Whitney's family have very strict and unbendable traditions for Thanksgiving (the day that the British give thanks that several boats pushed off and gave the rest of them some more room). It begins with a potato and egg breakfast, followed by a film, then a board game, then a traditional dinner of... seafood stew. Because they're vegetarians, you see.

This year, after altogether far too much debate about the subject because there really weren't any good Thanksgiving films out this year (whatever a good Thanksgiving film is), we went to see Hitman. Now, it's true that I share my dad's taste for really stupid films (Independence Day, Van Helsing, Mortal Kombat, and so on) but I genuinely think that the reviews for this film have been rather harsh. I would actually go so far as to say that it's the best game to film conversion so far, although let's be honest, competition in this field is not fierce. And I haven't played the game for more than about ten minutes over at Craig's when we were in sixth year of school, so I don't really know anything.

I had only been aware of Timothy the Oliphaunt since Die Hard 4, in which he was rubbish. But here he somehow works, because much like Roger Moore he is only capable of one expression - that of mild annoyance - and that translates rather well into being totally emotionless. The plot involves Scottish Bloke, English Bloke and Russian Bloke attempting to find Agent 47 as he performs various hits, but beyond that is not incredibly coherent. And it's not as if he would be very difficult to trace. "Tall. Bald. Barcode on head." It's true that the film is just one gunfight after another, but you couldn't expect any more, really.

The board games came out next, and in a variation on the traditional theme, they were both DVD-video games (something that I hadn't seen since the likes of Atmosfear about fifteen years ago). These were Scene-It and Jeopardy.

On a technical level, I was quite impressed with the Jeopardy game. It uses three infra-red "buzzer" units which communicate via IR to a large battery powered "game unit" that doesn't appear to contain anything at all, which passes on signals to the DVD player via an IR transmitter that is velcroed to the DVD player's IR receiver. Understand that? Keep going, it gets better. I'm not certain of the memory on DVD systems - I had thought that they were just flowchart-style menus with very little room for actual variables, but this keeps score and keeps track of subjects chosen from a six-by-six grid throughout the game.

However, where it falls down is how they've chosen to ask the questions. The only quiz game that did it competently was Trivial Pursuit on the Commodore 64, which was brave enough to rely entirely on the judgement of the other players to decide whether you'd got a question right or not, which was perfect - otherwise you're working with parsing hundreds of multiple possibilities and deciding whether a misspelling is close enough. This goes for having multiple-choice answers - and while that's not disastrous in itself, the possible answers they've chosen make even the difficult questions extremely easy. For example:

This composer wrote Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. What is...

a) Mozart

b) Beans

c) An abdominal muscle



Osiris was the Egyptian god of this.

a) The afterlife

b) Biscuits

c) Hairdos

So the best way to win the game became the "Stab furiously at the buzzer until it recognizes you" tactic, followed by ticking the obvious answer. Although there were a few bombs in it where you were supposed to know the height of a dam in Kazakhstan or the like. The other disadvantage to this game is that when we opened the DVD player drawer it was no longer there, and said player is now out on the table with the disc presumably lodged in its innards until someone can find whatever star-shaped tool is needed to unpick the insane star-shaped screws on the sides.

Scene-It is actually much better - it has a far simpler DVD system than Jeopardy did (and I'm glad I've got that out the way, because it's an incredibly awkward word to spell), relying on just a menu to select different categories from, from which questions are chosen at random. And the correctness of an answer is decided by the other players, with tie-breaker questions also provided. It's a quiz about films, which I don't really know much about (see opinion of Hitman, above) but has enough observation-type questions to make sure that pretty much everyone has a chance.

Then there's the meal in which everyone eats far too much, then bed, followed by tree-hunting the next day. I may write something about that, but seeing as I'll be on another six-hour flight within twelve hours my capacity for writing entertainingly is not fantastic.