TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

Rock, Paper, Shotgun

From a new gameblog entirely by people I happen to know. It will fail and explode and probably cause a quite serious outbreak of head-cancer, of course, because it’s not PC Gamer – the best and only worthwhile achievement of mankind so far. But still, I have to admit that’s a pretty good opening line for an article entitled Horrible, horrible game still clings to life.

BioShock Review Review

The issue of PC Gamer with my BioShock review in is now on-sale in England. I wrote it mostly with lunatic fans like myself in mind, so I don’t spend a lot of time saying what really should be the first thing you say about BioShock: holy shit! Someone made a game about a subaquatic capitalist utopia for the intellectual elite! And it’s going to sell? This is a game in which you have to know some of the history of Versailles to understand one of the villain’s insults to you.

There are ways in which BioShock does more with its subject matter than any other game I can name, but mostly it’s just amazing to have something to sink your brain’s figurative teeth into. It has ideas. There are themes. I think I even saw a paradigm.

I’ve started capitalising the ‘S’, you’ll be riveted to hear, because a) it’s correct, and I’m a fan of correct, but also b) it’s very System Shock 2. You can even draw a line from each of Rapture’s districts to each of Shock 2’s decks. They might not be able to say so legally, but there is a Shock series of games and this is one of them. The best, in fact.

I was slightly bemused when I first heard that they wanted to make a game set somewhere “more interesting than a spaceship”, because Shock 2 did such an extraordinary job of making that ship a vast and exciting place to explore. But yeah, I get it now. This is an order of magnitude more artistically exciting.

I’m not talking about the bits where you kill children, because they’re not very good and they don’t need to be. Everyone will fixate on them forever and ever and it will be boring and terrible and that’s a shame. They’re not important, either emotionally or mechanically, and the game has so much more going on that is provocative and brave and weird and brilliant.

The lunatic fans seem to be satisfied, by the way – although they frantically crave documentation of every microsecond of the infanticide. And one called me a ‘filthy worm’ for giving it a score as low as 95%. While I was away in France last week, the first copies were delivered to subscribers, and one guy on the official forums got to be a mini-celebrity for a few days by being the only person who’d read the first ever review of their holy game. People grilled him for info and implored him to type in the first few sentences. I love being a part of something that inspires that level of excitement, even if I’m just riding Irrational’s coat tails.

There’s a line in my review that starts “So kindly avoid any…” I would just like to say, for the record, that this line originally read slightly differently, and you will probably be able to guess precisely how once you’ve completed the game. It was a very obvious and weak in-joke that hinges on something enormously spoilerific but invisible to the uneducated eye. I couldn’t ask Tony to make sure he kept it intact when he was sub-editing my review because it would have entirely ruined the game for him, so I’m just going to have to ask you to come back here in a month, sneer slightly at my failed attempt at a bad joke, then switch your neural interface back over to whatever Zero-G Hyper Sports event the future will presumably be full of.

The Completist: Tribes: Vengeance

What I thought at the time: Great, but merely great. It got eighty-something in our mag (Tim reviewed), and I remember thinking “God, I love eighty percent games” as I jetted and ski’d around the enormous levels. The Grappling Hook level annoyed the living fuck out of me, though, to the extent that I stopped there and didn’t play it again for three years.

What the world thought at the time (paraphrased): The world was unavailable for comment since no-one in it actually bought Tribes: Vengeance. It went vritually unmarketed, so only the Tribes hardcore actually bought copies, which was kind of a shame because, by putting enormous effort into a lengthy, complex, story-driven single player campaign, it was very obviously designed to court everyone but the Tribes hardcore. They hated it.

What the world thinks now (paraphrased): The world is unavailable for comment as its populace have either a) never heard of it, b) forgotten about it entirely, or c) intentionally erased it from their memories to preserve their fondness for the original games.

What I think now: I liked it a lot more this time through, admittedly because I wasn’t above using a level skip cheat to avoid fiddling around with the dismal grappling hook level, and to retain my sanity when I lost yet another hour’s progress due to the COMPLETE FUCKING LACK OF AN AUTOSAVE. The ludicrous thing is, the reason I keep losing masses of my progress is that I like the game so much. I’m lost in it, so I’m almost never pulling back and thinking “This is a game, I need to save”.

It doesn’t even have a quicksave key. Instead, you have to pull out to a menu, select save, then select “New Save Game”, whereupon – I kid not – it asks if you want to overwrite “New Save Game”. It’s not really an option, it’s a dummy savegame they put in there that gets recreated when you save over it.

The thing I wish everyone would copy: Skiing! We have games with jetpacks – though not enough by anyone’s count – but we badly need more that combine your short-lived skyward thrusts with the ability to curl that gravitational potential round into blindingly fast lateral motion by angling your descent along inclines. It’s a thrilling, elegant and endlessly satisfying mechanic. Even on the last level I was amazed by the dizzying speed I could pick up by playing off the shape of the land.

Best bit: It’s partly that, but more specifically what that leads to in the context of a single-player shooter. Because the levels are enormogasmic, you have some time and distance to plan your attack. But the main thing you’re planning is not which weapon to use, where to throw a grenade, but the rollercoaster undulations of your blistering route through the area.

“If I jetpack over that ridge, I can land on the incline and ski all the way down to the facility, and hit that lip at the bottom to launch over that water-tower, take out the turret, and still have enough jetpack juice to blast up to the mountains on the other side of the valley to ski back for another pass.”

I got to the stage where I could execute all this without hitch almost instinctively, leaving my higher brain functions free to handle the shooting as I shot by. The centrepiece weapon is the Spinfuser, which is like a lightweight rocket launcher except that your missiles inherit your own velocity. That means that you have to lead to compensate for both your own movement and that of your target, so nailing five guys as you slide by at eighty miles per hour does genuinely need some brainwork.

I don’t think I’d like a game that forced you to conduct that kind of mathematics in the middle of an N-like momentum manipulation across a 3D landscape, but I love that there’s a game which lets me, and rewards me.

How cocking hard is it? Not too bad, but the challenge has its minor frustation factor magnified a billion times by the no-autosave thing. There’s the odd inordinately tough boss fight, some of them unexpected, and the prospect of repeating the entire preceeding level in order to take another whack at one of these caused me to level-skip to the victory cut-scene once or twice. I am not ashamed of this. Irrational should be.

How long is it? Long. It feels super-epic, but in fact it’s merely long. It’s an utterly absurd structure – at various times you play a princess, her daughter at six, her daughter in her twenties, her daughter’s boyfriend, her daughter’s boyfriend’s killer and even your own killer. By the end of it, even though precious little of the dialogue and precious few of the characters have been even remotely good, you’re so exhausted by the sheer amount of plot you’ve lived through that you can’t help but feel rather satisfied.

Jumps the shark: Guess what? The grappling hook level. But not just because of the grappling hook. This is a level where you play a six year-old girl, piloting fighter jets and mowing down legions of trained soldiers. The problem with the grappling hook, by the way, is that their coders weren’t clever enough to work out how to make it wrap around obstacles that get in the way of the line, so when you grapple onto the ceiling or a high ledge, the challenge is to make sure your lifeline doesn’t brush some light fitting, skirting board or defect in the wall, or it will instantly vanish and you’ll plummet. It’s all the less tolerable because an Unreal Tournament player modded in a grappling hook with this feature implimented beautifully, and it took him all of a few afternoons. That’s the same engine.

What’s the end like? The penultimate level is really good, as mentioned, and entirely true to what made the bulk of the game great. The final one is a boss fight with someone who seemed to me to be a fairly minor character, and it’s pretty unremarkable. But it wins big points for a) not being at all frustrating, and b) being set above the clouds against a spectacularly beautiful sun. It’s one of the few games that ends in a place that feels like an appropriate place to end. It’s a game about flying, and you finish it higher than you’ve ever been before.

What’s the ending like? Surprising, actually. You never get to kill the real villain of the piece, she gets away scott free. It would almost be noir if the characters involved weren’t such hammy irritants.

Gamespot Finally Do The Logical Thing

And start marking games out of nineteen. Nineteen.

The scale still goes up to 10.0, the stupidest number in the world, but no game is permitted to score less than 1.0. Reviewers can still score to one decimal point, but only if they want to give it .5. And if they do, it can’t be a 0.5.

One of the many, many things I love about this announcement is editor Jeff’s thinly veiled astonishment and disgust at the surreal new system. “While I’ll personally miss the ability to give games a 6.8, I look forward to eliminating quibbles about the quality differences between games that are only a tenth of a point apart.”

I agree. I don’t know how we ever worked out which was better out of 7.9 and 8.0. It was baffling. And they were out of ten? What is this ‘ten’?

“You’re busy. You don’t have time to stare at one game that got a 5.2 and another that got a 5.3 and puzzle out what the big difference is.”

It was the ULTIMATE MYSTERY. There was no way of knowing. Nothing short of looking at the score could get you that information.

“We’ve been working on this update for quite some time now…” Here, this is your first tip-off that your planned scoring system is insane. If a way of rating something takes “some time” to work on, that is because it is not in fact mathematics but rather some sort of beat poetry with numbers.

In case I haven’t made this clear yet, I loathe everyone’s scoring system except ours and those identical to ours. This is because I am numerate.

7.5/10 is a decimal atop a fraction and never made a lick of sense, but this is a country mile further from Sanesville Tennessee. If Gamespot give something 7.5 now, that’s not 7.5 out of 10. It doesn’t translate to 75%. This, honest-to-god, is the equation you now have to put Gamespot scores through: (G – 1) * 10 / 9 = S, where G is the Gamespot score and S is any kind of rational system.

I once came across a website that marked out of twenty, but allowed quarter-points. They come close – close – to being as dumb as this, but it’s that fatal 1.0 minimum that just can’t be beat. This is, officially, the stupidest scoring system on the internet. And I say that as a man who gave a film “Bat out of bat.”

Oh wait, it’s cool. Now they’ve got a medal for “Xtreme Baditude.”

I leave you with a Daily Show-style moment of zen that is at once beyond, beneath and beside parody.

“With fewer scores to choose from, our review team will be able to speak more definitively about games. By eliminating scores like 7.9, we’re no longer able to say “this game is almost great, but not quite. Now our choices will be to say “yes, this is a great game” and give it an 8.0, or say “this game is good, but not great” and go with a 7.5.”

Score: (1.0 – 1) * 10 / 9

The Completist: Far Cry

Feh, I had another This Month in Terrible written but I’m bored of Terrible now. Terrible is over-rated. As stupid as it sounds, I’ve actually been reluctant to post here because I didn’t want to interrupt the series with something else, but didn’t feel like checking over and finding images for the final post. So, new series!

Valve’s stats show that still less than half their players have made it through the four-hour first episode of their follow-up to Half-Life 2. Crytek reckoned around 20% of gamers would see the end of Far Cry, and on anecdotal evidence I’d put the actual figure at less than half that.

If I really like something, though, I play it to death, then start again and play it back to life, and then really just mess around with its limp and compliant body of work until I get bored. So I shall, from time to time, note my thoughts on how old stuff holds up as I replay it, what the ending’s like, and how cocking hard it was. First up, Far Cry:

What I thought at the time: Brilliant! I knew the Trigen and indoor bits would suck, but I was expecting the game to degenerate into them for the whole second half, when in fact they turned out to be sprinkled bearably throughout. I remember playing River, one of the last few missions, about twenty times over, screwing it up each time but enjoying myself far too much to try and do it sensibly. I crashed boats into buildings, jeeps into the sea, boats into other boats, jeeps into boats, boats into people’s faces, and at one point a jeep into a helicopter. Sorry Bruce, I did it first.

What the world thought at the time (paraphrased): Brilliant! Unprecedented AI! Amazing graphicsability! Freeform gameplay! Ruined by Trigens!

What the world thinks now (paraphrased): Less brilliant! Everyone still loves the freeformness, but love for the AI has faded somewhat and the horrible Trigens and horribler last two levels have stuck in everyone’s minds.

What I think now: More brilliant! I don’t know why, but the Trigens hardly bothered me this time through. I actually found them pretty scary – they pounce suddenly and unpredictably, and kill in one swipe, and take a lot of shooting, so you end up having a lot of moments where you only just kill them in time, causing them to fling their own limp, bullet-ridden bloody corpse into your face.

The two things that really stand up well today are the boats and the binoculars. Skimming that glossy rippled sea is pure joy, and crashing into a beach at a hundred and fifty miles per hour, flipping eighty foot into the air off a rock, is the only way to start a mission. At one point on Boat – a mission that has boats in it – I hit an enemy speedboat at full pelt, both of us firing, just as I took out their gunner. My boat hit the driver in the side of the head, threw me into the air, spun three times and landed the right way up in the water, just before I landed back in it and sped off. Bitches, I refer you to my wake.

The binoculars are The Thing I Wish Everyone Would Copy. In fact, new field:

The thing I wish everyone would copy: The binoculars. You scan an area with them and every enemy not behind anything very solid is highlighted, and their position is tracked on your radar from then on. It’s a level of intel most tactical shooters don’t dare give the player, for fear that he might be able to plan his attack, or enjoy himself. Situational awareness enables situational manipulation, and that’s where the fun always is.

Best bit: Oh, I wasn’t supposed to be talking about the best bits yet? Because that was the best bit.

How cocking hard is it? Not desperately, actually. Shameful admission: I actually played Far Cry on Easy mode the first time. I felt pretty smug about it, because everyone else was groaning about how hard it was even a third of the way through, and it gets a lot harder than that.

So I grit my teeth slightly when I committed to Medium this time through, but it was fine. I got through it without cheats and only mild frustration. I don’t think the end, which I’ll talk about in a minute, is as hard as people make out, it’s just frustrating. I died more times on the Boat level than on the last two missions put together, it’s just it wasn’t really my fault when I died on those, and I lost more progress.

How long is it? Fairly. You could cut out all the indoor sections – around 30% of the game – and it’d still be a good game-length. You should probably do that. They’re not terrible, they’re just no better than most shooters.

Jumps the shark: Not right until the end, actually – the mission where you start with an M4 and ten bullets, and there are a million Trigens. That was dumb. I didn’t cheat, but I did install the quicksave mod. I foxed that first Trigen by waiting for him to pass a boulder on his way to me, and passing it myself on the other side. PSYCH!

At that point I jumped off the waterfall, on a motorbike.

What’s the end like? After that you’ve got a drive through instakill magma rivers with five hundred Big Trigens – WEAK – an assault on a large complex full of well-armoured commandos without much health or ammo – WEAK – the fight with Dr Krieger, who is tough and irritating and surrounded by lots of guys and there’s nowhere to hide – WEAKNESS ITSELF – then the infamous dust bowl of four hundred Big Trigens – NOT AS WEAK AS PEOPLE MAKE OUT BUT STILL PRETTY GODDAMN WEAK GUYS.

What’s the ending like? Abysmal.
Doyle: You don’t understand, Jack, they sent me, you can’t change the future!
Jack: Probably not! But I can make sure you’re not a part of it! LOL! (shoots Doyle)
Jack, that is totally changing the future you dick. Also stop talking like a barbecue salesman.

Not The Finale Post

I have so many season finales to watch now, it’s like the end of the world. The only one I’ve seen so far is Heroes, which I will refrain from commenting on here until I’ve thought of a better way to deal with the spoilers problem.

This is why this is not the post about season finales. Instead, it is about these things:

Pirates of the Caribbean 3: Dead Man’s World Of End-Sparrow. In one of those things that didn’t really happen to me much when I worked in a warehouse building skateboards, I was taken to a preview screening of this on Wednesday in a stretch limo with free champagne, which I did my level best to pour on the editor of Disney Girl magazine. It is, I thought, ‘okay’. I would stretch to ‘quite good’ if this was the first one, but it lacks so much of the fun of the second that I find it hard to recommend. Particularly since everyone hated the second.

The first one was the zombie pirates one, and was good because it was breezier and funnier than you expected. The second was the fish pirates one and was great for its absurdly long, wildly overdone, bloody-minded physics-driven set pieces on gorgeous tropical islands. The third is about a big book of rules and some crabs that look like rocks.

None of them make a whole lot of sense, and I don’t recall what actually happened, plot-wise, in any of them (at the start of 3, everyone is alive and roaming around, so I assume nothing of import happened in the last two). But the third one doesn’t use its license to be absurd to do anything very fun. All the spectacular bits are just ship battles, which we’ve seen in some depth before.

I actually love ship battles, but they can’t hold my attention for long in dumb films. The reason they’re exciting is that they’re so physical – you can see the cannonballs, you can see which bits of the ships they smash, the damage is all evident and so the outcome is believable. In dumb films, such as this one, captains are idiots and the hero’s ship wins because it’s made of magic.

At one point a billion-strong armada retreat from two enemy ships, because they destroyed the flagship (because, for no reason, the captain couldn’t decide whether to fire or not). John, who loved it, argues that this is normal film logic, but the whole setup for the scene is “They can take this guy, but what do they do about the billion ships?” It’s hard to enjoy a dumb film about naval combat, politics and trickery if you’ve ever seen Hornblower, which was eight non-dumb films about naval combat, politics and trickery, with characters it is possible – nay, easy – to like.

Aside: Geoffrey Rush is still such a watchable pirate. While Depp’s drunken eyebrow-work on Sparrow gets tiresome, Rush can still just say “Arr” or a sentence of the form “X be Y”, and I am immediately happy.

Score: okay.

The reaction to my Galactic Civilizations 2 War Diary: which has been surreal. This is a ten-thousand word account of a single match of an expansion pack to a little-known turn-based strategy game with poor graphics, and no-one seems to mind. It’s not the hits or links that it got, surprising as they were, but the extraordinary comments. I just read someone saying- well, I’ll quote: “My brother and I would read the blog, then get together to discuss what he was doing right, what he was doing wrong, and what he needed to do to win.” This makes me feel amazing.

I like very much that I work on a magazine where I’m allowed to give stupid ideas like this a try. I did most of it at home or after work, but only because I love writing this kind of stuff so much. I had some New Years Objectives this year, one of which was to write something that got the same kind of reaction as my report on the Eve Online assassins – which has always frustrated me by being better-received than almost everything I’ve written since. This got a different kind of reaction altogether.

Comments at PC Gamer
Comments at Joystiq
Comments at the GalCiv site
Comments at Kotaku

Facebook: it’s like social networking, except that I like it. I’m on everything – MySpace, LiveJournal, Blogger, Twitter, WordPress, Technorati, Tumblr, Flickr, Last.fm – but Facebook is the only one that seems really smartly designed in terms of how it connects you to people. It’s good at knowing what you’ll find interesting about what your friends are up to (almost anything), so the main news feed you get from it is incredibly fast-flowing and rich in interesting goings-on.

Now I have to watch TV.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaa-

Sorry for two loud-noise video-link posts in a row, but that’s the freakiest thing ever. It’s the Fingerposer planned for the next version of Gmod. ON BROKEN DRUGS.

I’ve just cycled home from losing at badminton with Clare, there’s a spectacular sunset in Bath tonight that actually makes me wish I’d just stayed in town to watch it, I have two jumpy and bizarre new tracks from Fluxblog, it’s still light at quarter past nine, I have masses of good food to cook and my favourite kind of writing to do, and there are lots of interesting things happening in the next two weeks. A few things suck, but I choose not to dwell on them on a night like this.

Starcraft 2

It’s a game from Blizzard, and yet it’s artistically uninteresting. I’m sure it’ll be wonderful, but why does it look so vapid and plastic? These might as well be sprites, they have no depth or character to them. In the original the Zerg looked sticky and disgusting. In this they look like a breakfast cereal.

Blizzard have never had the edge with tech, but their artists always wildly over-compenstated by giving everything wonderfully exaggerated character. Even with the primitive Warcraft 3 engine, they managed to make units look cool enough that you could zoom in on them for cutscenes, and watch them talk. And as you can see, you wouldn’t want to zoom in on these guys.

Anyway, excited nonetheless. Beww!

Grrraaahahahahaa!

That is all.

Mystery Trip

I’ve been away the last few days. It feels like about a year and a half. I’d forgotten what it felt like to be home. I caught up with the London crew the night before my flight, and then with a load of old high-school friends the day I got back (yesterday? Could it be yesterday? I feel like I’ve been home for five weeks). I’ve sort of retro-actively photoblogged it in the Flickr set. It’s this kind of thing:

It was good. I asked him, after my first sip, what it was. He said it was a trade secret. I took another sip.
"Is it red wine and orange juice?"
"… yes."

‘Iv’

But this is the first time since we were last in Liberty City that a GTA game hasn’t been garish. It looks serious, sombre. Try to picture a Vice City or San Andreas trailer with that music. This looks majestic. However amateurish the combat and missions have been in GTA games, the one thing they do with professional aplomb is storytelling. If they’re choosing to tell the story of a slave-trading (bride-selling?) Russian immigrant, they’ll tell it with the appropriate gravity.

They told Vice City’s Scarface tale with appropriate style, and San Andreas’s homecoming with appropriate attitude. But in Vice City I was a mealy-mouthed prick, and in San Andreas I was a sad, stupid little man. If I can’t be the mute blank slate in a leather jacket I was in GTA3, a depressed and amoral Eastern European is still a dramatic step up.

Desktop Tower Defense

A perfect Saturday-morning, still-slightly-drunk game. Like the Warcraft maps, you can only set up defensive structures, and your objective is to stop the influx of enemies from getting to the other side of your territory. They come from both sides at once, but they can neither pass through nor harm your defenses, so you can force them round a little maze to ensure maximum exposure to your turrets before they reach the exit.

This was my first attempt at a maze, in its early stages of upgrading. The choice of turrets – even once it was fully developed – was pretty guileless, but I think the maze layout is fairly efficient. I’d be interested to know what the most efficient one is. You can view the efforts of everyone in the high-score table, but the winners don’t shed much light on the combinatorial mathematics of the situation. They tend to be small mazes with two routes, and their creators presumably exploited the AI deficiency which allows you to fool them in to changing their mind about which route to take by repeatedly selling and re-building a turret that blocks the shorter route. Tricky to do effectively once they pour in en masse, but a less interesting challenge.

If you try it, submit your score afterwards and add it to the Pentadact group so you can see how profoundly you beat me.

Noble Jedis

Infinitely More Exciting Than Anything

A very, very long time ago, a fairly high-ranking Future exec whose opinion I trust hinted – as we all lightly mocked Sony, the national sport for the past eighteen months – that the PS3 had Something Else that made it more of a contender than it might seem. I can believe Home might have been it. From what I’ve seen it’s firmly a There rather than a Second Life, in that you’re a consumer rather than a creator, but it still eclipses the rather under-developed concept of the Mii.

It almost makes Sony seem forward-thinking to discover that they’ve been going down the virtual world while everyone was wondering why they didn’t ape Microsoft’s matchmaking interface. It even lends a little credence to their rather unexciting claim that the PS3 is a computer rather than a console (“Could you make a console next, then? We already have computers that do everything.”) A consumerist social virtual world is something that’s probably best enjoyed from the sofa rather than the desk.

But why, then, on Earth, doesn’t the PS3 come with a keyboard? Accepting USB keyboards is a start, but people don’t have spare ones lying around, aren’t prepared to move their PC one, and aren’t going to buy one specially unless Sony pronounces it necessary. And without widespread keyboard usage, this isn’t a social virtual world, it’s a dystopian nightmare in which people can only communicate through the medium of emote-dance, stock phrases and a cacophony of clashing crackling nasal voices. You know how your voice sounds all wrong recorded? That’s because headset microphones have an inbuilt filter that post-processes the audio input to make you sound like a horrible prick. In those dark, chilling moments after I’ve newly reinstalled Battlefield 2 or Counter-Strike but before I’ve remembered to block all voice-comms, the first time someone actually uses it is like something from a Cronenberg film:

“Oh dear God, I think it’s trying to- it’s trying to talk. I’m going to be sick.”

Non-textual communication is appropriate for a much more exciting prospect also unveiled at GDC, this time from the ex-Lionhead guys who made Ragdoll Kung-Fu. In a restaurant bathroom earlier tonight I got a (non-textual) call from Tim in San Francisco, saying “Look up Little Big Planet. You’re going to love it. It’s like a cross between Spore, Ragdoll Kung-Fu and The Incredible Machine. Oh, and it’s only on PS3.” (That, by the way, is how to promote your system without sounding like a dick, Sony).

I do love it. I love it so much that, if the PS3 were a games console rather than a computer and priced as such, I would be seriously considering waiting a while and then starting to mull it over and straying remarkably close to musing about getting one before returning to my baseline state of definitely-not-getting-one. I would have gone with “Garry’s Mod with hugging”. Creativity and physics we’ve seen together before, but being able to latch onto things makes it wonderfully tactile, and turns the player into a physics prop to be toyed with like all the rest. It looks – and I can’t truthfully say this about any other console game – like a load of people being silly and having a great time together. This video made me laugh with a series of highly embarrassing noises that I haven’t heard myself make since I was six.

There’s a longer video here explaining the creative features, but it’s not set to the Go! Team’s Everyone’s A VIP and so is vastly- wait, there are sound-effects in this clip too. Holy God, does that mean they’ve actually got the Go! Team as the game’s official music? +58%! To its current 94% score. You heard me.

The most indelible criticism I’ve heard anyone make to Sony was simply “Come on, guys, I just want to play with my friends.” I don’t know how much better Home is going to be at making that a simple matter – I’m willing to bet that Microsoft’s old-skool solution is going to be quicker and simpler for some time to come – but there is at least evidence, now, that you’ll be having a completely ridiculous time when you manage it.

Of course, none of this really matters when the system costs, and will continue to cost for a minimum of two years, SIX-HUNDRED DOLLARS.

Let Them Eat Facts

It’s that bi-annual tradition of looking through the top twenty search results that lead people here, noticing that they’re all wildly misleading, and in the spirit of giving people what they want, or at least what other people once wanted, trying to address those curiosities. In descending order of wantedness!

wii controller
Yeah. I was pretty wild about the idea, but I was dreaming of something more precise and reliable than this. Without those qualities this can’t replace the mouse in the way I wanted it to, but it’s still vastly more pleasurable to use than any other console controller. That’ll prove its main contribution to games: making individual actions pleasurable, rather than more sophisticated or artful, and there’s masses of unexplored territory there for games about smashing things up, hitting stuff and chucking it around. In other words, exactly the kind of off-the-wall concept-driven stuff Nintendo can do well.

ah that wonderful ability sylar script heroes
You refer, I imagine, to Sylar’s line to Eden in episode 11:

extra life omlette aliens
Okay, I lost you at ‘omlette aliens’. Extra Life is a section of our magazine that I contribute to, but if you’re looking for omelette aliens you may have meant ‘extra-terrestrial life’. You’re mis-spelling omelette, too, so I’m not going to try very hard to find out what you were looking for, find it or bring it to you.

711391
My unfaithful friend. This is the woman whose search-engine usage over the three months for which AOL decided to publish her and three-thousand other people’s personal data painted a picture of a sad, broken modern life, quite literally warts-and-all. She’s a loathesome, deceitful, callous woman, but reading those search queries gives you such a comprehensive understanding of her life, thoughts and motivations that it’s impossible not to understand her. And understanding, it turns out, really does lead to a strange kind of forgiveness, or perhaps just acceptance. If you knew with this level of certainty, this level of insight, why everyone did what they did, it’d be hard to ever truly hate again. She probably won’t go down as a victim of one of the most heinous breaches of privacy, but I think she warrants the title most complete, most merciless, most interesting.

“rhetorical bombast aside”
Okay, hands up who searched for this. I mentioned it as something I was particularly pleased to see written on this site, by commenter Jason L, and it looks from this search like there’s only one other site in Google’s brainbanks that’s ever used the phrase. I didn’t search for it, until just now. DID HE?
 
i donloaded a video file with bittorrent but it is a blank white page
Okay well your first mistake was to donload, rather than download, it. Your second was probably to open the .torrent file as it were the movie, or perhaps just open it with the wrong program. Your third was to confess to what was almost certainly a crime in a search string. Next time try “I hear movie pirates sometimes find that the video files they download with BitTorrent come up as blank white pages, and that there is a solution to this problem. I wonder what that solution is, so that I can undermine it, in order to scupper pirates, whom I hate.”

battlefield 2142 disc doesnt recognise
I know! It’s a complete dick. My Battlefield 2 disc was clasped so tightly in its case that it cracked before it would come out, and now my 2142 one goes completely unrecognised on about half the machines I’ve tried it on. I wouldn’t care if EA’s digital distribution system worked in any goddamn way whatsoever, but my legitimate copy on that has never once launched successfully, and their tech support guys have simply given up trying to help me. I was only trying them to see what they’d do – I’ve got access to a working disc that I can use to play anyway – and they failed utterly. I should expose them, if only that were the kind of thing anyone would care to read.

“zombie zombie zombie” virus virus flash
I can’t decide which is more intriguing, what this person was looking for or the fact that I must, once, have said “zombie zombie zombie”. Without that second ‘virus’ he could almost be searching for an infection his PC has suffered that involved printing the undead triplet somewhere, but as it is he seems to be penning a tribal chant for our times, to be sung around bonfires while stomping and bouncing in a slow-moving circle.

delicious pentadact
Aren’t I just, though?

getting windows to recognise a wiimote
I believe you need Glovepie. I have no idea what it is. Those are just words to me, and ones that need a space between them at the very least.

just cause where is the fighter jet
I actually can’t answer that one. I did find it, but I don’t recall where and our review code has now expired. Guides online are surprisingly rubbish, too. If it’s any consolation, the only time the jets are really fun are on the missions when you’re given them to begin with – the rest of the time there’s not much to chase. You could always get in a lot of trouble with the cops and grappling hook one.

primer movie wikipedia
 I’m going to assume you found what you were looking for, and not mock you for using Google to find something when you already knew where it was. I use Firefox’s Google-powered address bar to virtually describe where I want to go and assume that it’ll jump me straight to the right page. Addresses are so passé.

replacement nintendo sensor bar
I hear a candle works. I hear it’s actually a bit of a misnomer – the bar isn’t sensing anything, it’s putting out IR for the Wiimote to detect, and it’s the controller itself that works out where it’s pointing and sends that info to the console via the same Bluetooth link the accelerometer uses.

incurably ill dvd
Get a new one?

last episode of dexter
Pretty good, wasn’t it? I loved the confetti bit right at the end, it needed to go back to how fucked up he was.

morrowind sexy armor for females mod
I could help you, since my staggering knowledge of the later Elder Scrolls series extends even to things I would rather not know, but I get the impression you’re not the kind of person I want to help.