TOM FRANCIS
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Highlight Of 2006: Previewing Oblivion

I said I’d tell you what these were that week, by which I meant this month, of which there are now only three days left. So, going chronologically, here’s number one.

Reviewing it was of course the bigger deal, but the four-hour preview event that night in a London hotel was the first time I actually went there, so to speak, and that made it magical in a way that’s tough to communicate to non-gamers. When I say playing a new game is like going to a country you’ve never visited before, it sounds like I mean “almost as good as”, and that’s misleading. It’s much, much better than that. It’s better than going to a planet you’ve never visited before. When the game is good, and you know it, and you have a game-enabled brain, stepping out of your skin and into that screen is a sublime form of physical and psychological transportation to which drugs, love and space travel cannot compare.

And much of that culminated with me punching a rat in the face. Those who had no great pre-release interest in Oblivion found the opening dungeon pretty dull, and certainly it’s one of the weakest parts of the game, but it was designed for me and my kind. We’re the Morrowind obsessives, people who spent longer in this game’s predecessor than on any vacation, and who would delight in every little change as they were introduced to us one by one. And the sensation of cold-cocking a dog-sized rodent mid-air with a conclusive right-hook is something every human needs to feel at some point in their lives. Whunk!

For all the joys out in that enormous and spectacular world, it was how physical it all felt that would captivate me. Plenty of games have worlds as big, plenty of games are open-ended, there are even some now that look as good. But none feel so right, convince so totally, whunk with quite that fidelity.

Tomorrow: snow, heroism, lightning and abdominal pain!

Yeah, Me Too

I’m the one on the left – a slinky Draenei huntress. I have no idea if I enjoy World Of Warcraft or not, but I’m definitely physically dependent on it at the moment. I think the reason it eats so much of our time is that they’ve hit upon the gaming equivalent of TV: something comforting and unending that requires little effort from you. You’re always progressing through it, consuming New, but it’s dilute New, tastes a little like Old, and you’re drinking it slowly.

I’m Sobaseki on Steamwheedle Cartel, and I’m only level 7. I’m in it for the pets – Rhianna was telling me about a Scorpid she had called Mexican Pete, after the way he waved his claws nonchalantly as he scuttled, and at that point I knew I would have to be a Hunter. I wanted to be a Blood Elf – the Draenei are a bit of a non-concept as races go – but my colleagues are all Alliance filth and I faced exile if I stuck to my Horde inclinations. I don’t have a problem with pets, like all interesting stuff being held off till level ten, but I wish they had enough ideas to keep that feeling of progression going through the later decades. As they get exponentially further apart in the time-invested stakes, the interest and value of their perks simultaneously plummets, and it’s kind of a lethal combination for me.

It’s a much more pleasant game to play once you fiddle with the controls a bit, I now discover. If you enable Click-To-Move, you still don’t get rid of the endless error messages during combat, but your idiot does now fix most of them herself. She still says “It’s too far away!” when told to attack a distant target, but now she actually moves in range and does it. Ditto for usable items and talkable NPCs. It’s also handy for making long journeys with single clicks, without having to hold anything down or risking going too far if you, er, alt-tab away. Which I have a tendency to do a lot. In fact:

Update: Okay, the preceding paragraph is also an update, but this is why I’m really updating: tonight I…

Dressed up as a tree!

Seduced a crab!

Rode around on a big old elephant!

If they just took out the 80% of quests that are utter dross, it’d be a fantastic game. I still don’t have a proper pet yet, just a feeble cat I befriended, and christened Clawgasm. I’m torn between a better cat, a big ostrich, a small and rubbish crab, or holding out for something stranger. I’m leaning towards the small and rubbish crab.

First Screenshots Of Introversion’s Next Game

Introversion have just blown the lid off their previously mysterious next project Subversion. From these shocking new shots and Chris’s revealing vision for the game, it’s clear that it will be a single and multiplayer office espionage sim in which you bring down a multinational corporation from the inside, using information warfare and optionally working together with your friends via the game’s rich social networking features. It will score 87 or 88 percent and be released at 9am GMT on the 5th of September, 2008.

Woo

I was shamefully unable to leverage my super-VIP insider access to get access to a Wii before last week, when Nintendo sent a free one to more or less every magazine in the office except us. I played the one they sent to our kids’ mags with one of their staffers, a non-gamer, and was beaten resoundingly. That alone seemed to vindicate the Nintendo agenda here: she won her first point against the AI in Wii Sports tennis, and it’s hard to think of a game on any other platform that a non-gamer could succeed at so immediately.

But that intuitiveness doesn’t quite last. When the novelty of waving something around rather than mashing buttons wore off, neither of us were clear on how our avatar’s movements related to our own. Frequently they’d do the exact opposite of the real-world motion. Having played on Tim’s a lot more now that it’s officially out in the UK, I still don’t think it entirely works.

Last night was just six people messing around, which is about as casual as gaming gets. But even in that environment at least half of us kept getting stuck in situations where the game thought we were doing the opposite of what we really were, and screwed up the shot. Personally my problem with these situations was that I didn’t know how to avoid them: it usually lost track of me when I was moving very quickly, but if I tried slowing down so it could keep up, it didn’t register what I was doing as movement at all. In the end I found myself creeping the controller slowly back to where my avatar was holding it, slowly enough that the game didn’t know I was doing it, then pulling it back to where I wanted it at a Wii-friendly speed. In other words, I spent more time thinking about the control mechanism than I would have with a mouse-driven golf sim.

We did have a fantastic doubles match of tennis, and for a while I really enjoyed golf, but in both cases it was when I treated it as an abstract game rather than the real sport that it started to make sense. I started doing really well in tennis when I finally accepted that the game couldn’t care less which way I swing the racket, only when I swing it. I have a feeling each mini-game has an abstraction like this that I need to learn before it starts behaving the way I expect it to – in fact perhaps they’re all about timing and speed rather than the actual nature of your movement.

It gets said a lot that you do better when you just play it like the sport and don’t think about the controls, but it never worked out that way for me. I’ve played a lot of golf, I still play a lot of tennis, and I know how balls behave. Most of the time Wii Sports is close enough to attribute the difference to lag or ineptness on my part, but for one in five shots it ignores your movement completely or does the exact opposite of you. And the only way I can avoid that happening is by forgetting about the real action and doing what I know the game will register.

That can be great fun, but it’s not what I thought the point was. And when we’re getting our parents or spouses into gaming, we shouldn’t ever have to start an explaination with “It’s really just about…” That’s what they already think games are, fancy graphics hiding simple timing challenges. I wish their introduction to our world could be with something artful, sophisticated or profound, something that shows games as worlds more than toys.

I think there are going to be some incredible games on the Wii, but now I think they’re not going to be very skill-based. Now I want to play games that relish in how satisfying the motions are – because they are – rather than demanding a level of performance from you that forces you to strip away the illusion and work out what the game’s really measuring: timing or speed alone rather than the direction and arc of your movements. Ironically I think I’m going to enjoy the single-player games more than the multiplayer ones, because multiplayer is always going to be about who can best grok the system. In fact the thing I keep thinking about is a Half-Life 2 port – sucking up and firing things out with the gravity gun would be five times more satisfying if it was done with a grabbing and a punching gesture than it is with two mouse-clicks.

Just ‘Cause

I’ve just declassified my Just Cause shots, since the game is long out. The plot of the game is that the CIA want to overthrow the government of this island nation to destabilise the area and allow them to put their ruler of choice into power. Their modus operandi for this is to drop you, from a plane. They figure you’ll take it from there. You literally do – you control that skydive, and everything from that point on, and you’re basically incredible.

I’m riding a weaponless civilian jet-ski along a winding river with three gunboats following me, three helicopter gunships slamming missiles into the water all around, and the military about to dispatch fighter jets to take me down. I have a grappling hook. And these guys are so, so screwed.

In a minute or two everything is a flaming wreck except the best helicopter, which I am flying, at an altitude of five inches, in pursuit of a police boat that’s arrived to investigate the carnage. I pull up, jump from the cockpit to the boat, and kick the cop out of it as the chopper doubles backwards and crashes upside-down, blades-first into a group of troops lining the coast to get a shot at me, and I zoom off into the open ocean. This is normal for a Tuesday.

Spoiler Test

I’m hoping you can’t read this in RSS readers without hovering over it.

Supreme Commander

Another trailer of this has just been released, mixing some new game footage with an interview with Chris Taylor. Taylor’s one of those virtuoso game designers: all zeal and vision; and it’s always a pleasure to hear him talk. He has Quentin Tarrantino’s characteristic spluttering urgency in trying to describe all the cool things he wants to tell you about as quickly as he’s thinking of them. I got an absolutely wonderful but almost entirely useless interview with him at a party in Beverly Hills a few weeks before E3, in which he spent around half the time trying to explain the hydraulics of the system by which the leader of the Cybrans – a brain in a jar – could move around his tank of preservative by thought alone. I guess a brain in a jar does everything by thought alone. But it was as hard as ever not to share his enthusiasm.

The other reason you should watch this is that I’m still convinced it’s going to be the best thing ever. Chris says it’s hard to go back to limited-zoom RTS’s after being able to back all the way up to see the full map in SupCom – he’s putting it lightly. I’ve had a headache (manifested in my middle finger) from banging my cranium against that glass ceiling ever since first seeing the game. I’m a particular fan of the long-game, in general – I play out every important phase of DEFCON in real-time, much to the ennui of my opponents, and I’m always straining against the interface of a game to put my plans into action. That’s been most of the challenge of the RTS for a long time – synchronising assaults, tending to the progress of your base and telling it what to build next, exploring the map click-by-click with your forward groups. All three of those things can be defined from moment one here, which is a brave move. What if those were the fun? DEFCON succeeds by doing the opposite – automating less, forcing you be a frontline general by doing everything yourself. But SupCom’s usability enhancements are doing something equally appealing: promoting you. A Supreme Commander cares not for caretaking work. The interface between you and the game world is now a lieutenant in your army: you tell it what you need doing, and it takes care of the particulars. It flatters you somewhat by assuming you have higher things on your mind, grander schemes.

I came late to Total Annihilation, only playing it properly when it was already ancient. What’s almost as striking as its brilliance is how little it has influenced since – the RTS took nothing from its sublime formula, ignored every innovation except its least interesting one: 3D terrain. Playing it now is like uncovering an alien artifact that fell to Earth long ago – you can’t ignore how old it is, but that doesn’t explain how it can be so far in advance of everything we’ve done so far.

A Weak Russian Sunset

It’s Sunday night, but I’m on holiday! I am spared that awful Sunday night feeling, somehow so much worse than Monday morning, when I realise that I actually like my job. I wasted the first two days of my holiday sleeping ten hours a night to recover from my three-week binge of sub-five-hour nights and an inescapable drowning feeling. The only upside of that sorry cycle is that I get the wholly wonderful song Feather By Feather stuck in my head, by the increasingly wonderful Smog, largely thanks to the gallingly wonderful opening verse:

You spend half of the morning
Just trying to wake up,
Half the evening
Just trying to calm down.

The reason I’m telling you of all people this is that losing an irreplacable chunk of the next day – particularly in winter – gives things a weird, sad atmosphere. I’m waking up to weak yellow sunsets, a beautiful but incredibly bleak light that seemed to last all day in Moscow. Hang in there a little longer, we’re approaching the point now. There’s a map in Battlefield 2142 set in Minsk, Belarus, and the sky texture captures this exact sight, light and feel magnificently. I find myself loading it up, alone, and flying a futuristic airlift craft to the top of a skyscraper to get out and admire the view. It’s built for forty-eight players, but the testers have stopped playing so there are no multiplayer games going on. Not that I’d want gunfire spoiling the mood.

By divine coincidence I only just this week realised how much I like Two Dots On A Map by the Russian Futurists, another gem from the Fluxblog mines. Not only does it have ‘Russian’ in the band name, but it’s also magnificent, majestic, sweeping and unbearably sad. I don’t know what the backing vocals are saying, but the last lines are:

If we knew we were dying,
Is this how we’d leave things?

I choose to hear “If we knew we were” as implying that we are, but aren’t facing it. Which is true, and awful.

I actually thought this mopey wistfulness might be a sign of age, but I just now found a text file on my hard drive describing exactly the same thing, written by me in 2002. So I’m just repeating myself, which is worse.

So… I think I was trying to lead in to the subject of game-music associations, which are brilliant. My favourites:

Half-Life 2 and The Great Destroyer, by Low: two of the best things about planet Earth released at the same time – it was a good November. To this day I’ve never actually listened to Low while playing Half-Life 2, because I like Half-Life 2’s in-game music, but I alternated between the two so reliably that the connection forged nonetheless, and now I can’t stop at those weathered, deserted seaside shacks overlooking the glassy sargasso without hearing the exultant Walk Into The Sea, nor whack that childless dangling tyre with a crowbar and not hum a few bars of California. This is another sad one, isn’t it?

System Shock 2 and Cobra And Phases Groop Play Voltage In The Milky Night, by Stereolab: ba-ba b’dow b’dah. Bubbly futuristic electro-pop played over paranoid dystopian futuristic action RPG. I subconsciously reconciled the two by identifying this album’s off-kilter jauntiness with the hollow optimisim of Xerxes’ pre-recorded broadcasts to the long-dead crew of the Von Braun. Good save, subconscious!

Deus Ex and Voodoo Wop, by Clinic: itchy stompy scary medical drone punk played over a nocturnal interactive conspiracy theory? Well, they’re both uneasy, inaccessible and dark.

Hitman: Blood Money and Deep Cuts, by The Knife: sheer coincidence, I assure you, that I got into these at the same time and that the last screenshot I posted of Hitman was of cutting someone deeply with a knife. There’s no connection between music and game beyond the violent overtones – The Knife aren’t even that sinister, a lot of the songs are upbeat or simmeringly sexy.

Yeah, so they’re a little sinister.

I Am About To Play One Of These Games

Battlefield 2142 Demo: Yes, I have the full version, and yes, thank you for noticing, I am the very model of a futuristic Major General, with forty unlocks to his name and medals alphabetical (G&S FTW, S60 FTLOL). But they’ve shut down the review servers now, and so I must play with the great unwashed on the terribly unreliable demo servers. Often, the great unwashed shoot me repeatedly in the face, inexplicably disregarding my rank.

Still, I have been mostly holding my own. Battlefield is only fun when you have some success, and one morning this week I destroyed three Titans, got two gold and one silver medal and cut four soldiers’ dog-tags before breakfast. That is the start to a good day. 2142 is also a great way to stay up – win or lose, the sheer concentration of adrenaline in my system from this game makes fatigue seem a distant and absurd concept. Sometimes that adrenaline is causing me to break my mouse in frustration, or splutter in an unmanly high-pitched voice at the injustice of it all. Counter-intuitively this is not the sign of a bad game – it comes up a lot when I’m playing a bad game, but watch closely for the moment shortly after, when it happens again and I just sigh irritatedly. That’s the sign of a bad game. In Battlefield 2 and 2142, my searing, spastic, apoplectic rage never subsides. I always care because I always believe in it, and it’s always “FUCK!” instead of “Oh fuck it then.” That, as N fans will attest, is the sign of a good game.

DEFCON: It’s out! It’s selling! People love it! I cruelly ignore this when reviewing their games, but I have an enormous fondness for Introversion. It’s mainly because of Darwinia. People would sometimes ask me, of that, “Yeah, but is it really good, or do you just like it because it’s indie?” It is really good. It’s one of the ten best games ever made. It’s special in some ways that even Half-Life 2, Deus Ex, and Oblivion are not – it has a coherence of vision, a richness of imagination, a warmth of some kind it’s hard to articulate. Those aren’t the most important things about a game, or it would be better than The Big Three, but it has these things which they do not. More than anything, it couldn’t have been made by anyone else. So I am pleased that everyone is finding DEFCON as much fun as I did, and that they are obeying the Must Buy award I gave it. Even if I am sort of hoping they make something more like Darwinia next.

Until quite recently I was quite good at DEFCON. My first public game with five strangers went appallingly, and I’d just decided I’d been rubbish all along when I noticed that it was fifteen minutes past the end of my lunchbreak and I had won by a staggering margin. Then I tried Diplomacy. In Diplomacy, all the nations of the world start in the same alliance, and the action only starts when one betrays it, or the rest vote to kick him out. I am not good at Diplomacy. I should play the regular mode again now to see if coming dead-last as the strongest territory in the game has ruined my confidence to the extent that my early-game bravado will lack the conviction it needs to convince the other players that I’m an idiot and don’t need to be attacked because I’ve probably spent all my nukes anyway and surely won’t NUKE YOU HARD IN THE CAPITOL the second your silos hit launch mode.

Company Of Heroes: I know, rationally, that this will be very good. I have it right here. It got 94%. I love Relic, I think Dawn Of War is my favourite RTS. And yet that little silver quicklaunch icon never gets any more tempting. I’ve even played enough of Company – at a press event in Hollywood and on this very machine for a few minutes one morning (morning gaming is a habit) – to know that I love it. But oh God, do I really want to go back to World War II? I’ve fought every miserable minute of that wretched struggle from every conceivable angle, and I want to forget it almost as badly as the people who lived through it. This isn’t ennui, it’s shellshock. If I put Company off long enough, maybe they’ll make Dawn Of War 2 with all the stuff that makes it great? I’ve heard it’s similar to Dawn, but to me they couldn’t be more different: one is set in the most exciting universe the human mind has ever dreamed up, the other is set in the most miserable time and place in human history.

UT2004: I suddenly realised why Half-Life 2 Deathmatch was the only multiplayer game I did well in. I liked it. So I played it. You actually improve at something if you do it a lot. So I went back to the other one I liked, UT2004, and played that a lot. And lo! I could beat Adept bots. In fact, I started doing the thing you often see arch villains do: have my minions attack me in absurdly unfair fights, me outnumbered sixteen to one, and see if – okay, to show them – I could take them all on. If you add in the Bullet Time and Ninja Rope mutators, you can crank up the odds to even more absurd levels, and be even more awesome. I call this mode Arch-Villain Arena, and the ability to mess with UT to create things like this is one of the reasons I love it so much. There’s a common mathematical misconception that less is more – I’ve done two modules in advanced number theory, and I can tell you first hand that more is much more than less. In fact, if you research the etymology of the word to the extent that I have, you find that its roots are closely tied to those of ‘more’ itself.

Hitman: Blood Money: I almost feel I’ve talked enough about this, but I’ll just say that the scope for macabre finesse in this game is narcotic.

So: Which? I was hoping writing briefly about all the amazing games on offer right now would somehow clarify the most appealing option, but I still have no idea. Maybe I’ll just watch TV.

Bad News

For some reason the gaming news media have attempted to evolve from scratch, rather than taking any cues from the way actual news is reported. Stranger, the natural-selection process for which sites become popular seems to be horribly, horribly broken. Thanks partly to RSS and partly to free-and-easy link-without-reading incest, the headline has become the only important thing about a story. There’s a huge chunk of readers, myself included, who click links to news stories without knowing which site they’re going to until they get there. For that reason, the site’s reputation and integrity is irrelevant – all you know before clicking is the name of the story, and the more outlandish and unlikely it is the more you want to see how they justify saying something so patently untrue.

It’s getting pretty ridiculous. Right now, the most-clicked news story in the most-read game news aggregator, which pulls together the content of 186 news sites, is called “Rumor: WiiD Coming Next Year?” It’s a piece on Kotaku decrying this image as fake, since it clearly looks like a DVD player and Nintendo have announced the Wii won’t have one:

“The lesson here,” chides Brian Crecente, “is to check your rumors before you start creating fake images to pass around.”

Is it… is it a DVD player that straps to your face, Brian? Do you push the DVDs into your eyes to watch them? Is Wii-D a phononym for DVD that just misses out a letter or two? Because that thing, fake as it is, is quite openly a 3D stereoscopic headset. It would be bizarre enough if you were just picking headlines in order to state that they weren’t true in the body copy, but even the fake image you’ve posted isn’t suggesting the claim in your headline. You’ve just made something up, then insulted it, then reported it as a rumour, and backed it up with a forged image that you haven’t even looked at. A rumour is called a ‘false rumour’ if you know it isn’t true, and if you yourself made it up, the word for that is ‘lying’. That could be a useful new prefix for a lot of your stories, actually. And it probably wouldn’t stop people clicking on them.

I’m sure there was a time when Kotaku was the only offender. At time of writing the latest story on Joystiq is “Ridiculous “black 360″ with ridiculously cute cat”:

It’s the reporter’s cat. Could this be the best story since they broke the news that if one number is bigger than the other, then the smaller number is smaller than the larger one, all else being equal? The story here, again, is that their own headline is inaccurate, this is not a black X-Box 360 retail unit.

“This “black 360″ crap is really getting silly. That’s a test kit that my cute-ass cat is pwning. Nothing more.” Great. What am I doing here again?

At least Joystiq have the decency to be exasperated by their own mendacity, I suppose. To be fair, they do link another photo of the same type of unit posted on cousin-site Engadget, ruthlessly exposing the truth behind the lie! Except that the Engadget post they’re talking about, which they don’t link (but do hotlink the image from), is also one explaining that the image is really of a test kit.

“Can we move on now?” the writer sighs. Let’s see: you first posted this story on June the 11th, 2005. The outlook isn’t good.

That’s the other mind-numbing thing about gaming news: the zeitgeist is amnesiac. A major story becomes a major story again three months later, when everyone forgets that it ever happened. Again just using today as an example, and I apologise to Tom because this is not his fault, Eurogamer have the news that there will be X-Box 360 exclusive episodes for GTA IV. At least this story is true. I know because I was at the Microsoft pre-E3 conference when they announced it in May. I also know because I read it on Eurogamer the next day.

Blood Money And Sex

Update 2016-03-01: Since this post still comes up occasionally, I’ve edited it to be a bit less dickish.

The women in Hitman: Blood Money are grotesquely over-sexualised, which is not unusual for a videogame, but I think the reason for it might be. Blood Money’s vision of the world is stylised to let us see it through the eyes of the hitman: a sociopathic clone completely disconnected from human nature. To make someone see the world the way your character does, make the world the way the character sees it. Continued

James 1.0

I was meaning to shoe-horn the old version of James into this new template one day, but it has long been clear that I never will. Instead, I’m just uploading it and linking it. I think most of the post titles are bookmarks, so individual bits of its are theoretically linkable, but we’ll see.

For those who know only this new, shiny James, the original version was all one page, rather gloomy-looking, and at 70,000 words the longest document I’ve ever written. It starts shortly after I moved into my last flat, a few months before I started working for PC Gamer, and ends at the time Mark Sutherns left the mag. I may reappropriate some of its content to flesh out the Games section here, which has never really made a lot of sense.

Should I Hit The Weak Spot For Massive Damage Now?

Well, there drains my enthusiasm for the Wii. The footage of the actual games for it is deflating. Okay, those games were not handpicked to be ones I might like, but what kills me is that Red Whatever is clearly the sword-fighting game hinted at by that first Revolution teaser. And it looks simplistic, abstracted, toothless, phoned-in. I’d hoped the elegance of the controller would allow for more elegant games, but I think I missed Nintendo’s point. It’s just about making it intuitive, not about making it more precise or adding a dimension. In fact, the various reticules the motion sensor controls in those games lurch around just like a thumbstick. One was blasty and repetitive, one was basic and limited, and one looked like Virtua freaking Cop.

Still, I’m optimistic about the vegetable-chopping game.

Paris Laptop Consciousness Drip

John didn’t come on this trip because it was a day, a little more in fact, for a page, which is presumably less than he could otherwise earn. This trip is to Paris, to see the World Of Warcraft expansion The Burning Crusade. The choice is easier for me: Paris, or office with terrible vending machine, the pay is the same (though not as much as for a page of freelance work, I might add). I suggested that he should come, because it was Paris, but couldn’t come up with a more articulate reason than that, and also the exact arrangements weren’t worked out.

The exact arrangements turned out to be great. The Eurostar’s at 7.30am tomorrow, so I as a Bathican am being put up in a hotel in London for the night. I failed pretty miserably to get to London in time to do anything really, and even my lame plan of going yuppie and blogging from a Starbucks on Belvedere street were foiled by closing times. Instead I’m typing this offline (the Rock Extreme laptop I’m reviewing is picking up the Thames Online wireless network, but not well enough to get net) on a bench next to a hairy old black guy playing very lonely saxophone. I call this yuppohemian.

The hotel is the County Hall Marriott, which is on the Thames, next to the London Eye and Big Ben, and is pretty difficult to believe. I actually kind of laughed when I walked into my room. Hang on, the tour guide lecturing the old Americans on the bench behind me has just told them no-one in England is named Mary because a famous one burnt so many consonants. I think he’s remembering his history and quite a lot else wrong. Okay, now the busker has wondered off sadly, quietly missing out on whatever I was half-planning to give him on my way back to the hotel. Should I pay in advance the next time I pick a bench based on the jazz? No.

I have just cracked my knuckles for the last time, perhaps ever. I will likely crack them again within the minute. I am trying to avoid it, though, on discovering just how many people it annoys and to what extent. It seems a strange thing to be annoyed by – I think it’s perceived as a conscious action, but in fact it’s as involuntary as yawning and far harder to resist. I can’t say I know what the negative side-effects of stopping woudld be, though, so I’m launching an investiagtion. I’m going cold turkey on knuckle crack. God damn it I nearly did it right then. I need a cigarette.

The whole thing – the hotel, this is – is some kind of cylinder built into an enormous courtyard within the same building as the London Eye ticket office. I’m getting the cylinder shape from the corridors – once you get onto your floor, they arc round in a huge circle. My room is vast, the bed has ten pillows, and the window is aimed at the sunset over the Thames with willful precision, igniting the whole thing in orange as soon as I opened the curtains. I am so thirsty. I’ve just discovered the tree I’m sitting under is full of blue lightbulbs. Is this the sort of thing I habitually don’t notice?

Breakfast at 6.30 tomorrow. I feel like I should have something fried to take advantage of it being free, but I also feel like I should never eat anything again. As flattering as the lowlight of the hotel bathroom is, it doesn’t disguise that my new bad habit of eating lunch every day has now begun to counteract my good habit of cycling up a formidable hill on the way home from work. I think the dude who just walked past saying “There are worse places to watch porn” was talking about me.

There are worse places to write. It’s properly night now, and windy with it, but so warm that even my T-shirt feels superfluous. I’m next to a streetlamp engulfed in a swaying tree whose leaves glow as they wave at the light, and the effect is something you wouldn’t see in Oblivion on this laptop, because you pretty much have to disable Canopy Shadows if you want a decent framerate at this things insane native resolution. Ooh, so nearly got through this trip without a Real World Graphics joke. It’s become a tradition now. Dammit! I have cracked. It feels… bad, not doing it. A vague and nameless badness. If I had to give it a name I would probably called it Arthritating, but I would also probably think about it a bit longer so it’s hard to say for sure that that’s what I’d go for, or even if it would be on the shortlist.

I sometimes miss the start of conversations. I sometimes ask people what they’re talking about, as politely as possible, but if I can I just join in not knowing what we’re talking about. The other journalist on this press trip was talking about someone’s gaming habits, specifically exploring game worlds like Far Cry, and I love mountain climbing in the places you’re not supposed to be able to get to in Far Cry. She was saying that he, who’s name might be Dan from what little I overheard of the start, likes to take the hang glider as far as possible, and use it to soar to strange places. Me too! “Who’s this?” “My dad.” Ah, Terry Pratchett then. This is the next day now. I charged my laptop on the Eurostar on the way back, and have enough juice for a few words on the night train to Bath. I’ll have to cycle with this ponderous bastard up Watery Lane, the sharp ascent back to my house, a lofty realm of such good digital reception that one nearby estate is called Freeview Road.

It turns out I’ve met Rhianna Pratchett three times, but didn’t recognise her the second time (hair colour change?), and I think I thought she was a voice actress from the way she was talking about a game’s dialogue. This time, I totally recognised her from the last time, but since I didn’t know who she was last time that wasn’t an awful lot of help. Incredibly, I managed to surmise that this person had, too, worked for Nevrax on Saga Of Ryzom and wrote for PC Zone without connecting her identity with the other very similar-looking person of whom both these things were true. They kind of cottoned on to one another in my head a while later, far too late for me to admit my confusion without embarrassment. Luckily, one of my super-powers is the ability to go from a position of astounding ignorance to perfect understanding without any external reaction at all. The cure for cancer could dawn on me without elevating an eyebrow.

Have you ever seen an orc bored? That’s not a joke set-up. Actually it could be: it’s enThralling. Anyway, that’s what I saw today. The guy wandered mopily between the chambers of the cellar at this event and couldn’t muster a snarl when photographed. I prescribe emancipation.

This Next Test Is Impossible

I’d like to pretend I’m all nonchalant about Portal, because we’ve all played its predecessor Narbacular Drop to death, and knew a Source version was coming. Or that the trailer was old hat, since Graham procured it from Valve a few days before release. Instead, I’m still watching this thing an average of five times a day. The bit I love, apart from every line of the gorgeously wonky synthetic voice-over, is the trick the player pulls in the fast montage of whacked-out nutsoness, just before the plummet through the infinite loop before the end. And it took me a long time to work out what he was doing.

Here’s the setup. The player needs to get to the X, a lower platform that’s too far for him to jump. I think he takes a rather unnecessarily complicated route, but we’ll assume some hidden rules prevent him from doing it the obvious way. He’s about to cast two portals, the first at 1 and the second at 2.

He casts 1 first, close to the platform he wants to reach, then throws himself off and casts 2 beneath him as he falls. The reason for casting 2 after jumping, as near as I can tell, is that it’s easier to know where you’re going to land once you’re in the air. Also it looks more rock.

He plummets through 2, shooting him up through 1 with all the velocity his fall has given him.

At the apex of his climb, he turns to face the place he came from – 0 – and opens a new portal there – 3. Since he’s using right mouse rather than left, this new portal replaces 2, rather than the 1 he’s just come out of.

Here we’re looking at the ground – he’s falling back toward the portal he just shot up out of, 1, and through it he can see the same view as from his starting point 0, but upside-down – note the X is now on the ceiling.

His downward velocity is translated into lateral velocity because the portals are perpendicular, and he’s flung all the way across the chasm – automatically spinning in mid-air to realign himself with gravity…

…to land on his feet at the destination. Bravo, test subject!

“At the enrichment centre, we believe a highly motivated test subject can carry out rather complex tasks while enduring the most intense pain.”