Name:

D Howell

Genre:

Reggae / Dancehall / Caribbean-Latin Fusion

Founded:

Early 2010s

# of Albums:

Currently building toward a major EP release

Latest Album:

Upcoming EP (TBA 2026)

Latest Single:

“In The Air” (feat. Chase) FIFA World Cup theme song

Latest Video:

Favourite musician growing up:

Beenie Man — his stage dominance inspired me early.

Favourite musician now:

Eminem

Guilty pleasure song:

“What goes around” – Justin Timberlake

Live show ritual:

A moment of gratitude and focus. Once I step on stage, it’s full throttle.

Favourite local musician:

Drake

EP or LP?

EP. I prefer focused, impactful projects — no filler, just strong records back-to-back.

Early bird or night owl?

Early bird. I like starting my day with intention – clear mind, focused energy and getting ahead before the world wakes up.

Road or studio?

Studio. That’s where the vision comes alive, and the records are crafted with purpose.

Where can we follow you?

Instagram | TikTok | YouTube | Spotify

***

Rapid Fire Local Questions:

What is your favourite local restaurant?

Mr Big’s Jamaican Restaurant — authentic Jamaican flavour and real island energy.

What is your favourite street in your city and why?

Damien Way — it represents ownership. I believe in carving your own path — and I’m creating mine one record at a time.

What is your favourite park in your city and why?

Humber Bay Park — peaceful space to reset and think clearly.

What is your favourite music venue in your city?

Scotiabank Arena — that’s the big stage. That’s the level.

What is your favourite music store in your city?

Long C McQuade — every serious musician knows the spot.

The post Five Minutes With: Reggae Musician D Howell appeared first on Toronto Guardian.

Veuve Clicquot Sun Club at Kōst Restaurant (Bisha Hotel) has officially kicked off the season with its epic coastal vibes. Located on the 44th floor of the Bisha Hotel, the open air patio offers unparalleled views of the city and lake. Come for sunset dinners, afterwork wind-down, or weekend brunches. There’s also a reason to celebrate with friends or your significant other.

Taberna LX (1161 Dundas Street West) is hands-down our favourite Portuguese restaurant in the city, and with this warmer weather, we’re dreaming of nights in Lisboa.  Enjoy vibrant dishes and cocktails bursting with flavour. A love letter to Portugal and for all those who have fallen in love with the cuisine and the vibes.

GEORGE Restaurant (111C Queen Street East)  has an intimate courtyard patio tucked away that is a favourite for date nights. With Executive Chef Lorenzo Loseto leading the team at this four-time Michelin-Rated restaurant, it really is a hidden gem right in the city. Enjoy the full menu of offerings and the restaurant’s dedicated operative program of shareable plates and cocktails.

Via Allegro Ristorante (1750 The Queensway) is a landmark in the city for their iconic Italian fare. Their covered patio is a coveted spot all year round. Dine under the awe-inspiring vision of colourful orange groves. This season is extra special as the restaurant celebrates 30 years with a “throwback menu” to honour the milestone year. The menu was created by Executive Chef Marco Zandona and Culinary Director Claudio Aprile. Available until July 25.

AYLA Upstairs (794 Dundas Street West) has opened up the second floor rooftop patio for the season. This intimate Hong-Kong inspired restaurant located above Patois continues the same nostalgic vibes taking inspiration from Moon Street in Hong Kong’s Wan Chai district. The name itself means “halo of light around the moon”. Perfect for summer nights to enjoy a menu that blends bold Hong Kong flavours with global influences all under the warm glow of the city lights.

Sky Garden at Louix Louis (325 Bay Street) located on the 31st floor of the St. Regis Hotel, soars above the Financial District. A favourite patio in the city known for its dramatic views and heritage story. It’s a stand-out spot to take in the views and toast any milestone celebration. BTW, their signature 13 layer King’s Cake is a must-order – special occasions or not!

Chotto Matte (Brookfield Place) is like stepping into a tropical oasis right in the city. Their exciting Nikkei cuisine (Peruvian and Japanese), VERY popular weekend brunch, and incredible cocktail program make this an escape you won’t want to return from. A great place to bring your BFFs for a Girls’ Dinner!

RendezViews (229 Richmond Street West) has been considered one of our favourite spots right in the core of the entertainment district. Considered the largest patio destination, it also boasts an impressive number of picnic tables style seating. This year, they’ve added a soccer pitch, live FIFA World Cup watch parties, custom Casamigos margaritas, DJs and other fun soccer activations during the tournament. We also love that it’s dog friendly!

El Catrin Destileria (Distillery District) has a massive 200 seat outdoor patio, perfect for soaking up the summer rays. If it feels like you’ve landed in paradise, you’re not wrong. Here you can enjoy Mexican coastal inspired dishes, including Tacos Gusave  – a fusion of land and sea inspired by the town in Sinaloa. Of course, we love keeping cool with their margarita flights!

Madrina Bar y Tapas (Distillery District) is the perfect patio with a Spanish vibe. Since Barcelona is in playing in the current World Cup Games, it’s a natural fit where you can enjoy the flavours and sips inspired by Catalonian traditions with a modern twist in this Michelin recognized spot.

Cluny Bistro & Boulangerie‘s updated patio (Distillery District) has us dreaming of our next Parisian Garden escape right here in the city. Pull up a seat and say “OUI” to their Habitant Poutine made with smoked plait pea and maple gravy, ham hock, fresh cheese curds, oozing over thick-cut fries. It’s a perfect date night surrounded by greenery in this hidden oasis.

Pure Spirits Oyster House & Grill (Distillery District) reminds us of our most favourite Canadian coastal visits. Ideal for seafood lovers who put sustainability at the forefront in all their dishes. Try the maritime lobster rolls and crab poutine! This patio seats up to 120. It’s also heated for the cooler nights.

Waterworks Food Hall (50 Brant Street) has become a community social and eating emporium in the King St.West (and Brant Street)  entertainment district. With several fast casual restaurants to choose from, including its new $15 lunch club, it’s a winning spot! Recently, the food hall launched Bar Brant, a new 100 person patio developed in partnership with Collective Arts Brewing. There’s also a hidden courtyard with entrance on Richmond Street. We love that it’s also dog friendly!

Union Summer Patio (Union Station) open until August 9. Considered one of Toronto’s favourite food, music, and culture outdoor patios! Expect stand out culinary talents, live performances, DJs, and cultural spotlights throughout the summer months. This year’s food lineup includes Wicked Caribbean, Sumaq (Iraqi shawarma and kebabs), The Taqueria by Narcos Tacos, Ugly Delicious (Kensington’s famous Wagyu Burgers), and Ruru Baked (small batch ice cream and sweets).

The post Toronto’s Best Summer Patios Escapes appeared first on Toronto Guardian.

Why Should You Think About Games Before Departure?

There’s a lot to handle before the metaphorical wheels hit the road, and it makes sense if entertainment isn’t at the absolute top of your priority list. Figuring out what to pack, where you’re going to stay, what the itinerary looks like, and how to keep your travel documents safe understandably get priority.

But once you’ve got those basic essentials nailed down, let’s talk entertainment. After all, travel necessarily tends to result in significant chunks of downtime. What you do with that can determine how you feel when you arrive at the end of your trip – frustrated? Tired? Bored? Antsy? Or, with the right approach, energized, refreshed, and excited to get started.

Let’s figure out what makes casino games such a good fit here.

Moment-To-Moment Flexibility

The number one priority for any on-the-go gaming? Flexibility. You have to be able to put the game down with no warning. Gate change? Train got in early? Member of staff requesting a ticket? Your brain has to be able to literally drop what it is doing and switch its attention to the environment for the game to work well. Anything that demands consistent attention or is negatively affected by a sudden pause ends up adding frustration and stress to your trip.

That’s what makes casino games particularly well-suited to this setup. Most of the games you’ll find at 7signs Online Casino match this requirement perfectly. Roulette, slots, baccarat, blackjack, craps, and many other titles on this site can be picked up and put down with no consequences, either in the game or in your brain. There is no requirement for sustained attention or finicky timing. There’s just you and the reels, cards, dice, or animation, and if something in your trip suddenly needs you to focus on it instead, the game will still be there when you return.

Of course, that’s not true for absolutely every title. You should avoid things like live dealer games, where a live-streamed dealer will keep the round moving even if your attention is elsewhere; poker, where you might be waiting for and responding to other players in real-time, and crash games, which depend on you determining the finishing point before the game “crashes.”

However, that still leaves plenty of the classics for you to enjoy. And the great news about that is that you’ve got a lot of options. Play roulette until you get bored and then swap to slots. When you decide you’ve got a slightly longer stretch and you want to put more energy in, opt for blackjack. This can still be dropped without notice, but does ask you to think a bit more – making it ideal once you’re on the flight, or perhaps while waiting for a plane. If a gate changes or an attendant asks a question, it’s easy to set it aside and resume later, but it can provide a nice change of pace from slots and roulette.

Simplicity Of Entry

What’s something almost all lengthy travel experiences have in common?

You get tired. It’s exhausting to go from one place to another. That means entertainment has to meet you halfway (or almost all the way) and avoid overburdening your brain with complex rules or difficult mechanics.

The best casino games thrive on being easy to understand in just a few moments; most have a rule sheet that you can scan in under a minute. Added to that, many people are already familiar with the basic concepts because these games have widespread recognition. That makes it even easier to get engaged.

But that doesn’t mean the games are boring! Many of these games, especially titles like blackjack, still require input and decision-making from your end, providing a satisfying feedback loop for your brain to respond to, without making huge demands on it.

And even simpler games, such as slots, are packed with variety in today’s world. Scrolling briefly through the list of options on any good casino platform will show you an absolute plethora of different mechanics, including:

• Hold & Win
• Multipliers
• Scatters
• Megaways
• Expanding Wilds
• Exploding Wilds
• Jackpots
• Sticky Symbols
• Respins
• Special Wilds
• Pick’ems
• Cascading Reels

That’s just a brief flavour of the different options – so when you get bored of one kind, you can easily jump to another and mix up the gaming fun, without having to ask too much of your brain. Bonus rounds help add a little bit of differentiation from the main gameplay, ensuring sustained interest without asking for any more from the player.

To finish, let’s quickly cover what makes a great traveling game, versus a bad one!

The post Do Casino Games Make The “Travel Game” Cut – And Why? appeared first on Toronto Guardian.

How would you describe your comedy style?

Real, Honest and Irish

Who are some of your influences?

Billy Connolly, Joan Rivers, Whoopi Goldberg, Tommy Tiernan, Kathy Griffin, Rosie O’Donnell

Who was your favourite comedian growing up?

Billy Connolly

Who is your favourite comedian now?

Tommy Tiernan

What is your pre-show ritual?

I write out my set during the day and perform it for my dog. Once I get to the gig, I will write it out again before show, just one keyword to remind me of the joke; this could also be due to my memory being fried from perimenopause.

What is your favourite place you have performed? Why?

Newfoundland is fantastic, like Ireland on Steroids, and they are so up for the craic

What is your favourite bit you have written and why were you proud of it?

My absolute favourite joke I wrote is about period products now vs when I was a teenager, and we had to use Single Ikea Mattresses. I love it because as soon as I mention the word “Period,” everyone tenses up, and then I have to win them over. It’s a lovely feeling when all the older women and men start hitting each other and laughing because they can relate to the struggle we all had.

What is your favourite medium for listening or finding new comics/comedians?

Usually, Instagram and YouTube or seeing a newer comic at a gig, there are so many great comics in Canada.

Tell us a joke about your city.

Do you know how to spot a real Irish person on St Patrick’s Day in Toronto?

We are the ones wearing NOTHING from Dollarama

Do you have anything to promote right now?

Yes, my latest album “FIONA 51” on Spotify and Apple; thanks to Cottage Comedy for helping me.

Where can we follow you?

All my links to my social media are on the website. Please follow me. Thanks very much.

PAY IT FORWARD: Who is another local comic/comedian we should know about?

Eric Andrews is a joy to watch on stage, makes me really laugh every time. Also, John Mostyn, originally from Glasgow, Scotland, living in Toronto now, is hilarious.

The post Tragedy Plus Time: Comedian Fiona O’Brien appeared first on Toronto Guardian.

Original Platform: Windows (Steam)

Version We Played: Original Release, on Steam Deck

Verdict: All I want for Christmas is a gravity gun.

A confession: I quit Half-Life 2.

It was probably ten years ago, which is to say, a decade after its 2004 release. I’d picked it up as part of the fabled Orange Box (of which more in a moment), but after working my way through the masterpiece that is Portal, I found Half-Life 2 slow, frustrating, outdated.

In retrospect, that wasn’t fair.

Portal is such a singular experience – a metafictional dark comedy masquerading as a AAA puzzle game, not to mention one of the smartest games ever made – that expecting anything to live up to it was a mistake. I set aside H-L 2 back then (right around the third or fourth antlion attack), but, inspired by conversations with friends and far too many glowing retrospectives, I decided, this year, to give it another chance.

What I found was a first-person-shooter which is oh-so-much more than that. Rigorously designed, fiercely intelligent, Half-Life 2 is a breathtakingly entertaining game, brimming with great ideas (many of which would be borrowed/stolen by the many games it would go on to inspire), and most of all a joy to play.

Half-Life 2 is a puzzle trapped in a shooter.

More specifically, it’s a brilliant, endlessly inventive, physics-based puzzle game, trapped in a very good but admittedly creaky first-person-shooter, with all the baggage that comes with it.

The sequel to 1998’s (also very good) Half-Life, H-L 2 continues the story of Gordon Freeman, a theoretical physicist who, through events which are, frankly, partly his own fault, has gotten mixed up in an intergalactic cold war pitting several alien factions against humanity. In the first game, spoilers, Gordon succeeded in repelling invaders from the Xen dimension, only for a mysterious figure known only as “G-Man” to recruit Gordon into the ranks of an unnamed, shadowy organization.

Fast-forward six years – twenty years in game time – and 2004’s Half-Life 2 begins with Gordon awoken from the stasis he was placed in at the end of the first game. In the twenty years since the events of Half-Life, Earth has been invaded by not one but two alien forces, new foe the Combine having already conquered the planet (with, it’s implied, the support of some collaborating humans). When Gordon wakes up, he discovers a world at war – a human rebellion fighting the Combine, the Combine staving off endless hordes of Xen aliens, returning from the first game.

Details about this war, about the motivations of various factions, about the remarkable passage of time, remain frustratingly vague throughout – one of the unfortunate knock-on effects of H-L 2’s approach to storytelling, in which key details are omitted, and in which our eternally silent hero fails to ask some fairly basic clarifying questions. Indeed, if H-L 2 has any real weakness, it’s the rather perfunctory narrative, which doesn’t entirely cohere and which ends on a cliffhanger which, rather infamously, has yet to be resolved.

When Half-Life 2 is firing on all cylinders, it’s the absolute best an FPS can be. The gravity gun, in particular, opens up – and encourages – such wildly entertaining experimentation it can be easy to forget Gordon has a whole arsenal of weapons to choose from. (That is, until a Combine soldier unloads a shotgun in your face, and you realize you should probably stop throwing boxes at them.)

Half-Life 2 is also a rollercoaster ride of brilliant ideas, each section offering something novel, something exhilarating, while also building on everything which came before.

One moment, H-L 2 is a slowburn horror game, the zombie-cum-haunted house stylings of the Ravenholm chapter (ominously subtitled, “We Don’t Go To Ravenholm”) an obvious standout. The next, it’s a Halo-style vehicular combat journey across Highway 17, zipping past enemies, slowing down for the occasional pitched battle. Sometimes, H-L 2 is even a co-op or squad-based shooter, Gordon joined by an array of computer-controlled allies including quasi-love interest Alyx (later to star in her own, widely heralded, VR game).

Impressively, while Half-Life 2 may be the progenitor of environmental storytelling – in which environmental details (rather than scripted cutscenes) offer glimpses of a broader narrative – its environmental storytelling is still excellent, surpassing in certain places even the BioShocks and Dishonoreds of the world. Sure, there are the simple things – like stumbling across a corpse next to a weapons cache, the poor soul having run out of food/water – but then there are the more intriguing ones, like the blood-splattered walls, the ominously placed chair in the middle of a room, hinting at the terrible things which happened before your arrival.

This helps H-L 2’s world feel lived in, organic – as do the actual glimpses of other storylines playing out in real-time, as, for example, when you spot Combine thugs interrogating a frightened civilian, or when you come across an active firefight between your enemies, the alien-zombie hordes menacing a Combine squadron. Even today, in 2026, it’s cool to just stand back and watch these battles play out, waiting for your moment to pick off the survivors.

In Half-Life 2’s case, the adage “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” does not apply.

H-L 2 even makes space for some bona fide scripted set pieces, again played out in real-time. Highlights include an Airboat (think mini-hovercraft) chase where you’re weaving through falling smokestacks, or a bridge crossing in which a high-speed train races through just in time for you to dodge it, or – one of my favourites – the ominous arrival of the War of the Worlds-styled Striders, enormous tripods which can stomp or laser beam you to death in an instant.

Thanks to some very brilliant hidden scripting, these events appear to play out spontaneously, even if they’ve actually been finetuned down to the millisecond by the team at Valve.

I didn’t notice it as much the first time around, but my second encounter with Half-Life 2 cemented for me just how indebted it is to the classics of sci-fi past.

Sure, the headcrabs are basically just reskinned facehuggers, but by the time H-L 2’s “fast zombies” are aggressively smashing through skylights and scurrying along walls, it’s impossible to ignore the Alien influence. The evolved, poisonous headcrab is particularly Alien-coded, with its devastating attacks which knock you down to a single point of health.

There’s more. The biomechanical Striders are, as mentioned, lovingly borrowed from H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds. The mysterious G-Man is basically just The X-Files’ Cigarette Smoking Man. The omnipresent, all-seeing Administrator Breen, Gordon’s former boss and now leader of Earth’s Vichy-style government, is heavily Big Brother-coded. (Breen’s name, incidentally, is a likely nod to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s Breen species, the grunts in the intergalactic empire of DS9’s The Dominion.)

The list goes on.

I say this not simply to congratulate myself for being a mega-sci-fi nerd, but to highlight how expertly Valve melds all these influences into something so memorable and, yes, unique. Sure, its story isn’t quite up to snuff – there are, frankly, too many unresolved details, particularly in light of Valve’s ongoing failure to deliver on the promised Half-Life 3 – but it’s still an impressive inheritor of a proud sci-fi tradition.

From a purely gameplay perspective, H-L 2 excels from top to bottom. This is a game which admirably resists handholding, while at the same time pushing you to experiment with its many tools and systems. Enter a room full of dropped saw blades? Who could resist hoovering them up with the gravity gun and then launching them at enemies. Spot a deviously-placed ceiling barnacle, its extended tongue ready to scoop you up like a Venus flytrap? Try rolling a nearby explosive barrel towards it. Half-Life 2 is full of moments like these, mini-dioramas which encourage experimentation on the part of the curious player.

The impeccably designed physics system – see gravity gun, above – is probably the best part of the game. So many times, I’d encounter an environmental puzzle, a pathfinding challenge, a just-out-of-reach item, which forced me to stop, think, and figure out how to use the game’s physics system to find a way forward. (You spend a surprising amount of time constructing simple levers and bridges.) You can easily spot the seeds of Portal in these moments, when H-L 2 ceases to be a shooter and turns into a meaty, intelligent, physics-based puzzler.

For a game about blowing up alien zombies, H-L 2 also finds time for subtle details.

Take, for instance, the game’s mind-controlling headcrabs, which have a nasty habit of turning humans into zombies. Occasionally, upon killing a zombie, the headcrab will fall off, revealing the tortured face of the infected human underneath.

The entire Ravenholm section, in which the devoutly mad Father Grigori has created a sort of contained ecosystem for his “flock” of zombies, slowly reveals a whole crazed backstory without once spelling it out for the player.

Elsewhere, discarded newspapers found throughout the world reveal the devastating nature of the Combine’s invasion of Earth – details which can easily be overlooked unless you take the time to stop, read, survey.

Half-Life 2 is also, of course, an imperfect artifact of an imperfect era.

The actual gunplay is the least interesting part of the game, with bullet sponge enemies which require a few too many shots to defeat, and sporadic placement of ammunition and medkits, which can occasionally trap the player in an endless checkpoint loop of defeat. (I had to reload earlier saves a very small handful of times.)

Half-Life 2, by design, also refuses to point you in the right direction – an idea which mostly works, but can occasionally grow frustrating when your pathfinding is persistently interrupted by enemy attacks. (I found the waterborne Airfloat chapters of H-L 2 to be particularly annoying in this regard.)

To its credit, H-L 2 also lacks boss fights in the traditional sense, though there are still a few progression wall battles which feel slightly unfair. This is especially true when Gordon is faced with waves of endlessly refreshing enemies, and you begin to wonder when the fight will finally peter out.

The conclusion, on the other hand, is excellent, deftly avoiding the mistakes of its predecessor’s godawful trampoline boss, and instead offering a mini-setpiece in which Gordon faces a series of enemies while trying to deactivate an enemy reactor. It fits well within the overarching story, and offers narrative payoff for Gordon’s adventures dating back to the first game.

What else can be said about Half-Life 2, by someone who’s only played it through for the first time in 2026? Well, the voice acting is great – I was delighted to hear Star Trek’s Ro Laren, Michelle Forbes, in a key role – and the graphics are very good for the era. It’s not scary, exactly, but the horror vibes are strong.

It’s also, as noted, impossible to discuss Half-Life 2 without talking about its re-release.

In 2007, three years after its debut, developer Valve re-released H-L 2, in slightly upscaled form, as part of the now-legendary Orange Box, a compilation package which included the base game, its two postgame expansion chapters (which I have yet to play), the wildly popular multiplayer shooter Team Fortress 2, and a little game called Portal.

One day, I’ll write a whole other feature about Portal, a superlative, game-changing experiment quickly creeping up on its twentieth anniversary next year. Suffice it to say, Portal is one of the two or three real works of video game genius – the other two being, say it together now, Journey and Shadow of the Colossus – in which the very act of gaming is simultaneously interrogated and celebrated while you play.

Portal starts inauspiciously enough, player-character Chell handed a physics-based weapon – here, a portal gun, styled much like the gravity gun and canonically manufactured by the same in-universe company – and tasked with navigating a series of challenge rooms.

Soon enough, however, Portal – under the malevolent watch of its seemingly omniscient, diabolically cruel AI overlord, GLaDOS – reveals itself to be something else entirely:  an offbeat, very funny, fourth wall-teasing short story (it lasts about four hours) which challenges long-ingrained notions of player agency, game design, and the act of telling an interactive story.

From using the portal gun to sneak behind the scenes of GLaDOS’s puzzles, to tripping across its many (also very funny) Easter eggs, Portal is so much more than a cake meme, and an essential experience in its own right. It’s Portal which retrospectively undermined my first impressions of Half-Life 2, and it’s also Portal which, all these years later, finally convinced me that I should give Half-Life 2 another shot. (Side note: Portal’s sequel, starring Stephen Merchant, is arguably even better and funnier than its progenitor, though I’ll always have a soft spot for the original.)

Even if Half-Life 3 remains only a gleam in creator Gabe Newell’s eye, the Half-Life universe continues to expand. There are the aforementioned H-L 2 chapters and the VR game, while Valve’s bespoke handheld console, the very good Steam Deck, comes with a free game, Aperture Desk Job, which doubles as a hardware demo and canonical adventure in the H-L/Portal universe. Counter-Strike, the remarkably successful and long-running series of multiplayer shooters, started life as a Half-Life mod, before being taken in-house – and given quasi-canonical status – by Valve.

Admittedly, if, in 2026, I was asked to recommend one Valve game to a new player, it would have to be Portal (followed closely by Portal 2). But that’s no knock against Half-Life 2, a singular gaming experience which, more than two decades on, continues to impress and even surprise.

I loved rediscovering Half-Life 2, exploring its many and varied regions and storylines, getting (re)acquainted with its characters, goofing around with its physics system and gravity weapon. I’ve played a lot of first-person-shooters, but this one, precisely because it’s not just a shooter – just as BioShock, or Dishonored, or Prey, are more than just Half-Life-alikes – reminded me of the endless possibilities of a game developed by very smart people who are very aware of the context they’re working in.

Of all the games I’ve been late to, Half-Life 2 is the one I’ve had the most fun with.

***

For more Late to the Game adventures, check out our archives.

The post Late to the Game: Half-Life 2 appeared first on Toronto Guardian.