummer was rock-solid in time, they knew their songs and didn’t spend ages arsing around in between songs trying to decide what to do next. Most of the material was straightforward powerchord pop-punk sort of stuff; fairly predictable but well played and with stacks of energy. There were, however, two songs introduced as being “new” that stood out head-and-shoulders above the rest as being genuinely well written, well arranged and much more interesting pieces of actual songwriting.

So, file Shuriken in the “ones to watch” box. File all the supports acts in the shredder.

I went to a talk and Q&A session with Clare Short on the subject of Britain’s role in creating a more just and safe world order. She spoke at great length on the need for Britain (and the rest of the world) to acknowledge international development not simply as something to be tacked onto foreign policy, but something that should be placed at the core of foreign policy. She spoke with an optimism that the goals of the UN Millennium Development Goals could be achieved, but that a substantial shift in the politics of the US and other powerful nations needed to happen first. The very fact that people pulled together in the face of the Tsunami disaster showed that the international community was capable of incredible compassion and joint effort, but that the message that poverty and poor health and education in developing nations was an even bigger disaster needed to be hammered home to people.

She also touched on a wide range of other issues, including civil liberties (“That disgraceful and horribly misguided ‘anti-terror’ bill going through Parliament at the moment”), the EU (“The EU is important – I’m in favour of the European Constitution – but currently the beaurocracy in Brussels hugely limits its potential to make any appreciable impact on the world”) and globalisation (she argued that multi-national corporations could be a good thing for the developing world so long as they get a handle on the idea that their corporate image and social responsibilities are important, making reference to the time she approached the Top 200 FTSE listed companies to ask them to switch to Fairtrade coffee and Nestlé went ballistic).

I was, frankly, hugely impressed; I think I’d be hard pressed to find anything she said that I disagreed with in the whole evening. She came across as compassionate but thoughtful and well reasoned; although she had an incredible social conscience, she wasn’t so quick to dismiss or paint as pure evil the role of, say, large corporations or organisations such as G8 in the building of a more tolerant and just world order. Frankly, we could do with more people like her in politics today; it’s a crying shame that, as Naomi commented, she seemed to be speaking in direct contradiction to nearly everything her party seems to stand for these days.

A greatly summarised version of her speech can be found here.

Jez went to the US on a training course and managed to locate a Nintendo DS and a couple of games for me whilst he was out there, and it’s very lovely indeed.

It’s a pretty sturdy piece of kit – about the size of two of the original GBAs sandwiched together in a clamshell-type arrangement. The two screens sit in the middle of each half of the clamshell; the lower one is touch-sensitive (you get a stylus and a sort of weird thumb-nubbin thing to stop you getting smeary marks all over the screen), and has the d-pad and action buttons arranged around it. The shoulder buttons are, as you’d expect, on the shoulder of the device.

In use, it’s a nifty piece of kit – when you power it up, you’re presented with a sort of set-up screen thing, from which you can launch games (you can have a GBA cart and DS game in the system at the same time, and pick which one to launch from the menu), use the Pictochat system, change system preferences (language, time, date of birth, that sort of thing) and start a wireless download. The screens are clear and bright, and the touchscreen seems pretty responsive (and hardy – I’ve played it for about three hours now and there’s no sign of any marking or any indication of use at all).

With the system, you get a demo of Metroid Prime: Hunters, which is very much in the vein of Metroid Prime on the GameCube – a first person 3D shooter with strong exploration and platforming elements, basically. I was unconvinced as to how well this was going to work – firstly, 3D on a handheld never really struck me as a great idea, and secondly, control without an analogue joystick was going to be difficult. In practise, though, it works really well: the graphics are slick and smooth, running at a constant 60fps; and the control mechanism works better than I’d thought – you can use the stylus/thumb nubbin as a sort of mouselook, and the d-pad to run around. The shoulder buttons fire, double-tapping the touchscreen jumps and you can select weapons and change to/from the morphball using icons on the touchscreen. It takes a bit of getting used to, but pretty quickly I was circlestrafing, strafejumping and all the rest. One to stick on the pre-order list, I reckon.

The other two games I got are kind of variations on the same kind of theme: Feel The Magic (released in the UK as Project Rub) and WarioWare: Touched! Both games utilise a large number of minigames, strung together in some kind of order: In Feel The Magic, you’re performing tasks in order to win the heart of your beloved; in WarioWare, there’s a different “story” for each character, but to be honest they’re all pretty flimsy and superfluous. With Feel The Magic, there are a smaller number of games, but more variety within each game; each game also lasts considerably longer – in WarioWare, you get about 5 seconds to figure out what’s going wrong and complete the task, whereas in Feel The Magic, the tasks can sometimes take as long as you need to finish them (which, in the case of the Antlions game, can be a frustratingly long time).

Presentation-wise, Feel The Magic blows WarioWare out of the water. It looks great, with a wonderful, cohesive visual style not entirely dissimilar to the Apple iPod silhouette adverts; Sega have put a huge amount of effort into making this game look and feel really great and it shows. The game flows well and never feels disjoint. WarioWare, on the other hand, doesn’t look anything like as good: disparate artistic styles are thrown together in a sort of mishmash of ideas. The overall look of the game isn’t as polished or well thought out as Feel The Magic.

But both games live or die by their playability, and they’ve both got it in bucketloads: WarioWare is a videogame created by people with ADD – perfect if you’ve got zero attention span – whereas Feel The Magic is a bit more laid back, although equally bonkers. It remains to be seen how much replay value they each have, but for now, I’m very pleased with them. Hooray for crazy Japanese games developers, that’s what I say.