2005/08/12

Captain's blog: stardate minus three one six seven seven two point three

Grr This is taking longer than I imagined. I had to suddenly come up with a way for comments to be enabled on permanent text like the Philosophy and Media bits (both of which have undergone rennovations). Got the theory sorted out now - shall we say tomorrow lunchtime? Sniff In other news, Mark Sutherns finally left for good tonight, as did Duncan Leigh of X-Box World. Dan Griliopoulos left to edit the games section of the official X-Box 360 mag a few weeks back, and I hear that's working out well for him. Like I care - I don't wish any of these people well in their future endeavours. They should all have stayed doing the same thing forever because I liked having them around.

2005/08/09

Captain's blog: stardate minus three one six seven eight one point six

Hola Bro This will be my last post on the current incarnation of this site - I've been redesigning it furiously and I think the result will be go up here on Friday. My disc deadline at work is Wednesday, so hopefully I can lay into it properly after that. The new one uses WordPress, will still confusingly be called James, and will let you leave comments, which I will beg you to do at the time. Please ready your typing fingers. I may also have some mag-related news that has something to do with this event.

2005/07/21

Captain's blog: stardate minus three one six eight three four point one

Sex Is Worse Than Murder GTA San Andreas has just been recalled because of the Hot Coffee mod - a hack that let you play a lame sex minigame that looks like it was half-made by Rockstar, then abandoned and never entirely removed. My A-Level Computing teacher had a thirteen year-old son, and we once got talking about censorship (it was that kind of course). He said he didn't want his son, Tom, to see graphically violent films, but he didn't really mind if he saw pornography. The reasoning being that violence is a despicable act of stupidity that he'd never want his son to engage in as long as he lives. I had to admit, this made an awful lot of sense. It wasn't an 18 for all the face-shooting, hammer murders, compulsory cop-killing or profanity. It's now an 18 because you can mod it, with third party software, to show a feeble imitation of clothed consensual sex between adults. Look, I have no desire to play a game with sex in it, I don't like it in books and it makes me mildly uncomfortable in films - I'm just generally not wild about the idea of me watching other people doing it. But I do at least concede that it happens, it is not a crime, and it's generally a force for good in so much as it momentarily stops people hating each other quite so much. Luckily the internet already affords minors in-depth graphical demonstrations of sex, but if it didn't, it would honestly be quite a good thing for them to see early on - they'll only obsess about it anyway, and the fewer illusions they have the less screwed up it'll make them.

2005/07/07

Captain's blog: stardate minus three one six eight seven zero point nine

Terrorists Win! We followed the London thing today in typically geeky fashion - browsing Google's news aggregator, comparing it to Yahoo's (theirs is edited by a human, while Google's is automated based on popularity - Yahoo is quicker to recognise the significance of stories) - checking to see if the BBC site was back up, and eventually installing a digital radio card in my PC to listen to the news. The Guardian blog was very good right up until it reported a bomb had gone off in Leicester Square when it hadn't, which is a fairly big thing to get wrong. Quickest and juciest, though, was the Flickr pool for photos of the bombing, and most authorative - as ever - was the extraordinary Wikipedia entry, which is beauitfully organised, totally comprehensive and eerily up-to-date. At lunch I wanted to try the new cs_assault map in Counter-Strike Source, and the moment I joined the server, "Terrorists win!" blared out of the speakers over the radio casualty reports. Counter-Strike exists in this kind of isolation bubble for gamers - the fact that one of the teams - the one that I virtually insist on playing as - is called Terrorists is utterly unconnected to the language of 9/11 and, now, 7/7 (you have to like that they picked a date that's the same in American and British formats). It's not until the two shout at you at the same time that you notice the similar sounds. It remains meaningless. My sister and both my cousins live in London. Before I knew Anna (the former) was in Scotland, I entertained the idea that she might have been killed. It's never injured, is it? Every event like these sees hundreds of times more injuries than deaths, but that's inconceivable - in your head, if they were there, they're dead. Examining my emotional response to this possibility, I didn't come across any hatred or anger. It would have been exasperation, at the fact that her bike was recently stolen, and that she might have been riding that instead if it hadn't been. For fuck's sake, mankind. You had to steal her bike? She actually always took her bike (which was collapsible) on the tube anyway, because cycling in London is dangerous (you laugh, but Stereolab lost a vocalist that way). But it's interesting that only the theft would have really irritated me. Explosions are a force of nature, suicide bombers are psychopaths. If someone's prepared to kill themselves for a cause, they are, by any definition, mad. It's hard for me to get angry at a mad person. Bike thieves are assholes, though. They stole my bike, so I got a new one and a better lock. They stole the wheel, so I bought a new one and locked it to the frame. They stole the other one, then stole my sister's bike from her house. God damn it people! Leave the bikes alone! Why can't you steal a form of transport that kills people and pollutes? Cowardly Act Cowardly? How so? I mean, brutal yes, evil, random, sure. But the current understanding is that these were suicide bombers. Say what you like about that, it takes guts. It might not be honorable or whatever, but cowardice is about shying away from danger for your own sake. It's so wildly inaccurate for suicide attacks that you have to wonder if anyone's checked to see if our soundbites and clichés make any sense in the last few years. They just come out subconsciously now, the logical part of the brain having given up vetting the garbage that passes under it every day for the sake of just fitting in with the other illiterates. It's a disappointing misuse of language, because this is a time when our language should be gleaming with zeal, bringing us together with passion. If you've seen the West Wing you've seen a glimpse of this - how did Bartlett's speech after the pipe bombing go? "I don't know if it's one person or ten, and I don't know what they want. All I know for sure, all I know for certain, is that they weren't born wanting to do this." We need writer Aaron Sorkin in government, even if he is on magic mushrooms and cocaine. You don't need to emphasise the brutality of this. People get that part. You don't need to call them names that you don't even seem to understand yourself - that's a playground response, and it's sad to watch. The thing to note, the thing that does need emphasis, is that these attacks were stupid. Al-Qaeda terrorists aren't Muslims, they're idiots. They're killing for a religion that forbids killing. They're trying to stop Western powers by really, really pissing them off. They just haven't thought it through.

2005/07/05

Captain's blog: stardate minus three one six eight seven six point five

War Of The Worlds I don't really see how anyone could walk out of War Of The Worlds feeling satisfied. I know it's scary, and has great aliens, and things get blown up - I know also that it is a fairly fundamental part of the story that the aliens just catch a cold and die - but Jesus. It doesn't have an ending, it just stops playing. It's one step short of having a Billy West voice-over saying "And then they all died for some reason!" It makes the conclusion of Revenge Of The Sith look leisurely. The tripods are great. It's mostly their lights - the night scenes involving them are strikingly beautiful, and their size and luminance is used to scary effect. Effective too are the little hints at the degree of humanity's desperation - the guy clawing his way through the only working car's windscreen with bloodied hands, the people hanging on to people hanging on to the rising lip of a departing ferry. But people are calling it a predictably masterful work of directing, and it's so not. Building up this visceral impression of the tripod's devastation, sheer power, utter dominance of humanity - it all works, but it works to get you thinking "Man, everything is fucked. How the hell are they going to defeat them?" That huge build up prepares you for an epic conclusion - even if you know enough not to expect a battle, you're waiting for the apocalypse, the infection, the spreading, the explosions. What happens is: one of them falls over. Later, a second stumbles a bit and they shoot it. It falls over. Morgan Freeman spouts some hilariously pretentious vagueness about humans having a right to live on Earth. DIRECTED BY STEVEN SPIELBERG. Just like Sith, you wince a bit at someone so proudly reminding you of their association with something so clumsy. One step away from "I'm Greg Evigan. I MADE THIS." It has a third painful feature in commmon with Sith: a one-line attempt at a political conscience. "Is it the terrorists?" Because I hear terrorists destroy things, and have never seen any sci-fi in my life so do not understand the concept of an alien. In my spare time I represent the fragility of the still-stunned American psyche. Score: WRITTEN BY TOM FRANCIS. Batman Begins There's probably not a lot of virtue in talking about Batman Begins properly now, but I feel the need for some bulletpoints at least: I never read the comics, and appear to have missed the apparently excellent animated series, and this is the first time anything's really attempted to explain what the point of Batman is - i.e. that he scares bad guys. The trappings of the role have become so important in every other incarnation that the central ethos never got mentioned to me. Here, it's not just mentioned, it's cleverly brought out by a mirror-image bad guy, Scarecrow. Scarecrow, in this, is one of the greatest villains I've ever seen. His by-day human face is so perfectly acted - fresh-faced and pleasant in a way that is utterly and immediately creepy. His mask is almost comically exaggerated in its attempt to look scary, but the speed and frequency with which he dons it makes it terrifying - it's so halloween that it seems absurd for this respectable person to suddenly don it, and that lack of comprehension gives a nameless horror to the act. The scene when he first uses it - against a crime boss - is one of the most magnificent pieces of cinema I've seen in years. Batman isn't really a superhero in that he doesn't really have any powers. He's what we City Of Heroes players would term a Natural Scrapper. Essentially, he achieves his goals by punching people in the face. That's hard to make cool - as a tubby Adam West once demonstrated. Batman Begins explains that Batman is basically a ninja, and that is very cool indeed. The Batmobile looks silly in stills, but in the film almost immediately makes all previous Batmobiles look silly. There's even a sports car with Batmobile style doors in there, as if to mock the low-clearence ponciness of previous models. Another Scarecrow one - his first defeat - when Batman contaminates him with his own weaponised hallucinogen (I, like everyone else, love referring to that stuff by its proper name) and becomes a brawny black red-eyed mutant to him - is incredibly cool and neatly symbolic. His second defeat - rearing up on his flame-breathing horse and informing Katie Holmes' character that "There is nothing to fear but fear itself!" immediately before being tazered in the face and galloping off screaming - is hilarious. Score Bat out of bat.

2005/06/17

Captain's blog: stardate minus three one six nine two eight point one

Batman Begins I am too tired to adequately review this, so I'll hand over to the ever-informative Qwantz. It is completely ace - see it if you like action films even just a little bit. It's also very funny. Lazy reviewer! Bad reviewer! If I Set Fire To You Now, Would You Even Make A Sound? I'm off to the Future Publishing 20th anniversary party tomorrow, which is a kind of festival camp-out kind of thing in a field. The last Future party had a fountain of molten chocolate into which you could dip skewers of marshmallows and strawberries, so this one had better have fried gold or something. Then on Sunday there's a street party on our street, then on Thursday I'm going to Glastonbury for five days. Ticker Tape Tales will return on Sunday, I would think. I also hope to write about the wildly exciting things I've found on the net. In the meantime, LiveJames is redesigned and now has tags (and an RSS feed and comments, as ever), and my Flickr Photostream has loads of Battlefield 2 shots which I will eventually annotate with little stories not long enough to form full Ticker Tape Tales. The game, the demo rather, produces story-worthy game experiences like it's a factory for making them or something. Things you should do: play the Battlefield 2 demo or, if your PC can't handle it, Eve Online. Watch Batman Begins, and if you have the DVDs or have always meant to give them a go, Firefly. I had, until today, never been more excited about a film than I am about the Firefly one, called Serenity, out in September. Today I learned that the Futurama guys are hoping to make some straight-to-DVD films of it. WHOA.

2005/06/12

Captain's blog: stardate minus three one six nine four zero point five

Ticker-Tape Tales - Episode 1: Defibrillate This This is mostly Tim's idea - he was telling me about Battlefield 2: "I was watching that ticker-tape text in the top left, where it reports each kill and what it was done with, and I realised every one of those lines is a little story." It strikes me that they're not terribly descriptive stories, though, so I have taken it upon myself to give some background on a few lines that scrolled past me in the demo yesterday. Locutus [SVD] mrbuzzard Fuck. They're swarming us. This beachhead strategic point looked safe, but they're pouring in now and that guy just got it in the face. I sprint over to him and whip out the defibrillators. I'm a medic, you see. "Clear!" Tzz. He gets back up and I chuck him a medikit for good measure. "You're gonna be okay buddy," my character automatically says. "Thanks man, I owe you one," his automatically replies. The tank we're standing next to explodes. mrbuzzard is no more. Fuck! The concussion from the blast is so strong I can barely see, but as a medic you See Dead People regardless. I stagger over to his body and- "Clear!" Tzz. -shock some life into it. I don't have time to patch him up before the ground explodes again and the troops pour in. ^^andy^^05 [AK-101] BlueBall ^^andy^^05 [AK-101] $uper_Gang$ta hammi [T-90] tOMMy Jesus Christ. I make a beeline for the bodies and an enemy troop rounds the sandbags ahead of me. I hit the deck and spray him with M4 fire, and he goes down before he can hit me. Pentadact [M4] pHk I get BlueBall- "Clear!" Tzz. -and tOMMy- "Clear!" Tzz. -fixed up, but $uper_Gang$ta fades away before I can get to him. God damn it, I hate it when I lose one. "You'll be fine, get back to the fight." I wish I could believe or stop myself saying that. nofear [T-90] Squire nofear [T-90] tOMMy Shit! The tanks have rolled in, and I'm- Mr0 [Artillery] mrbuzzard Mr0 [Artillery] easydog Mr0 [Artillery] Sigmax Everything explodes. You hear it before you see it, but not by much. Then you can't see anything at all, and pretty soon you can't hear anything either. The dust-clouds a blast like that kicks up would blind you even if you weren't in shock, and your ears just hum a monotonous song instead of reporting the outside world. When my senses return it's to a beige world of loud noises. Through the smoke I can still make out the gleaming white trails of more artillery shells slamming down into us. I know with a grim certainty that almost everyone will die before I can get to them, and before I even make it to the first one I'm shot three times and hit the deck. I have no idea where the shots came from, or even if there's any cover nearby - all I can see is the corpse bar on my singularly selfless HUD. Biting the dust seems to have saved me, and I'm on the mend all the time my medikit is out, but I'm not any closer to the bodies and I'm not going to hold this post on my own. I get up and immediately come face to face with the guy who shot me. I throw myself backwards over some sandbags and frantically hammer the number keys. My Beretta 9mm comes up and I shoot him three times in the face. Pentadact [Beretta] ^^andy^^05 In retrospect he was probably more surprised to see me than I was him - it was a fair bet I was dead. More fire rains in, either a Support troop or a tank judging by the sheer fire rate. Shots thwack into the sand all around, and a final artillery explosion kills- Mr0 [Artillery] BlueBall Mr0 [Artillery] wpmike -two more and- Mr0 [Teamkills] th0ry -ha! One of their own. I'm hit again but I'm not ducking this time. I pelt straight for the very patient body of my patient, dive through the smoke over an ammo box and land prone on top of him, immediately- "Clear!" Tzz. -defibrillating. He gets up and- neurax [AK74U] easydog God damn it! I shock him back to life. He's learnt his lesson and stays down with me, but by this time I've lost everyone else for good. I chuck him a medikit and we scramble to the bunker by the flag. easydog [M16A2] Bleak easydog [M16A2] neurax Pentadact [M4] Parliuus easydog [M16A2] Monterto He might be stupid but he's a good shot. But there's still the APC, and when its not scattering heavy fire at our little window on the world, it's smashing up our empty vehicles with guided rockets. Worse, an enemy chopper I thought was just flying by has come around for another pass. But something's not right about it. I don't know anything about anything, really, but consciously or otherwise most of the Western world now knows a Black Hawk when they see it. Black Hawks are ours. I focus on it and sure enough, friendly nametags pop up - green ones, in fact: my squad. Then, inevitably yet surprisingly, gloriously and loudly- D4rkM4ster [Black Hawk] nofear D4rkM4ster [Black Hawk] hammi D4rkM4ster [Black Hawk] DanMM D4rkM4ster [Black Hawk] Jage It's their turn to explode. The much-killed idiot and I sprint out to meet them. There's still a body out here I can res, which I promptly- "Clear!" Tzz. -do. Half my squaddies throw themselves out of the chopper and parachute down to meet us, while the pilot takes it to a safer landing just outside the base. It's a fantastic sight, but I don't have time to admire it - I'm seeing more Dead People. Scampering around the wreckage of the base rubbing my shock-pads together gleefully at the prospect of more life-saving fun, I suddenly discover where these fresh corpses are coming from. An enemy Spec Ops commando an inch from my face, silenced pistol raised to my neck. I don't have time to think. "Clear!" Tzz. Pentadact [Shock Pads] FaR2SiNiSTeR YES.

2005/06/06

Captain's blog: stardate minus three one six nine five eight point two

What We Really Need Now Is An Emotional History Of The Lower East Side I have a new favourite expression. I will relate it in context, taken from one of the most idiotic threads on the most idiocy-friendly type of forum - one for a game that isn't out yet, but is far enough along that suggestions are too late. Idiot: "PC CD-ROM" Unfricking acceptable, Bethesda. I'm not buying a game with 6 cds. Genius: Want me to call a waaambulance for you? The idiot's quote comes from the little placeholder icon at the end of the extraordinary, mind-blowing, Patrick-Stewart-voiced Oblivion trailer that came out a while back. The PC, of course, doesn't have a real logo because it's a type of computer rather than a brand, and games publishers have been admirably reluctant to adopt a Windows logo to indicate the nature of a game's compatibility. Evidently they've been a bit sluggish getting "PC DVD-ROM" logos made up too. They're also slow to give a God damn about the install process when they're in the middle of revolutionising the genre. So yes, self-pity, complaining about trivial things, and superficial criticisms are hereby outlawed. Violators will be prosecuted with an icy "Oh, can I call you a waaambulance?" Get it together or be zung! Also, and this isn't really related, but can we stop capitalising 'mod'? I'm not sure when people started assuming it was an acronym for something, but what would it even stand for? And another thing! MMO isn't a noun, MMOG is! God damn it people! Always with the three-letter TLAs! Yes, I know. Because It Was Wild I've signed up to Eve again. It turns out I bought myself a huge hauler just before I quit last time. I took it out for a glacial cruise and tried playing the cattle market. Within an hour I'd lost my ship, five million in cargo and a few thousand skillpoints. I knew there was a reason I loved this ship: It's a Cormorant-class Destroyer, and it's named after a Low album. It has searchlights all along the bottom that wiggle around searching for stuff. It has missiles, guns, mining lasers, invulnerability and a micro-warp drive. In WoW terms this is only about level twenty stuff, but it's mine, and I have all of it on the same ship, which is actually pretty rare. You can't upgrade from a Destroyer and get something better in every way - if you don't lose speed you lose cargo capacity, and if you don't lose that you lose guns too. I trade, do combat missions and mine, and oddly enough any upgrade means being worse at at least one of those things. I choose a missile type good against armour and hulls, but not so hot against shields. Why, Tom? Because my railguns are loaded with slugs that are excellent against shields, and by the time the first missile gets to them armour is all they've got. Then, they're a constellation of debris. If I don't need my capacitor's power for shield regeneration or invulnerability (because, for example, suckas be frontin') I can keep my micro-warp active in combat, meaning I'm zooming around at a kilometer a second. In a moment that made no sense but was, relatedly, bristling with awesome, I caught up with one of my own missiles in a fight earlier, just as it hit and destroyed my target, meaning my (awesome, awesome) ship burst through the explosion at the exact moment of his demise. Windscreen wipers activate! Tea, Earl-Grey, hot. Which is the thing I still long for in Eve - walking around you ship. I'd also like to get out at space stations and go for a wander while work is being done on my ship, or cargo is loaded and unloaded. Everyone has spectacular human beings as their characters in Eve, beautifully formed features genuinely unique to them and at the same time uncannily face-like. They're already 3D models, all they need is a body and some animations. Trading always takes me to impossibly exotic-sounding solar systems thousands of Astral Units from home, and if I could just wander the already lush interior of the station I'm docked at, sit in a café, look at the faces, check the news, fiddle with the jukebox... basically Eve is already a sci-fi dream come true, now I'd like it to be all my sci-fi dreams come true. This wasn't supposed to be a post about games, but whatever! Here are the names of player-jettisoned cargo containers my scanner picked up while I was touring constellations looking for a fugitive hideout earlier: drugs druqz no drugs here drugs kill wtf i cant scoop it back up destroy me Hey! You! Hands off! Have you heard of Eve Lotto? Mail Godspeed for details! GSV What The Hell TO THE CONTAINER THIEF - HAVE IT, BUT ALWAYS SLEEP WITH ONE EYE OPEN Gate 1 Gate 2 ... Gate 20 Finish line!! Finish line!! Finish line!! can't sell it/can't reprocess it/u have it Where all the rocks went Hey, I'm empty

2005/05/29

Captain's blog: stardate minus three one six nine eight zero point two

Lost Well, we don't find out what's under the hatch. I consider this an anti-spoiler, hence the lack of warning, since it pre-empts a half-expected disappointment rather than an exciting surprise. Lost is almost inexplicably better than it sounds - JJ Abrams' last series Alias was good, but it's not any more and it was never this good. This is genuinely brilliant television, the kind you could just string together to make a great film. If Alias was defined by its ridiculous cliff-hangers, Lost is defined by ridiculous mysteries. Since the start of the series twenty-five episodes ago, the following elements have cropped up and been developed to the extent detailed here: The Monster: We don't know anything about the monster. It might be big. It might not exist. It could also be robotic or organic, or ethereal, or none of these. Jack's Dad: Jack's Dad appeared. We don't know why or what was going on. The Hatch: Locke discovered a hatch. We don't know what it's doing there or what's inside, or what the thing is it's built into. Since the hatch was discovered, virtually every episode has been about it. So far, we have discovered: nothing. Once the hatch lit up. We don't know why. The Numbers: Hurley won the lottery with some numbers. They might be cursed, or not cursed, or it might be fate. Or magic. The Others: There might be others on the island, or there might not, or they might not be on the island, or they might not be others. If they are and they are we don't know who they are or what they're doing there or what they want. The Kid: The kid knows something about the hatch. We don't know how or what and now he's gone forever. The French Woman: There is a French woman on the island. Something killed the crew she was with. We don't know what and now she's gone mad. The Polar Bear: A polar bear appeared. We don't know why or where it came from or how it got there. It was killed and never mentioned again. The Other Half Of The Plane: We don't know where it is or what happened to the people on it. They might be still alive, or dead, or trapped sixteen years in the past with a magic time-traveling radio. The Island: The island might have a will of its own, though it might not and if it does we don't know what it is, why it has it, or how it works. Whichever of these wildly vague concepts you might be hoping for clarification on, you're perpetually disappointed. The appeal is that by failing to resolve any of these plot lines, they're never cheapened by specifics. Their enigma gives them a lasting menace that only improves the tapestry of sinister threats mounting around the ever-diminishing survivors. All of them verge on the mystical without being scientifically inexplicable - given a degree of imaginative license. We still don't even know what genre we're working in - sci-fi, fantasy, supernatural or real-world. But the writers seem content to leave that ambiguous too - they've got plenty of stories to tell in flashbacks to the castaways' previous lives, and some of those have been extraordinary. The glimpses of the mysteries, too, have been expertly judged. The one 'Other' we've seen - despite being just some guy - is one of the most unsettling bad guys ever. Even small things like making sure you realise dynamite is dangerous - they have the dynamite expert annihilated by it when handling it as carefully as he can, and from then on you're screaming at the characters to walk slower, don't put the dynamite in their packs, don't use flaming brands for torches. Locke: Hugo, take these extra sticks back a couple hundred yards. Hurley: Me? Oh, okay. Got it. ... Can I have a flashlight? 'Cause, er, the torch-near-the-dynamite thing's not making a whole lot of sense to me. Which leads nicely into the other reason it's great: Hurley. On paper he sounds awful - a fat comic relief character who just says "Dude," "Yo," or "That was messed up" at oppourtune times. But that fails to take into account the sheer brilliance in the timing of his Dudes, Yos and That-was-messed-ups, and also that he says them flatly, rather than in the Keanu Reaves surf-slang drawl. Essentially he's just a guy who watches a lot of TV, in a TV series, saying the things you feel like saying yourself (as above).

2005/05/25

Captain's blog: stardate minus three one six nine eight eight point six

You Didn't Have To Do It, But You Did It To Say Oh wait! I write about games. There's only one summery game, most gamers have it, and you should play it right now. I'm talkin' Far Cry. Do you like paradise? Do you like speedboats? Do you like explosions? Then come to Kabatu, Micronesia! Still the best-looking game on the planet, still the most refreshing burst of escapism, and still the most ridiculously action-packed shooter ever made. If nothing's exploding, you're not playing Far Cry. What did I just say? I absolutely love the action - these are the best vehicles ever, and they've been sprinkled generously around vast open-ended environments. But I'll admit that its beauty is so overwhelming that this is what it'll always be remembered for, and deservedly so. It's a revelatory game for the sheer variety, scope and quality of its flavours of fun, but the visuals are beyond a revelation, they're a small miracle. Only Half-Life 2 has this level of visual polish, and the scenes rendered in that are much less ambitious - and less attractive. And that was by the most professional developer in the world, eight months later. In fact, Far Cry is virtually the only shooter that didn't suffer from Half-Life 2's release: everything else went slightly weak at the kness when you went back to it after that glorious game, but Far Cry's still just sitting on a beach sipping cocktails, looking amazing. It's a phenomenon. Looking good eight months on - being the best looking game in the world eight months on - is ridiculous. So play it and/or peruse the extremely shiny Flickr set I just made of my best shots. That You Didn't Have To Do It But You Would Anyway And I only just now got why it's called LiveJournal. RSS feeds! Click the little orange icon when you're at LiveJames in Firefox, and you'll be able to see from your bookmarks menu whether there's a new post. Ace! Incidentally, my sources tell me forty percent of you use Firefox. It sounds bad, but that's actually an extraordinarily high percentage - more than eight times the web-wide average. I have decided to call this my page's Firefox Coolness Quotient, and declare that I am eight cool and so are you. I don't know if it's compensation for the horrible time I've had on the last few deadline weeks, but work and life seem excellent at the moment. It helps that I'm spending most of my time writing for the mag, which of course only means harder work on the disc later, but it's worth it. At least from the present-day Tom's perspective. The near-future Tom may feel differently. Sorry, that got a bit journal-like for a sentence or two there. LiveJournal... spreading to... brain...

2005/05/25

Captain's blog: stardate minus three one six nine nine one point two

I'll Be The Platform Shoes, Undo What Heredity's Done To You It's summer, so you'll be needing some of these: summer songs! Here are two ace ones: Mates Of State - Goods (All In Your Head): possibly the catchiest thing ever, and a song which TV's Dan Williams calls: "STUPIDLY addictive. it's all awesome, and you're totally thinking 'this is awesome'. then about half way through it gets even more awesome and you're all like 'THIS IS AWESOME'." This guy knows his stuff. Do not, under any circumstances, miss this video, which is even summerier than the song and yet so perfectly captures the spirit of it. If there's two things this song says, it's 'THIS IS AWESOME' and 'dance like a loon'. Let's put our neck out: best music video ever. Let's give context: this is not the real video for the song nor is anyone featured a band member. The band asked people to make their own videos for the song, so this is a fan creation. Imogen Heap - Hide And Seek: that song from The OC finalé. Yes, I know you hate The OC, but good lord is the music good. This one was new on me, but I - like most people who listen to the music on it - was like, WHAT. Dan says: "ROBOTS CAN SING?" Is it summery? Yes. Goods is catchy pop, this is the other summery - sparse, wistful, perfect for dazzling blue skies. Wake up to this. You Won't Have To Strain To Look Into My Eyes Okay, I now have a LiveJournal. Weird, I know, but you can comment there and also I'm toying with the social networking aspect. So far it's rubbish, but rubbish at using its flexible data on its mind-bogglingly huge userbase, and that's the kind of rubbish we can work with. In other news, I've paid the king's ransom of $24 for a year of Pro Flickrage - that means several gigabytes of upload capacity a month, massive res photos and some other cool things. I'm already a member of some intriguing groups, have found some fellow screenshotters and one of my not-entirely-mine photos has been favourited. Result: loads more photos up here. I'll be crowbaring more and bigger ones into this page in future too.

2005/05/19

Captain's blog: stardate minus three one seven zero zero four point eight

Annoying This Quickly Gets Once it became clear, during Phantom Menace, that there weren't going to be any likeable characters, good lines or cool bad guys, I got past it and kind of enjoyed the sense of adventure. Clones was heavy on meaningless politics and the least interesting romance in the history of cinema, but it had some great fights and luscious CGI. I guess Sith has good CGI too, and for the first half hour I was planning commments in its defence along the lines of "It had some really nice-looking sci-fi scenes, though." But no, I'm not defending this. It's pathetic and we laughed in its face. From The Oh Jesus Category Anakin: You are so beautiful. Padme: That's only because I love you so much. Anakin: No, it's because I love you so much. From The What Does That Even Mean Category Guard: We haven't found the body, sir. Palpatine: Double your search! From The Put The Verb First You Dick Category Yoda: If the security tapes you view, only pain you will find. From The I'm Laughing But Also Hurting So Very Badly Each Time You Say That Word Category Obi-Wan: He murdered the younglings! From The Script Margin Notes Accidentally Said Aloud Category Obi-Wan: Anakin, the Chancellor is evil. Anakin: From my point of view, the jedi are evil. From The Emote, Dammit! Category (Thanks Craig) Darth Vader: Nooooooooooooooooooo! I wish I was joking. Further along the line of awful delivery (that last one being highlight), the one line a kid has is so bad - even for a kid - that his subsequent death seems only fair. And when the (sometimes very good) Palpatine gets carried away he strays far and deep into scoff territory. The ridiculous rubber crinkles they smear on him mid-scene for no coherent reason don't help. There is so much more wrong than the dialogue, but there isn't much mirth to be had in trudging through the rest of the embarrassing amateur dramatics. Suffice to say- Score: Suffice to say that this is the first time the awfulness of nu-Star Wars has been so unbearable as to more than negate even the inherent joy of the lightsaber. Tom: I hated, hated this film.

2005/05/14

Captain's blog: stardate minus three one seven zero one eight point seven

Everyone You Forgot, Everything That You Need It's one of the ironies of the nerd that we love the films that misunderstand our world so wildly, demonise or trivialise it for mainstream audiences. Hackers? Brilliant! We even like The Net. Every time we see a black screen with a green blinking cursor we think "Awesome! Haxor!" I'm currently watching Every Mother's Worst Fear. In it, a sixteen year-old girl is 'got to' through her computer when her computer date goes bad! Apparently, the internet can get you involved with people from all over the country. "All over the country?" A police woman asks, incredulous. "As soon as she crosses state lines it becomes a federal case," her colleague explains. Some extremists even believe there may be other countries in the world, though these would be populated entirely by murderous gays. Naturally she speaks to an internet expert. He explains that the only way to find anything on the internet is to know the exact code. Friends tut. Well of course if you're going to use the internet you'll be kidnapped and forced to appear on a porn monster's website (he lives in a porn dungeon). Also sold. It's excellent. Everybody Gonna Make It To The Cemetery The above was actually written a long time ago, I just came across it and realised it was never posted. Speaking of coming across things written long ago, I just re-skim-read my dissertation for the first time since- well, actually this is the first time I've ever read the finished version. I made several dramatic alterations at the last minute, including two Edit > Replace operations that I didn't have time to check. This was because, twenty-four hours before the deadline, my supervisor read my latest draft and suggested I ask for extra time and start again. I was, like, no. It's an odd piece. It was about how the way we think about killing would have to change if teleportation were invented. I concluded that people are data, not bodies, and it's only wrong to kill unique people. It reads like a convoluted trebuchet - it keeps winding back, getting more boring with definitions being set up and apparently irrelevant cases considered, then suddenly a sentence appears that claims something ridiculous and all the winding-back comes into play to convince you of it. I didn't see any of the major points coming, and I wrote it. In fact, when reading a quotation I describe as 'famous', I found myself thinking "It can't be that famous, I've never heard of it." I think it convinced me, but I'm surprised the marker liked it. It was the deciding positive factor in my degree classification, so I'm lucky they did. If anyone wants to read it, e-mail my G-Mail and I'll upload. Actually during those last twenty-four hours, I also had to take my bike in to get it fixed (I know!) and they horribly over-charged me. I'd been up for two days by this stage, so I was just, like, whatever man. The second they invent telelportation, I'm killing you all. The Cemetery! The Cemetery! Flickr has got rid of Flash! The biggest e-hating photo-sharing site on the web is now actually usable! I always loved the idea of a huge site where everyone can upload their photos, because I like photos, I'm short on webspacea and neutral on privacy (although that's an option if you want it). But when Flash was being used to display the photos it was just rubbish. They were tiny, you couldn't right click and save, they took three seconds longer to load, and if you had a Flash blocker (useful because Flash sucks so hard) you couldn't use it at all. I even posted on their forums asking "Doesn't Flickr suck?" The thread was controversial, naturally, and a staff member even joined in eventually to say "We like Flash, we don't care about the people who don't, and we're not going to change it." I repeat these words here in case said staff member is passing by and feels like a snack. Now, though, ahh. So much nicer. So much nicer, in fact, that I've started using it. I have something like 3GB of photos on my hard drives, and I've always wanted to have a huge collection online. I've already hit my quota for this month, so I won't be able to upload my next batch for a while. So far I've put up the best of my TV grabs (you'd be surprised), a few choice screenshots, some old classics from my school days collection, and more from my recent US excursion. Flickr has secretly been a good site all along - I see that now the fatal flaw has been ironed out. Tags connect people's collections without any real effort, hotspot notes let you annotate the more interesting shots, making sets is genuinely quick and easy, and the slideshows people can watch of them are oddly compelling. I now see why all the trendy internet types use it, and why it's the one all the genius hacks and integrations come out for. You have photos, right? You should sign up. I say this because I don't have any Flickr contacts yet. I've entered yet another new world that requires me to make all my friends again.

2005/05/10

Captain's blog: stardate minus three one seven zero two nine point nine

I was flicking through my Half-Life Source shots, and for some reason that one immediately evoked those words. Having seen the collaborative webcomic Whispered Apologies (featuring TV's Ryan North), I'd recently realised that speech-type captions ought to be hovering above people's heads in bubbles, rather than written beneath or in a pop-up. Interesting: virtually all of my captions are speech, I love writing captions, and have always wanted a webcomic. So screenshots willing, I might carry on doing this - single panel gamics.

2005/05/05

Captain's blog: stardate minus three one seven zero four two point nine

We've Got Deserts, We've Got Trees I was on a press trip - exciting! Before that, actually, I had the minor thrill of walking past a "Sorry, reserved for private function" sign in Revolution, a local vodka bar. This was followed by the more significant thrill of being killed again and again by Fatal1ty (pronounced 'Fatal-wonty', if I'm to be true to my 'Driv-three-ar' standard) at Painkiller. This was a Creative-hosted event - apparently annual - where they come down to beat us or give us prizes if we win. This year they were lazy and got the best pro-gamer in the world to thrash us instead, so they lowered the prize condition to getting a kill of any kind at any point. Nobody won anything. In fact, I got beaten twenty-nil by a guy who then went on to be beaten twenty-nil by Fatal1ty. That's a whole new power of not-very-good. The press trip was to Santa Monica and San Francisco, for seven days. I wasn't fully aware of this before, but on these things the company showing you stuff pays for everything, including alcohol. In fact, you have to quite impolitely refuse a lot if you don't want to be drunk every night. This is why a lot of journalists are assholes - you get treated very well and very little is expected of you, so it's only human nature to fall short of that. For me, the mind-boggling expense of accommodating, feeding and drugging me scared me in the opposite direction; I took thirty pages of notes, two hours of dictaphone recordings, four hundred photos and seven movies. Both the hotels we stayed in were breath-taking - at least to a trip-virgin like me. Dan noted with a hint of sadness, "I hate to say it, but I've actually stayed in nicer." I am informed that I will quickly become jaded, but disc editors on press trips are pretty much unheard of, so 'quickly' may take a long time. I think there were about eight UK journalists there, and over the course of the week I managed to find out their names enough times that I eventually remembered half of some of them - but for whom they worked I couldn't tell you. It seems a high percentage of UK games journalists share a common cultural pool not directly related to games, though - we could talk sci-fi novels with some degree of common ground, webcomic tastes overlapped, and few of us could stop laughing at Dean's account of the mysterious incarceration of our bags. After staring longingly at other people's luggage rotate endlessly by, Dan - looking the other way - had noticed mine in a cage behind us. Sure enough, all our bags were locked up in these, and we had to pester an elderly Chinese man and show him our passport stickers to get him to unlock them. When none of us could see what our bags had done wrong, Dean proposed the theory was that this man did not work at the airport and, if asked, would reveal himself to be named Mr Mischief in a high-pitched and gleeful voice. He would then perform the Mr Mischief dance and float away. I saw three really amazing things while out there - one was on Venice Beach, one was in the San Francisco Museum Of Modern Art, and the other was a game. The first was a giant crowd, away from the main drag and on the sand itself. Dan and I couldn't see what they were looking at, so we went over to investigate. There was some tribal music coming from it, but when we got there the only thing in the center was some slightly delerious people dancing unimpressively to it. It took a while to notice that the music was coming from the crowd itself - over thirty people had their own bongos, steel drum, saxophone, xylophone, or just a bucket and a stick. This was the event, and apparently it happens every weekend - people just come along and jam. The sound is extraordinary - unmistakably music, hypnotic and not at all chaotic or discordant. It had a tide to it - instruments would die down and let others take the stage, which would themselves recede to create a kind of consciously collaborative silence, then people would come in with something new or the same thing as before, and the music would come back with a different texture. The sheer number of instruments made it feel like a rich, cohesive performance, but if you looked at any of the players you could immediately isolate his contribution from the fabric. It somehow made a lot more sense than live music - it felt like the original form of it, and highlighted that the purpose has kind of got lost in our need for recognition; the familiar. It should be about instinctive interactions through an abstract medium, celebrating individuality and community simultaneously - as if to say "Look! They're not exclusive!" The only sense of community in live music now is that of shared subservience in an act of celebrity worship, and the only individuality is that crazy guy dancing too hard near the front. I joined that crazy guy once - he was a friend of mine, and he seemed to be having more fun than anyone else in the room. We had a two man moshpit at an underpopulated gig in a tiny venue by a band we didn't like, and we did indeed have more fun and bruises than anyone else in the room. The art exhibit was a small circular room with video screens on the walls. Each was showing a view from a revolving restaurant in a different American city, all at the same time of day in local time. The footage was accelerated so that a day - and hence a rotation - took about five minutes. Essentially this made the room a very rapidly revolving restaurant with no food and whose windows were scattered across the country - a dizzying yet beautiful experience. My new philosophy of art is that if it doesn't grab me, I hate it. I've spent ludicrous amounts of my time in galleries looking at things I don't get, and while I've had plenty of good experiences, they've all been with things I got right away. No amount of staring improves something incompatible with your sensibilities. Art is useless if it challenges you to like it. I have never won that challenge. The game I'm not going to talk about until it comes out, except to say that it was significantly more exciting than anything else I saw on the trip, made me say "God I love PC games" within ten seconds, think it every ten after that, and had me writing notes faster than I could understand them. These last two are videos - click to download.

2005/05/03

Captain's blog: stardate minus three one seven zero four eight point eight

Guild Wars I'm not alone in having thought, about Guild Wars, "That looks really interesting. I'll be interested to play that. Interesting." Now it's out, and everyone's playing it, and they're saying "Hmm. Interesting." What do I think? Well, it's interesting. It has that same exhilerating disregard for the rules of a MMOG that City Of Heroes had, and right up until half an hour ago I was loving every minute of it. I'm a Necromancer, because Necromancers and I go way back, so it would feel rude to sit with another class when my old friend is right there. Apart from my fondness for the undead, the name Pentadact sounds almost unmistakably like that of a Necromancer. This time I was a girl, though, and my name had to be two words, so I am Miss Aisle (you've got to want it). The first of the taboo-breaking excitement was when I found a bow and tried using it as my weapon - it let me. And why the hell not? In real life my class is Maths Nerd, and even I can use a bow. What the fuck is your problem, other RPGs? It'd kill you to let a mage shoot an arrow? A thief hold an axe? Jesus! Actually a lot of the Guild Wars experience is a process of realising how much you hate RPGs, because this is very different in ways that make an astounding amount of sense. I didn't need arrows - good point! Why should the player have to worry about arrows? How fun is that? I can click on a city on my map to teleport there - yes! Why not? What am I, a pack mule? Why can't I just be wherever I want to go? You're thinking stone-age, rest-of-genre! Quest-givers usually come along with you to help with the quest - of course! Haven't we always wondered why these idle morons don't just do it themselves? In Guild Wars it makes sense - they can't do it alone, they need help. Enemies show up on my map - brilliant! That means I know where they are! Searching for something to kill isn't actually fun. It's not even fun to get ambushed. And on the subject of the map, you can freaking draw on it! Your party can see what you scrawl! I was with a slightly scattered group, and encountered a boss the others hadn't seen. I drew a quick circle around his red dot on the mini-map, then wrote an ! next to it, and in a second, I had two friends bashing it with me. That alone is up there with City Of Heroes' sidekicking system as one of the genius concepts of the genre, destined to be copied by anyone who actually wants their players to have fun. Soon, I was a Necromancer with a pet panther, an eternally re-dying zombie friend and bow-specific skills borrowed from the Ranger class. Each part of my armour was dyed a different colour, and no-one else in the world was using the same eight skills I'd chosen. My main quest thread had been leading up to an expedition outside the city, and when I finally got to that part of it, I was told it would start in a minute or so. When it did, I found myself on a hillside with three other characters I'd never met, all of the same level, dressed in natty team-coloured capes. The quest-giver warned us that the gate in front of us would open shortly, and we'd be facing the enemy. That turned out to be four other same-levelled heroes, to be battled in the Team Deathmatch style. We thrashed them ten nil, battled our way gleefully through the final part of the quest together, and even sat back and watched the pivotal cut-scene of the game together. The next paragraph is a bit of a spoiler. The plot skips to two years later, and the lush hills and villages are a barren wasteland blasted by crystal meteorites, and roamed by weird rock monsters. It's a jarring moment, not least because you never quite expect a MMOG to say something like "Two years later", but the blow is softened by the fact that you're still with your new friends. In fact, you've been with them for two years apparently. It's an ingenious simultaneous enhancement and exploitation of the camaradery of MMOG partying, and a wonderful social gaming experience - for which, I might add, you didn't have to talk to anyone or organise anything. /clap Oh yes, it went wrong. The party inevitably disbanded. The new location is relentlessly bleak, full of identical stone enemies and virtually no quests. The difficulty ramps up unreasonably, so that my previously uber character can no longer hack it against more than one of the basic enemies. The one quest I did get broke, removing the crucial NPC from the game world but leaving him on my minimap, causing me to get mobbed trying to get to his location. It had - until I wrote this and got all enthusiastic about what it does right - robbed me of all desire to play it again, despite an interesting-sounding armour-crafting system. But perhaps I need to give it another chance. Update on where the hell I've been coming up!

2005/04/03

Captain's blog: stardate minus three one seven one three one point eight

Technology That Broke Last Month MP3 Player: Corrupts a load of music I copy to it, crashing when any of those tracks come up in a playlist. DVD Writer: Randomly creates what we affectionately term 'coasters' - utterly nonfunctional discs. This can happen at excruciatingly critical moments. Work PC: Starts making a distressing throbbing noise. It's the day before deadline. I call helpdesk. "I'll see if someone's available, but to be honest it's not going to die just like that." Work PC: Dies, just like that, ten seconds later. Goes straight to a Blue Screen Of Death on startup. Hard drive is corrupt, a lot of recent work unrecoverable. Digital Camera: Screen displays random mess of colours. Unfixable. DVD Writer: Creates disc that has all the files on it, but refuses to run an arbitrary selection of them. It is deadline day. It is, in fact, deadline hour. MP3 Player: Turns itself off after being connected to the PC for more than thirty seconds. Portable Hard Drive: Turns itself off after being connected to the PC for more than ten seconds. Portable Firewire 'Shuttle' Drive: Disconnects itself from the PC after one minute of having files copied to it. Virus Checker: Throws up a false positive on the disc. Everyone except the QA guy nearly dies - I may have actually been technically dead at one point. QA guy observes that the other four virus-checkers - including one which actually fucking works passed it with flying colours, and the one that complained is known for false positives. Work PC: After fitting a new hard drive, it is now polite enough to wait until the CPU is actually under load before locking up and refusing to boot. Work PC: After being taken away and having its heatsink, fans and cabling replaced, it is now the loudest PC I have ever heard, and it still doesn't work. The new hard drive is corrupt, and has to be wiped. Everything I've done since the last corrupt hard drive is lost. Home PC: Resets when under heavy load. Then artifacts appear, then it stops running games at more than 1 fps or taking less than 3 seconds to scroll down a line in Windows applications. The graphics card has died. Home PC: CPU core temperature is 75c. Heatsink is cold. Work PC: FTP stops working. It was annoying at first, then infuriating, then a total crisis, then ridiculous, then grimly amusing, then by the sixth thing it just became routine. I had to assume everything would break forever, and it did, eight more times. It's a very peaceful way to live - when you're expecting everything to work, it always falls slightly short of your expectations or usability hopes. When you know it will fail, it's probably the only time technology ever functions exactly as you expect it to. Doom 3 I wasn't going to talk about it here because I don't like to whinge too much - unless there's something to be said about how the good and bad mix, like with World Of Warcraft. But it had me in stitches just now. It's not that it's bad in an amateur way (although the monsters do appear to have been copied studiously from the back-page doodles of a fifteen year-old's exercise book), it's just that everything about it is so lame. There's this bit where you try to open a door and it says "Hazard present, initiate clean-up procedure first." So I found the control room, and there's a claw thing and some toxic barrels behind the window. And sure enough, just like that arcade thing everyone hates, you have to painstakingly direct the claw to hover above the barrels, then manually lower it, then tell it to open, then close on the barrel, then manually raise it up and move it to over over the chute, then manually release it. The room is lit from the side, so you can't use shadows as a guide to where it's going to fall, and you're looking side-on so you can't judge depth. It's not that that's the most tedious puzzle I've ever seen in a game (although I can't off the top of my head think of anything worse), it's just that I kept thinking of the bit in Half-Life 2 where you control an enormous crane, and troops pour out of a hangar, and you can sweep them away by picking up enormous storage containers and swinging them wildly, or you can crush individual ones by dropping the huge magnet on them, or even pick up your car and throw it into the fray. I have this image of Id painstakingly lowering, closing, lifting and repositioning their little claw while, at the Valve offices, playtesters are wiping out five people at a time swinging metal objects the size of houses. Id are all, like, "Man, this claw thing is going to floor them!" Apparently it's coming out on the X-Box soon - it'll probably be well-received. The console gaming world seems from the outside like an abused dog. It suffers a steady diet of 3D platformers with nightmarishly uncooperative chase-cameras and first-person shooters sapped of any life by the agonising unsuitability of a gamepad for games in which you actually have to shoot, so anything with the most superficial of positive qualities causes wildly disproportionate tail-wagging. It's a dark, dark world where lookspring and auto-aim are defaults. Anyway, I've been wanting to use this Adam And Joe quote for a while, and it's finally appropriate: I've played worse, but I can't remember when. Good Things Sorry, that got a bit depressing. I have actually been enjoying many great things lately, and life is good. In fact, even during that insane panic last month, I was on my way to another building to try another DVD burner, listening to something brilliant on my then-working MP3 player, and it hit me that everyone with a job they can endure which pays more than the rent (as yours does), and free time that is actually theirs, is in a very decent approximation of paradise. Entertainment has exploded into a galaxy of extraordinary works of art in our lifetimes, and anyone with access to it and time to enjoy it has nothing significant to complain about. What kinds of things are good, you ask? Sleater-Kinney's new album is, like, wow. If you don't know them, they're not so much a girl rock band as a rock band made of girls - encapsulating all the 'fuck you' of feminism without any of the 'women are great' (myth). Actually they have nothing to do with feminism, they just play music loudly and aren't idiots. M83 - a cross between My Bloody Valentine, Air and 'total sex' according to the NME, who are for once in the ballpark with their name-check cross-breeding - also have a new one, suspiciously soon after I discovered their last. They make music to see amazing things too, so either take hallucinogens or play World Of Warcraft when you're listening to them. Lower Your Eyelids To Die With The Sun is the new On A White Lake Near A Green Mountain, don't you know. (Turns whatever you're doing into an incredible and profound experience - mix with a good mood for optimum results!) If you don't require that the soundtrack to your life be new, you can always download a track so good it actually brought me to tears. That was on my two-hundredth listen - it keeps getting better. I'm scared of what might happen if I listen to it again. It's not emotional or anything, it's just unspeakably magnificent in its towering power-pop might. Game-wise, Brothers In Arms is excellent. I don't really like World War 2 games - it never struck me as something it would be desirable to recreate (you don't hear a lot of veterans saying "Man, that was fun. Can't wait for a way to relive it in graphic detail.") - but this is just a good squad-combat game. The three keys you need to command your teams are super-intuitive, and soon you're setting up complicated tactical maneuvers without breaking your stride. It is also ace to climb on the back of a tank and then use the ordering system to tell it where to go. Woo! War! An old woman said something pretty extraordinary to me recently. I don't know if any fellow young people have experienced this, but whenever I'm with my parents and they have a guest, and in trying to explain what I do/like they trivialise or demonise it, the guest will stand up for me and say why it's valid. On this occasion the woman, who is over eighty but I can't remember by how much, said "No, it's the next thing, isn't it? It's going to be like when man discovered tools, our brains are going to develop differently." She's not kidding. It's hard to convince people of this because it's entertainment, but gaming is the new frontier of human experience. Fear it, or play Pendulumania. Avril On April 1st 1976, the British astronomer Patrick Moore announced on BBC Radio 2 that at 9:47 AM a once-in-a-lifetime astronomical event was going to occur that listeners could experience in their very own homes. The planet Pluto would pass behind Jupiter, temporarily causing a gravitational alignment that would counteract and lessen the Earth's own gravity. Moore told his listeners that if they jumped in the air at the exact moment that this planetary alignment occurred, they would experience a strange floating sensation. When 9:47 AM arrived, BBC2 began to receive hundreds of phone calls from listeners claiming to have felt the sensation. One woman even reported that she and her eleven friends had risen from their chairs and floated around the room.

2005/03/17

Captain's blog: stardate minus three one seven one seven seven point six

Hey, We Were Living On That! The new issue of PC Gamer - 147 - is now in shops, with a twelve-page feature by me in it. It's about the tricks, treats and backstory that Half-Life 2 keeps quiet, and the idea really is to make you want to play it through again - and get more out of it when you do. 'Linear' is a bit of a misnomer - Half-Life 2 is different every time through, and the more tricks you know the more diverse and ridiculous your experiences with it become. Also, the article contains the title of this post. I was as pleased to get that in as Craig was with sneaking "My precious torso!" into his Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory review in the same issue. Actually I'm mentioned in that, as I teamed up with him to test the co-op part. Little Eye On The World I once mentioned that my journey through hundreds of weblogs had revealed that every one of them is unreadably dull. I have since found one that isn't! Rob Brown's curiously titled site achieves that rare feat of judgement whereby posts are about things that are actually of interest to someone who doesn't know or care who you are, isn't going to click on a link you post unless you explain why they should, and has heard your view on politics from six other people this week alone. That - take note, authors of boring blogs - is everyone on the internet. I've been meaning to link it for a while. He is primarily a film obsessive, but also a gamer and is about - I am sure - to post on "why [Darwinia] is so damn sexy". Other potential post-type encounters include memes (Nanaca Crash appeared there before I'd heard of it), gems (Blockland - the building MMOG - also covered early) and Joseph Manderley (not really, this is an odd Deus Ex reference). He has also recently added me to his link bar. This is a coincidence. Goodnight.

2005/03/10

Captain's blog: stardate minus three one seven one nine six point six

We wait. That's what we do. We play World Of Warcraft all the freaking time and that does, occasionally, involve waiting for things to spawn. It also occasionally involves waiting in a queue to get on the server. The spawn delays put me off in the beta, and I irritated you by whining about it then, noticed I was being irritating and vowed not to write about it until I had something positive to say. So please count each of these pictures as an "On the other hand, this is ace." point. If it was called Game Of Warcraft, I might ask for my money back, even though I didn't pay for it. But World it is, and exploring that world is one of the most incredible gaming experiences I've ever had. Each region is stunningly beautiful, and more importantly profoundly distinct from the last. As an Undead from Tirisfal Glades, I started to get homesick while questing in the Barrens of Kalimdor - it's that different. In fact, arriving in Kalimdor was ace. Lots of us - Future people - are Undead, so we'd been ganging up on the humans in our homeland and standing around together waiting for creatures and named bosses to re-appear (only to have their 'aggro' snatched from us by some jerk who just turned up). But the Orcs and Trolls both live on another continent, and were fighting together in Durotar, the region containing The Horde's HQ metropolis: Orgrimmar. So we all hopped on a zepplin, which at the time I considered to be the best thing in the game and the primary reason for playing it, and wafted gently over The Great Sea to Kalimdor, dancing, emoting, summoning unnecessary minions and peering off the edge as we went. It was night when we got there, and so our first proper sight of the huge canyons and deserts of the Orcish nation was with the moonlight gleaming off the sand. Guildmaster Hank informed us that he and the others were directly south of Orgrimmar, so we zombies trundled malcoordinatedly across plains and through valleys until we met him - a lone greenskin, bulkier than any of us, in a ridiculous white shirt. There was much waving and pointing at each other's pets, then we all joined up with the others, who were battling harpies in a gulch of some kind. We stormed through this quest we didn't have or understand, then trekked off across the vast expanses of The Barrens to Crossroads, an isolated outpost that is the true epicentre of Kalimdor. I picked up a quest there that mentioned the word Wharfmaster, and immediately decided I would go wherever it was talking about on the promise of a wharf of some kind. I love that word, and the associated location is always atmospheric. Never more so than Ratchet, though - it turned out to be a sleepy frontier fishing village. The wharf - really just a single pier - is what makes it frontier: the boat that sails from there (every bit as awesome as a zepplin, by the way) goes directly to Booty Bay, an uneasy truce town in Alliance and Horde eye each other worriedly under the suspicious glare of the mixed-race guards, who frown upon any inter-faction violence pretty hard. It is - though this seemed impossible before I left - even more beautiful than Ratchet. Interconnected wooden huts on waterborne stilts, built against the cliff-face below a tropical jungle, a stunning waterfall cascading down from the river above. So I have to recommend it. It would be tragic to miss out on probably the most comprehensive and exquisitely realised fantasy universe ever created. But I suggest you treat it as a tourism experience with RPG elements. My misgivings about the 'game' bit of the game were echoed pretty much universally among the large guild I play in, even as I was starting to see the pay-off for enduring the annoyances. One month in, only a few of the annoyances still grate painfully - the impossibility of escaping a hairy situation, the arbitrary creation of sticky situations by monsters materialising immediately in front of you, and the fucking chat box that won't let you get back to the game to deal with said randomly spawning enemies without sending what you've written as it is or losing it entirely - the decision between which is utterly impossible to make when having your face eaten by a goddamn bear the size of an affordable car. What still prevents me from enjoying the business of killing things and completing quests (which is 95% of the game - there are no exploration quests and seeing these fantastic places means either grinding to an appropriate level for them for days, or spending most of your time there as a ghost, running back to your corpse) is the soulless RPG at the heart of it all. Combat is a mess of error messages,° progress bars,¹ hits that shouldn't be hits² and people walking through each other. Quests are a matter of collecting a certain number of a certain item which may or may not drop when you kill a certain monster: they drag on for hours of random frustration. Elite quests, for which you must group with others, are identical save the enemies having more hitpoints. Levelling is a ruthlessly mercenary affair - you never have to choose between skills or spend stat points, you just buy everything available to a character of your class and level, and become qualitatively identical to all other characters of your class and level. ° "You're facing the wrong way! Invalid target! The target needs to be in front of you! That's still recharging! You need to be standing to do that! Your target is dead! That's not ready yet! That's too far away! You don't have a target! Not enough mana!" City Of Heroes fixes every single one of these automatically. Error messages are not fun. ¹ Seriously, almost all spells require you to wait for a progress bar to finish before you can cast them. Sometimes the progress bars go backwards. Progress bars are not fun. ² Combatants are quite happy to stand five metres from each other swiping repetitively into the air immediately in front of them, and worse, the game is happy to award these as hits. Fans of turn-based RPGs might see this as a minor graphical shortcoming, but as far as I'm concerned this means the close-combat system is basically missing. It doesn't happen. Cahracters gesture vaguely in each other's direction and numbers rise from their heads, but that is not fighting. In City Of Heroes, it always feels like you hit. In fact, short of something like Riddick, City Of Heroes has some of the most visceral face-punching in any game, let alone the broadly airy-fairy Massive genres. I never thought I'd say this to you, Blizzard, but perhaps it's time you played other people's games. For the first time, you're in a genre where someone else is doing it better, more intelligently, and it's more fun. You've got to be the same as other characters of your class so that Blizzard can know you'll be balanced against others of your level. You can't be allowed to make choices about how your character develops because you might regret them and cancel your subscription. Quests have to take ages because you can't be allowed to get through them or you might stop playing when you do. The combat system doesn't have to suck - they just didn't play City Of Heroes before they built it. But they're terrified that anything other than the painfully predictable might happen, and that's not how a MMOG should work. It's a joylessly teleological approach to game design, and it has resulted in a game that I can never love despite the passion, brilliance and herculean effort that went into crafting the exquisite world in which it takes place. If I were an artist at Blizzard, I would be stabbing WoW's project lead in a dark alley. Score:

2005/03/05

Captain's blog: stardate minus three one seven two one zero point nine

Sixteen Military Wives, Thirty-Two Softly Focused, Brightly Coloured Eyes I was up till two thirty Thursday morning writing a review that I then decided not to post until Friday. I feel like I shouldn't use my 'insider access', such as it is, to write things for my own website that I wouldn't otherwise be able to do. So I wrote an interim entry to indicate this, and that swelled to over two thousand words, and in the end I never got round to making the links links and picking some images. I didn't even get either piece up for Friday, because I ended up going back to my parents' almost immediately after work. So, as ever, there comes a deluge of text after a desert of silence. And I don't have my screenshots here so this will be text-only until Sunday night. Last week was deadline week, and since I'd written twice the amount for that issue as I did in my entire first year at the magazine, I was a bit behind with disc stuff. Then my PC died the afternoon before deadline day, then when I took all my drives home to do it there, the DVD writer produced a coaster at the last moment, and I had to rush between the various Future towers of Bath getting the last bits burnt. The sheer panic and related lack of sleep has given me ulcers and a sore throat, neither of which have gone away yet, and this annoys me. The disc vs writing thing is a pain, because writing - let's face it - is very easy and a lot of fun, even when you're stuck or don't care for your subject matter. Writer's block is nothing compared to the total shutdown your brain undergoes after renaming one file too many, resizing the last screenshot that you can bare to resize to those muscle-memorised dimensions you can bare to resize. Hence: me writing into the early hours for a thing no-one reads. Hence also: there will be a big and awesome thing in the next issue of PC Gamer (147, on-sale March 17th) by me. How awesome? I'm credited as Agent Tom Francis. Darwinia The process of understanding Darwinia goes a bit like this: It's what, a Tron RTS? Oh, you control squads like Cannon Fodder, and you've got to wipe out the virus. Ah, but it's like Lemmings. You have to get the green guys to the machines by getting one to direct the others. It's all about the souls! They're the resource and you have to take them from the enemy to win. Hey, what are those ants doing? OH GOD! Now the green guys have guns? So are they my army or are the squads? Who are the red guys? OH GOD! Ooh, I liked the blue cubes. What do the red cu- OH GOD! It keeps on opening up. By the final level you're playing six different games at once, and they intersect with each other so intelligently that the result is a kind of uber-game, or meta-game if you want to be a bit trendy about it, that lets you play across the surface of these aspects to it, and dive into whichever you feel like or needs your attention at the time. The new things are scary, but the chain-of-islands structure of each level lets you take it a bit at a time; do the bits you find easiest first, and establish a safe-haven and tackle the tricky stuff from there. When it plays with that structure a bit - as when a Triffid on one island is firing virus-filled eggs onto your island - your craving for a sanctuary means you instinctively plan and execute aggressive surgical strikes into infested lands without even realising the game has lured you out of your tactical shell. The aforementioned final level takes this even further by making each island of the map a microcosm of a previous archipelago, so that each one requires a completely different tack, and your degree of success in one informs your strategy with the next - and even your choice of which to tackle next. It has a story, too, and that gets breezed over a bit, which is a shame because it's beautiful. The Darwinians are an AI experiment a research doctor has created within a game-like world, to see if he can evolve a virtual life-form. As you might know, real researchers are doing almost exactly that to advance AI - grow it rather than program it, like an organic thing. Dr Sepulveda, though, wanted his experiment to be a digital theme park when it was done - people could float around inside it and watch the little green guys doing stuff. A virus got loose, bien sur, and it's taken over most of the virtual world. As you clean it up, rebuild the Darwinian population and get the machines that form its delicate and magnificent ecosystem of souls back online, you start to wonder how much of this is background fiction and how much is actually going on inside your computer. The system seems so carefully and intelligently constructed that you don't see why it shouldn't work as an AI development experiment, and the Darwinians themselves are forever doing unexpected things that seem to bely an intelligence beyond their aimlessly meandering facade. Even if you can resist the charm of their aimless individuality, your heart melts when Sepulveda gets talking about their history. When you come across polygonal head-shaped monoliths on one map, he explains that he once messed up a texture replacement and a live image from his webcam was plastered all over the sky of his digital world. Long obsessed with their creator, the Darwinians were so delighted with this glimpse that - after days of celebration - they built the statues in tribute and put them up at 'sacred' locations like the Biosphere. This obsession with their creator actually lands them in some trouble, and the minor revelation at the end of the game is a wonderfully charming missing piece of the puzzle that is the game's premise. There's even a brilliantly knowing crossover into reality when Sepulveda's gift to you for ridding the land of the virus is the level editor with which you can add to and modify his - and Introversion's - life's work. There's a very pointed passing of the buck to the community, and an encoded admission of the limitations of a small developer relative next to the creative powerhouse that is their cult following. Like nearly everything about Darwinia, it's satisfyingly digital, heart-warmingly organic and profoundly intelligent. Score: this is the Deus Ex of strategy, a wildly ambitious Whole New Thing that fuses an ecclectic mix of existing elements in such a clever and excitingly open-ended way that the result soars over the achievements of its precursors. Staring At The National Ten, Thirty-Two Gently Clutching Wrinkled Little Hands Kieron, mentioned here once before, is some kind of natural magnet for praise and respect, so of course I instinctively resent him. This is offset slightly by his association with Deus Ex and respectable musical taste, but when I read his Cradle article in the current issue of Gamer, I still did so with the kind of scowl that says "This had better be extremely good for me to even think it's okay." And it is, dammit. The juicy bit of the piece, though, isn't him talking about the genius of what is officially The Scariest Level In A Game Ever, nor the interview with its creator or breakdown of its innermost secrets. It's the fictionalisation of its story into a straight narrative describing the history of the place - the stuff you would normally need to do some digging, piecing together and imagining to discover for yourself. Elsewhere he says the great thing about its story is this piecing-together you have to do, but feh to that! I played the level and missed out on masses of the stuff in the article, and it's not until you read it as a story that you realise how remarkable it is, and how many characters are involved. The level is one of Thief 3's, and if you read what I wrote about that when it came out, you may have deduced that I didn't like it. I did not. But the piece is still a great read. It'd be a great read if I wasn't even interested in games. It will be a great read for you, when you read it, which you will, because you can. On-sale now! Hopefully when it goes off-sale some scans may be floating around the net, and I will link those if that happens. I don't know if it's the kind of thing to which the New Games Journalism manifesto refers, since it's not terribly subjective, but it is certainly games journalism that is New. This all ties in to something that is popping up more and more - in Jim's words: "we're not in fucking Kansas anymore... there's nothing unreal, fake, or virtual about it." We have always known this, of course - it's the intro to the Games section of my Media page (which I will update this week, promise). But perhaps now things so undeniably remarkable are around and being talked about that it will become more believable to the outside world. Seventeen Company Men, Out Of Which Only Twelve Will Make It Back Again Everyone wants a Succubus, but my reason wasn't the normal one. I actually think the Succubus model is a bit crude, and the chin glows oddly like it has a small white goatee. The reason I wanted one was that the first time I found the Warlock trainers in Undercity, I tried to talk to the Demon Trainer's Succubus thinking it was a person. It is a pet so impressive that it's not at first clear which is the master, or even that there is a relationship between the two. I'm a witch, with makes the parity all the more interesting. If I strip down to my underwear, and for various reasons I often do, we are essentially two crazy monster women in bikinis - she with wings, I with the missing bits of flesh. People stare. Males of my race - Undead - stare with glaring eyes and jaws agape, because their vitreous humour has been replaced by a firey hatred of the living and their facial musculature is in disrepair. Sometimes they emote at her - coy shoegazing, kiss-blowing, dancing - one orc simply pointed and ran off. It's cool. We - the burning legion, the forces of evil, simply The Horde - are all friends. I get into it a bit. I played Warcraft at 12, and its rich fiction is embedded in my subconscious and exciting in a way that only things reminiscent of childhood can be. That's why when I saw my first Alliance, I ignored the eighteen-level difference and stabbed him in the neck again and again until his pet crab gored me. Then I ran from the graveyard to my corpse, got back in it and did it again. A Troll hunter and I eventually killed the offending Gnome, but the ghost-runs and eventual resurrection delays were time-consuming, and I eventually learned to restrain myself in some of the more hopeless cross-faction encounters. Some people take it too far. A Tauren was fishing off the pier while that battle was raging. Others wave at passing Alliance, welcoming them to our lands. Usually they're technically Contested territory, but there are areas that are pointedly ours, and pink-skinned trespassers are not always killed, and it bothers me. This time, it was firmly Horde territory. Even on a PvP server, Alliance can't attack Horde on Horde turf unless "They started it!" It was a mixed group, Humans, Dwarves and Elves, all in their thirties. They stopped when they got near me and a few other zombies in the area. I glared at them. They waved. A zombie waved back. One of the Alliance started dancing. I kept glaring. It was the Dwarf - he blew a kiss to her. I clicked. She whipped him in the face with her lash, I cast Curse Of Agony and then Searing Pain on him, then jabbed my staff into his head. The group exploded, spell effects showering everywhere, ice encasing my feet while fireballs flew, axes hacked into me and unpleasant-looking icons started appearing on my Active Effects list. I went down as nearby Horde rushed to the scene. It was territory only really suited to twenty-somethings, but Horde territory, and they came out of the woodwork - not all twenty-somethings, either. War broke out, and every one of what was now officially an Alliance raiding party were slaughtered by giant bull-men, zombie assassins and shape-shifting Orcs. When the smoke had cleared I clicked Reincarnate - a handy Warlock trick I had set up in advance - and got up, dusting off my robe. My Succubus returned to my side, and I blew a kiss to the Dwarf's dead body as I left.

2005/02/05

Captain's blog: stardate minus three one seven two eight nine point five

Numb And Number As promised, I've got a sample chapter from my abandoned sci-fi book for you here. It's chapter three, because that's the first one with the three main characters in it, and it has both words and actions! It's a chick-flick for the guys! The only things explained by previous chapters are actually fairly obvious from their context here, which makes me realise the exposition-heavy first chapter was probably a big waste of time. E-mail me with comments, should any occur to you. Pablo By a slim margin, Pablo never saw me with my hair; I met him the day Alex and I shaved it off. We did this kind of on a whim - my whim - and what I didn't know at the time was that it would never grow back. I've kept my static clipper-stick at the same setting since, and it's never so much as nicked a strand. I hadn't grown any stubble since becoming super-human, but I just thought they turned it off because they thought my facial hair was long enough - I hadn't considered that they might have felt the same way about my primary hair. Anyway, we shaved it off that day and it's still the same length now. Probably. I'm not sure where my corporeal form is at the moment. "Gah! Look at my hair! It's ridiculous!" I'd left the drying phase of her shower before it was done with my hair, and was putting my trousers on. Realising I'd just asked her to look at me, I put my T-shirt on as well, just before she got up the energy to shuffle across the carpet on her back to see through the bathroom doorway. "It looks okay." "It's all spikey and wild!" "It's always spikey and wild." "I know! It's ridiculous. Look:" I held up a hand and, with the other one, some of my hair. "My hair is longer than my fingers!" "I feel like I've missed something here." "It's just... consider the ape." She looked at me. "The ape has hair all over! It keeps the ape warm." "Don't apes live in tropical climates, under forest canopies?" "... Okay, go to hell. Now consider the... this cup. This cup has no hair. It needs no hair, for its environment is never too cold for it." "But it didn't evolve." "Pah, design, evolution; they end up the same. Okay, now consider me." "You seem okay." "Thank you. But I'm never cold. My whole environment is permeated by a special magic field specifically to stabilise the climate to suit me perfectly in a T-shirt." "You often leave NV. You were cold when we walked around in Alaska last week. I had to mother you like you were a tiny child." "Well, you lent me your scarf." "A tiny child with a big coat already." "Then you took it back, and tried to steal my coat." "A child with a freezing mother." "But this is a good point - when I'm cold, I have to put on protective clothing anyway. Why have this absurd tuft covering just a tiny patch of my surface area?" "70% of body heat lost is through the head." "So the hair isn't working anyway!" "You know that doesn't follow." "But if it's really there for warmth, couldn't it be thicker rather than longer?" "You could try a wig." "Not with all this hair in the way! Okay, let's put this another way - Alex, I want you to shave all my hair off." "Okay." She stood up. "You're going to have to take your shirt off again." When I was human, I was human and a programmer, meaning a) if ever I were fit, I did not stay fit without exercising, and b) I did not exercise, nor was I ever fit. One of the many weird things I discovered when I woke up as an android - when I got up in that dressing room, in fact, if you remember - was that I was inexplicably sinewy. Not exactly muscular, in that my frame remained as skeletal as before, but now hard and interestingly contoured rather than soft and blank. I would later discover that no amount of decadence or inactivity could ever change this, and I was doomed to be strong, fast and attractive for evermore. My long-term reaction to this has been, underlying the guilty pleasure, shame. I've always been politely modest about nudity and never wanted to spontaneously subject anyone to the sight of my body, but now it's like a dark secret that my stomach actually looks kind of good. If someone sees, nearly sees or is about to see me shirtless, I get the same panicky, hot-headed feeling I get when someone says something that, for a microsecond, makes it sound like they know I'm an android. I think I'm scared they're going to say "Hey, you don't exercise, why are you so lean? What are you a robot?"* Or maybe just think I cheated, that I care enough about this stuff to achieve it with drugs. * This is an Alexism - she doesn't quite say "What are you, crazy?", and she doesn't quite say "What, are you crazy?", so I just don't commit myself to a comma position. This time, though, I'd walked right into it. There might have been a way out if she hadn't already commited us to the shirtless school of haircutting, but she had, and it would at least be out of the way and I could start accepting her invitations to go swimming in interesting places. She went off to find some clippers and I took my T-shirt off again. I met Pablo that night; it was Alex's birthday, so everyone was coming for an awkward social event in which almost any pair of people attending would have no common link other than her, and she would be far too busy with other people whose only common link she was to act as an intermediary. She'd even called it her Awkward Social Event, because so few of her friends knew each other. Her sister was coming too. She's a few years older than Alex, and her name is Claire Alessandra Morshower, which you'll notice bares an interesting relation to Alex's name: Alessandra Claire Morshower. The first two names are switched, you see? Apparently her dad came up with the name Alessandra Claire for her sister, and her mother wanted some way of ensuring he wouldn't be entirely fulfilled by this first daughter so they'd have to have a second, as opposed to a son or no other children. She didn't want to give the first a name he actively didn't like, so she came up with the switching idea, which made it tantilisingly close to what he wanted without being good enough. None of this would have done much to quell Claire's inevitable resentment of Alex when they were young, so they didn't tell either of them until they were older and on good terms. Claire is a 2D designer. I'd vaguely wanted to go along with Alex to see her parents that day*, but didn't say anything, so I was planning to say hi to her sister, and talk 2D. * Parents like me, and parents of people I consider cool are usually also people I consider cool: the kind of personality I like is too mild and friendly to be the result of rebelling against an opposite, so virtually the only way you can get it is to be raised by people who have it themselves. I already liked the sound of her mother from the crazy naming trick. Also, I'd feel like an ersatz boyfriend, which would be kind of cool. I looked insane. I looked like I'd had amateur brain surgery, or joined a cult. I looked really intense and raw, and when I made a face everything was expressed threefold. It was like how drama students wear black - it focusses your attention on the expressions and makes them more vivid; although my transition had involved losing a lot of black rather than gaining any. I tried to look serious, and looked scary. It had turned out to be a rather bigger thing than I'd anticipated, but I was still convinced it was the only logical length to have it, and it would therefore ultimately grow on me in a way that any less logical style could not. Over the next month, I would begin to realise with a very slowly mounting sense of panic that it would not, in the literal sense, grow on me at all, ever. I ran my hands over my head. It felt like nothing else. Alex asked permission to feel it, which I was hardly going to deny because she'd had to touch it to cut it anyway, and an artist has a right to admire their work. She called it fantastic, and I announced I was heading home to do some things. Her fingers burnt like crazy on my head, much more so than when she'd been cutting the hair - being touched for the sake of being touched is a deeply unpleasant experience. This wasn't why I left, we'd already arranged that. I wanted to come back when the Awkward Social Event was in full swing, to get the maximum awkwardness from all directions, rather than one by one as people turned up, because that way I might actually get good at it or have a meaningful conversation with one of them. It was mid-day, so there were a lot of people on the waterways and my bike's speed was down to fifteen m/s in places, having to stop totally at a few intersections, hanging over the still black surface and smiling at some people walking on the pavement, neurotic about looking mean with no hair. It hit thirty on the stretch out of Central towards my sector, the rushing air cold on my head, making me feel a bit more extreme and in touch with stuff. I let it slow to a stop under the cold shade of my balcony, sitting sideways as I got close then jumping off at about three m/s and stumbling in through the big open doorway. I call that floor the bar - it's just a circular table-top in the middle, eight high sofa-chairs around it and foliage towards the ends of the elliptical floorplan. The tall jungly plants make it feel like a hotel cocktail bar near a swimming pool or something, which I like. I've kept the house I woke up with, but used a lot of the impressive credit God gave me to customise, and this has given rise to the names: the big circular basement below this is the cave, and the small circular level above it is the kitchen. Actually not a lot of imagination went into that one. Oh, and the balcony I left the bike under is called the deck. It's really big, and - as the only naturally sunny part of the house - a great place to eat. I poured a Nuclear War from the apparatus at the back of the room, sat in a high sofa-chair and flicked into overlay mode. I'd had an idea to get some kind of absurd thick-haired wig for Alex's thing, so I was browsing, and a message from Alex herself turned up. My voice explained that Pablo was saying he wasn't coming, and Alex was going to be too busy being sociable to other people to talk him into it, so if I wanted an early start on the awkwardness I could try and persuade him. I decided she hadn't realised I had no idea who he was, so asked her. She said his name was Pablo Picasso and she knew him from work, which - and not just because I'd thought she was unemployed - only raised further questions. I didn't ask them and decided to do it, because I'd be kind of a jerk not to, and - having not actually dealt with any awkwardness yet - I still had my aggressive enthusiasm for social clumsiness and uncertainty. I toyed with the idea of getting the wig first and wearing it to meet this bizarre new person, but my imaginings of how that would work out seemed more like a fevered dream than a good idea, so I drank the rest of my War, winced and left. He had black hair, a bit like the stuff I'd had earlier that day - rather slick on top and regular on the face - only he was genetically and phonetically American. He made a negative face and said "I just think it'll be awkward, you know?" "She's calling it the Awkward Social Event." He laughed. "Well, she didn't tell me that." He changed his expression. "D'you think it's not going to be awkward, or that it doesn't matter that it is?" I looked blank. "Actually I'm just asking you to come because she made me to ask you to come. Now I know how her sentences must feel." He looked serious. "So you've got no logical backing at all on this?" "Well, it has a self-ironising title." "Uhuh, but I can enjoy the title from here." "That's true." I was slowtiming to think of witty things to say to impress the new person, but it wasn't working. He had a glass of something red on the balcony rail, though, and I was going slow enough to see that the arm returning to his side was going to knock it off; by the time it did my hand was already in position, and I caught antipodal points of its rim between thumb and middle finger, letting it swing ponderously from the momentum of its tiny drop. The drink slow-splashed over my hand. "Wow, nice catch." It was a phenomenal catch. "Thanks. I try, you know." I instinctively