TOM FRANCIS
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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.”

Team Fortress 2, Episode Two And Portal

The team must have been working on this for a long time, they’ve kept it very secret, and they must have been nervous as hell about whether people would go for a cartoon look to a class-based tactical shooter. They must now be beaming, because virtually everyone seems to love it. The only whispers of dissent I’ve heard are people who love it saying “I don’t know why anyone has a problem with it, TF1 was never realistic.” I was a sceptic before they released this shot, but I see now that it is wonderful. I love their slim chunkiness, their sharp curves, even shading, their characterful but not charicatured expressions. And how cool the Spy:

I still don’t quite understand why they’re giving it to us free with Episode Two, along with Portal – a fantastic-sounding Source-engine successor to indie gem Narbacular Drop (the best game name since Grim Fandango). My best theory so far is that it’s just to generate good will toward episodic gaming and Steam, and partially to ensure a large user-base for TF2. Maybe they were hedging their bets against the cartoon look putting people off, and ensuring that people would end up owning it whether they liked it or not. Of course, they did a similar thing with Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike Source. We’ll never know exactly how well that did, because they won’t release Steam sales figures, but I have to assume it exceeded what they would have expected for Half-Life 2 alone. Otherwise they wouldn’t be repeating the formula with TF2 and Episode 2.

Forgetting analysis, the ripe bunch of gaming fruit that your slim twenty-dollar bill is going to bag you now looks utterly irresistable. A hefty and exotic chunk of the most finely crafted single-player game ever created; a bold reimagining of one of the all-time greatest multiplayer games using a graphical style never seen in a game before; and a completely fresh and mind-fryingly inventive experimental game, put through the mighty Valve polishing machine. Maybe that’s the point – just to put together something wonderful and profoundly worth the money to everyone. Sometimes if I feel I’ve done something well, I spend an extra half an hour to make it extraordinary, just to see how someone reacts. To hear CEO Gabe Newell talk, the faceless collective grin of an impressed gaming public – expressed through poorly spelt forum posts – is what he lives and breathes for.

Episode Three Conjecture

Suffering from blogger’s paralysis, wanting to talk about five different things but having no preference as to which, I’ll just stick with the theme. This is a bit silly, of course, Episode Two being six months off, but Dabs mentioned something I’d forgotten, and I looked it up, and he’s right. Raising The Bar, the superb coffee-table book about Half-Life 2’s development, mentions that at one point a large section of the game was set in an arctic base, called Weather Control. Examining a scan of a map sketch, it even mentions a ‘Judith at Weather Control’ scene.

I don’t think we’re going there in Episode Two – it’s a whole new country and Episode Two is already introducing a very large and very different environment, but we’ve been shown it now, and I really buy the idea that they’d finish the trilogy in a very different kind of place. Also of note are two aspects of Valve’s design philosophy: a) that the player should see where he’s going to end up long before he gets there (mentioned in Raising The Bar), and b) that you don’t show the player something cool then deny him it (mentioned in Gamespot’s The Final Hours Of Half-Life 2, I think). Wherever the climax of Half-Life 2: Episodes, we’ll glimpse it well in advance, and whenever it happens, we will go to Weather Control.

My final, third piece of evidence is one of the most universal tenets of videogame cliché: all expansion packs, however they’re delivered, must take you to a snowy environment.

I’m not sure how far they got with the section when it was going to be a part of Half-Life 2 – the name makes it sound like it served a Combine function like the Air Exchange, which had a lot built around it before it was cut – but there’s a short story by Marc Laidlaw in there written as inspirational material for the section. Sort of like textual concept art. It describes an intense climactic battle between Combine reinforcements who’ve tracked down the main rebel force, a last stand by the latter. Snowstorms and ice explosions. Enticing.

Episode Two Conjecture

So. This is kind of exciting. We don’t get cliffhangers in games usually, certainly not the kind the world can discuss the way we do Lost. I have some theories:

Alyx isn’t dead, obviously – Confirmed!
It’s not that I don’t believe Valve would kill her – I think they will – but they wouldn’t give it away in a trailer. She’s hurt, and I’d guess out of action for pretty much the duration, so no more faux-co-op for a while.

There will be pheropods
I think you’ll have to go into the antlion tunnels seen in the trailer (there are grubs on the walls and ground) in order to defeat a queen antlion, and take her pheropod in order to send all antlions against the Combine, including Guards. So many people loved commanding antlions in Nova Prospekt, and the pheropod’s the only weapon that doesn’t feature in Episode One. Alyx’s presence throughout E1 was a response to the positive feedback about her, and I think they’ll use each episode to go to town on something people loved about Half-Life 2.

There’ll be a vehicle, probably a new one – Confirmed!
Your train is clearly crashing only a short way out of City 17, and the place is blowing up. You’ve got to get out of there fast, and we know from the trailer that you reach Eli and the others at their hideout, well out of the blast radius. No way are you walking. The obvious choice would be the jeep again, but it was a customised one-off vehicle, and there’s no reason it would be around (no-one knew you’d crash there). I’d love to think air, since they’ve done land and sea, but it’s more likely going to be a different wheeled vehicle. My gut says no to the Combine APC – too clunky and too familiar. I also can’t imagine it’ll be a civvie car – not interesting enough. But something…

Odessa Cubbage will return, and betray the rebellion – New entry!
Raising The Bar mentions that Cubbage originally played a bigger role in Half-Life 2, and turned out to be a nasty piece of work. He was also Alyx’s father, which is referenced in a little joke Alyx makes in Episode One. That’s one of three times Cubbage is mentioned in Episode One, which I think is to refresh our memories of that character’s existence in preparation for a reappearence. He’s also an outdoorsy type, and Episode Two is going to be mostly outdoors. That’s science.

And some questions:

Where are the Advisor Pods going?
Not up, seemingly.

What information did the Combine send back to their home world?
We get no clues that I can see as to what that data packet contains, but I would guess it’s something Alyx and co don’t already know – i.e. more than just info on what the rebels are up to.

Where is Judith and what’s she doing there?
She mentions ‘what’s left of the project’ and something about information the Combine might have gathered about it. The fact that she’s in what looks to be a snowy climate implies, to me, that the Vortigaunt’s teleportation is the slow kind, like the one that skipped a week during HL2. This time you were ported a shorter distance and the time skipped was probably only six hours or so.

Will we ever meet the Hydra?
It was a City 17 thing, the only time we glimpsed it, and now City 17’s gawn.

Who’s in charge here?
Half-Life 2 made it look like a Combine Advisor was the big boss of the Combine, somewhere far off on an alien world. Episode One makes it look like there are dozens of them, all in the Citadel. It also shows us they have a weird psionic attack – it didn’t do any damage in the Citadel, but perhaps it has another effect. The Advisor pods don’t fly up to space when they eject from the Citadel at the end, they snake off above the ground. The commentary suggests that we’ll be fighting them.

Half-Life 3: Episode 1

We didn’t make hats this time, but I booked the office as late as it goes (22.00), we got some Chinese food in and hung around for the release time, Craig, Graham and I. The worldwide simultaneous online launch is one of my favourite things about the Half-Life experience now, I absolutely love the feeling of a global unwrapping of this insanely exciting present. My office PC hadn’t preloaded it, absurdly, impossibly, maddeningly, so I had to scramble round to Tim’s and try not to look at Craig’s screen as he was first in. I repeatedly shouted “Shut up!” at every gasp and expletive it inspired, and tried to ignore Graham’s reaction as he got to the same bits. After scrambling wildly to install my mouse on Tim’s machine (I wasn’t about to settle for a freaking Microsoft one for something as important as this), I finally got in about fifteen minutes late, and played until Security kicked us out, which was oh-so-perfectly just as I reached the end.

Oh yes, the title – it does say Half-Life 2: Episode One on the title screen, but Gabe Newell consistently refers to this as Half-Life 3: Episode One, and indeed this episodic trilogy as the entirety of Half-Life 3. And I think its important to acknowledge the momentousness of the event – this isn’t a stopgap, this is it.

That beginning: holy shit. I don’t understand the technical bits of how the Source engine has changed, but that sequence so massively exceeds your expectations of how good Half-Life 2 can look that it suddenly feels like something properly new, not just Half-Life 2 deleted scenes. Valve have always been the only people who can make game characters touch each other properly, and the interaction between the Vortigaunts and Alyx at the start is one of the most extraordinary bits of animation I’ve ever seen in a game. All the other most extraordinary bits of animation I’ve ever seen in a game happen in the next five minutes, and most of them are on Dog.

One, of course, is being hugged. I am being hugged, by a game character. This is… nice. Perhaps slightly nicer than it has any right to be, given what it actually is. It’s not the last time the force of Alyx’s emotion surprises you – she is utterly flabergasted by your performance at one point, and is genuinely traumatised at another. All three times it jars you out of the mindset in which she is a friendly combatant, rather than a character. The rest of the advances in AI companionship are fixes rather than features – it took Herculean effort to prevent her from being annoying or a liability, but the result is by definition something you don’t notice.

Episode One’s two potential shortcomings cancel each other out: one, it’s short. Two, it’s still in City 17. Three and a half hours every six months works out to a little over one minute of game per day. I actually found its length satisfying – I did masses in that time, so it felt substantial. But it was helped a lot by the fact that I have spent a lot of freaking time in City 17. It’s the defining feature of the Half-Life games that every section is just slightly longer than the human mind can comfortably endure – you’re always a little exhausted after any given section, and it’s designed that way because that’s the threshold past which your brain registers an experience as signifcant. So every Half-Life player remembers Surface Tension intimately, whereas I couldn’t name you or describe a single level of Quake. As ever, it’s just right because it’s just wrong – it’s slightly longer than it was possible for me to enjoy a single setting, so exhaustion set in shortly before it ended, leaving me relieved to be leaving without having suffered for more than a minute or two. More than any other Half-Life location, leaving City 17 is profoundly cathartic. We’ve done, seen and felt so much there that – however wonderful it was – we never want to go back.

Can I Just Say

Before we go any further, that there is not a first time for everything. Some things never happen. That is kind of the point. There is a first time for everything that happens, but the irritating and sophistic catchphrase is generally used to argue against the notion that a given thing may never happen. Some things don’t. There is not a first time for these. They don’t happen. Just to be clear.

Maths Cop 2: The Revengening

I don’t usually do the link-someone-else’s-entry thing, but this is from a blog you probably don’t read, relates to a previous James post, and is easily geeky enough to inspire a response post from me. Venusberg, amused by Grey’s Anatomy’s contrast with its namesake, suggests other possible science-themed series with a keen commercial instinct:

Hooke’s Law: John Hooke is a tough New York detective. To keep the peace, he’s not afraid to stretch the law. Sometimes the strain gets to him… but it’s always proportional to the stress of the job.

I suggest:

Turing’s Test: Alan ‘Jack Johnson’ Turing is a grizzled alcoholic PI in a near-future dystopia. Earth is being taken over by android replicants, but only Alan can tell them from humans. Now he must take his test straight to the top: the President of the United States. Of Robots.

Socrates’ Method: John ‘Jack’ Plato narrates the story of the greatest negotiator who ever lived: Jack ‘John’ Socrates. By a interminable series of increasingly irritating questions, John could talk any hostage-taker, roof-jumper or bomb-wearer out of their intended course of action, and into kicking him in the neck.

Heisenberg’s Principles: Werner ‘Ice’ Heisenberg is a master car thief specialising in locating and obtaining landspeed-record-breaking vehicles for eccentric millionaires. On his last job before retirement to the Bahamas, his best friend (Niels ‘Interesting’ Bohr) turns him in. The arresting officer (Detective ‘Determinist’ Einstein) is derisive of Werner’s maverick methods, but has no choice but to offer him a deal: a dangerous street gang have stolen the five fastest cars in the world, and only Werner can work out where they are. To within (Planck’s constant / 4Ï€) of the standard deviation.

I found Venusberg’s blog when one of my screenshots on Flickr suddenly started getting a lot of hits. I traced them back like some kind of cyber detective, to a Venusberg post questioning the virtue of ragdoll physics when it allows for travesties against man and god such as the one I had created. It was the start of a beautiful friendship.

Waa?

I don’t recall where I was when the first plane crashed into the World Trade Center, but I think I’ll always remember that I was sitting right here in the office when Nintendo renamed the Revolution.

Out Of Office Auto-Blog

I’m in America for a few more days, the end of a week-long press trip with three different companies, to see around fifteen games. Anyway, here are some photos.

Dan above the firey water feature in the LA hotel’s bar.

The X ride at Magic Mountain – the only thing in the world more extreme than a guy jumping out of a helicopter on a skateboard and the skateboard is on fire and the helicopter is exploding maybe.

I spilt my drink, and this guy pulled out that card. It was pretty surreal, but he gave us our own cards to use in the event of further accidents.

Dan and I had been to Santa Monica beach last year too, so we decided to tour it on reclining trikes this year.

A busker – or maybe just a girl playing guitar for fun – being appreciated. Drive-by photography; you don’t get the whole story.

Rollerblades are faster, but I am faster than some regular bikes on one of these. There are no gears, so you have to pedal pretty stupidly.

Mike makes movies of his trips for X-Box World’s coverdisc, but probably doesn’t use much of this footage.

Oblivion Review

The issue of PC Gamer that’s just gone on-sale in the UK is the one with my eight-page review of Oblivion in it, so I’d like to a) encourage you to look at it and go ‘woo!’, and b) explain why it’s structured the way it is, and how it came about. It was a huge honour to be the one to review it, and I’d actually been looking forward to writing it almost as much as getting to play the game itself. But it turned out to be one of the hardest things I’ve ever written, up there with an eight-thousand word philosophy thesis on the morality of killing replicants.

I spent a week in Eton playing the game all day every day, with one other journalist (Ryan from X360 magazine) in the demo room with me. I wrote scraps of the review on a laptop in my hotel room each night, but generally fell asleep before I got much done, or changed my mind about what I’d said within the first five minutes of playing the next day. By the end of the week, I’d written around half the review’s length, none of which made it into the final piece. Cumulative wordcount: 2,500.

Back at the PC Gamer office, I wrote the whole review quickly, but wasn’t sure if I’d talked about all the important things. Graham read it, and suggested that I may have become hung up on the details a little. I re-read it, and I appeared to have written a manual. A step-by-step guide to what Oblivion is and what happens in it is all info I’d find fascinating if I hadn’t played the game, but as a review it was fussy, dry and missed the point. Cumulative wordcount: 6,000.

I’d been wrestling with the decision of which aspects to talk about, resigned to the fact that you couldn’t cover all the important ones in a small book, let alone a magazine article. I’d also been writing up some of the best bits of my adventures as little stories, to go in separate boxes throughout, but it became clear that these were actually making the one essential point. Oblivion is hugely complex and entirely free-form, so you can’t give an impression of what it’s like to play by attempting to describe it. The only way to give a real feel for how rich with possibilities it is, and why that makes it great, is with examples. So they’ve become a chunk of the main text, punctuated by the normal business of reviewing. Cumulative wordcount: 10,500. Final article: 3,943.

Feedback so far has been really good, and much more importantly I’m now officially mentioned on Wikipedia. What I’m really looking forward to is the game finally coming out. Apart from wanting to get back to it, I want to hear what everyone else gets up to when they play.

World Of Lifecraft

Rich pointed me to a post putting forward the concept of Massively Multiplayer Productivity, and I haven’t been able to find anyone who’s actually come up with a formal system for how it would work. The concept is that, in order to give the menial tasks you do in real-life the same addictive quality as the menial tasks in World Of Warcraft, all you need to do is assign experience-point rewards to them. Your To-Do list becomes your Quest Log, and every few thousand points you level yourself up – you have become a superior human being by getting things done.

So all it needs is a fair system of assigning experience points to the different kinds of things life requires you to sort out, and some markers to indicate when you would level up. I suggest:

Quest Type	XP
Making a phone call	250
– that involves persuasion	+250
– to someone you hate	+250
Filling out a form	100
– and posting it	+50
– and losing it	–100
Physical labour	250
– that takes more than half an hour	+250
– that takes more than an hour	+250
Going to an appointment	500
– and resolving a problem while there	+250
– and discovering you are terminally ill	+500
Cleaning a room	500
– including removal of blood stains	+500
Going shopping for groceries	250
Working outside of work	250
– for more than forty-five minutes	+250
– just to get ahead	+250
Doing someone a favour	250
– that takes more than half an hour	+250
– that involves assassination or insurance fraud	+750
Blogging	100
– about World Of Lifecraft	+150

Level-ups are awarded for the following XP amounts:

Progress	XP	Reward
Level 1	500	Consumption of an unhealthy food.
Level 2	1000	Consumption of an expensive and unhealthy food.
Level 3	2000	A frivolous purchase =< £5/$10
Level 4	3500	Home delivery for your next groceries purchase
Level 5	5500	Immediate consumption of eight units of alcohol
Level 6	8000	A frivolous purchase =< £15/$30
Level 7	11000	Moral absolution for one theft – past or future
Level 8	14500	Home delivery for your next narcotics purchase
Level 9	18500	A frivolous purchase =< £50/$100
Level 10	23000	Moral absolution for the contract-killing of one unwanted person

And so on. (If you didn’t spot the pattern, you’re probably not geeky enough to need to turn your life into a MMOG in order to get anything done). Notice that you start at level 0, just to emphasise how worthless you are until you’ve done something.

Well, I’m level one already and I haven’t had breakfast, so I think a bacon sandwich is in order. Any suggestions for more quest types or rewards?

Some News, JC

Seven hours left of the year – another good one, actually. Last year I got a job at PC Gamer, this year I got the job I’d always wanted at PC Gamer. I also got a raise and a house. Did I tell you about the house yet? I’m not allowed to move in until the 12th, but I have a key now:

So I’m counting it as this year. It looks like this:

It was an old man’s house, and he died. It looks very much like an old man’s house inside right now, but we’re going to modernise it heavily. There are dozens of picture hooks which presumably held precious memories and images of loved ones – I’m going to put up framed prints of my favourite screenshots, which is basically the same thing.

The key was a Christmas present. I thought I’d lost my camera for a while, so when I discovered I hadn’t (I refused to look for it for about a month on the grounds that, so long as I hadn’t attempted to find it, I had not in any real sense lost it) I went mad taking photos of everything. It’s hard to get far enough away from normal scenes to make them look interesting (as they are from a plane, for example), so you’ll notice most of my photos are extremely close up instead. This, for example, is a beach at sunset:

Interesting thing I learnt about macro mode over a year ago, then completely forgot until recently: it’s much better if you zoom out, then just put the lens very close. My brain is rubbish.

Recommendations are stronger when you make fewer of them, so for my Stuff Of The Year awards I’m limiting myself to two choices per medium.

Games

1. Battlefield 2. Just before I first set eyes on this, I had to sit through a series of presentations about various console-only games. It was embarassing. I was scared someone from the outside world might peer in and think this was what games were like. When we finally sat down in a lecture theatre and Battlefield 2 popped up on the projector, it was a blissful homecoming to the amazing worlds where I spend my time. Vast, crisp, luscious and magnificently complicated. The social hierarchy of the voice comms system alone is an elegant work of genius. It’s one of those sequels that goes a little too far in improving on the original, and we end up wondering how we ever could have been satisfied with the crude toy that one of the most important games ever made now looks like. Even if you ignore the brilliant, endlessly emotional, ingeniously designed game – and for a long time we did – the fidelity of the world alone makes it extraordinary to be in. The ludicrously thrilling speed and solidity of the jets, the earth-shattering apocalypse of an artillery strike, the exquisite sense of place in every forest, street, mountain and desert. Magnificent.

2. Darwinia. The second-place stigma is misleading, this is the best strategy game ever created – I just have an enormous bias toward first-person games. Ignore if you can the sumptuous style and heart-melting story, what makes my brain explode with delight every time I play Darwinia is the satisfaction of doing almost everything myself. You hold your army together with both hands, controlling your most powerful troops manually while your unpredictable horde of Darwinians flow according to the fluid channels of command you hastily set up for them. It sounds overwhelming, but every task is a game rather than a chore, so everything you’re scrambling to do is fun in itself.

Films

1. Serenity. If you liked Revenge Of The Sith, you should definitely see Serenity. It’s not similar, and I’ve never heard of anyone liking both, but you will I hope break down in tears when you realise the error of your ways. It’s sci-fi your sci-fi-hating friends, girlfriend, mother and luddite cultists will like, because it takes an innovative extra step of actually being good, so it works whether space excites you or not. It excites me a lot. Apart from being witty, emotional, character-driven fiction, Serenity is wonderful epic sci-fi; full of horror, assassins and bureaucracy.

2. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. I so nearly didn’t go and see this, but quickly checked the Onion AV Club’s review, discovered it was a “a noir-inspired L.A. mystery that isn’t afraid to show some satirical teeth” and bolted for the door. It is exactly my kind of thing. It’s endlessly cool, incredibly funny, frequently dark, and genuinely thrilling.

Music

1. In Case We Die (Architecture In Helsinki). The most fun you can have with your ears.

2. Twin Cinema (The New Pornographers). Spoiled slightly for me by having the best tracks – Bleeding Heart Show, Sing Me Spanish Techno and Twin Cinema – released on various MP3 blogs before the album proper was available. Spoil it for yourself too and listen to those.

More random images of Christmas follow. Have fun tonight/last night.

Villainy Like It Oughta Be

That is a Ben And Jerry’s joke.

I’m playing City Of Villains more than anything else lately, and I hate it. Well, no, I just resent it a lot. I don’t know why my fellow Heroes-lovers rate it so highly. After Heroes, I thought Cryptic were prepared to do brave, liberal things to make sure their games captured their themes gloriously. Then when their next theme was, excitingly, the polar opposite of their first, they refused to change anything at all. They just did a search-and-replace operation on the word ‘hero’ for ‘villain’ and charged full-game price for it. It’s not that I didn’t love Heroes, it’s that I still love Heroes, and I can still play it, so what the hell is the point of this new thing?

I’m talking in degrees, of course – there are some small token additions in Villains, there’s one new class, one half-new class and three recycled classes. But it’s not nearly enough, and when Heroes’ instanced missions were already absurdly repetitive, to give you utterly indistinguishable ones in Villains – usually against the exact same villain groups you were fighting in CoH – is criminal. But I’m not here to bitch, I want to explain why this is so disappointing by describing what would have been great.

Classes

The new class in Villains is the Mastermind, who has minions to do his dirty work. Ace. I’m not playing as a Mastermind, though, because the power sets are absurdly limited. In their bizarre attempt to cram the whole rationale of villainy into a single class, they’ve had to make your primary weapon and your minion type part of one power set. In other words, if you want ninjas, you have to use a bow. What the hell? Couldn’t it at least be a ninja-y weapon, like throwing stars? Anyway, clearly all classes should have minions of some type, and clearly you should be able to choose your weapon separately from your minion type, and clearly you should be able to customise your minions’ appearence with the costume editor. In fact, let’s separate minions from class completely – you choose a primary power set similar to the existing ones, then your next choice is what type of minions to have, and all classes can have any type. Here’s what the options would be:

Mob: A steadily increasing gang of lackeys, dumb cannon fodder but nevertheless an intimidating presence. They don’t increase in power by as much as you per level. Each new power is a new lackey, and each lackey has somewhat different abilities, but not necessarily better ones than the last. If one dies, you can res him by activating that ‘power’, but it has a longish recharge time. By max level you could have nine of them. Each time you get one, you get to design his appearence. The default is the same as the last lackey, so you can just make few or no alterations if you like.

Posse: Right from the start, you’ve got three loyal servants. They’re weak to begin with, but every new power is an upgrade to all of them, giving them all a new ability or resistance. You never get more than three, and their abilities are always identical to one another. You design their appearence, but it’s a uniform for all three. You can res one at a time, but the power has a long recharge time.

Henchmen: You have two bodyguards, potentially with different abilities and appearence. Each new power you get is an upgrade to one or the other, alternatingly.

Lieutenant: You just have one trusted right-hand man, but he’s every bit as powerful as you. You even choose a class for him from the same options you had, so he can be designed to compliment your own abilities. Each new power is just a new power in that set.

Twin: You’re one of a pair, so your associate is identical to you in appearence and abilities. Each new power you get for yourself, he gets too. The actual ‘Twin’ powers are ways to help each other out: the ability to resurrect him, for him to resurrect you, synchronised attacks that do more damage than the sum of their parts, linked health, and eventually the ability to switch which one of the two you control. These make up for the fact that, unlike a lieutenant, your twin’s powers don’t compliment your own.

Missions

Again, they had one nice idea and didn’t use it much. Getting missions from the newspaper – carrying out personal vendettas, responding to false stories about yourself, building your rep as a bad guy – is all great. But so futile since none of these missions have any continuity, and the thing they build toward – a bank robbery – is the same each time. So you end up doing Contact missions most of the time, just like Heroes.

Paper missions should be the only ones. You’re not working for anyone, you’re a super-villain, not a grunt. The ability to rob a bank should stay, but you should – and I know this is going to sound a little extreme – get some money for it. As it is, you get a ‘clue’ saying “I scored half a million from that job – not bad for a days work!” No you didn’t. There is no money in Villains. There’s a currency called Infamy, of which you received a tiny amount, but the rest is all in your head.

You should have actual money. Infamy is an equivalent of Heroes’ Influence, which made sense because heroes don’t work for money. Villains do. I should be getting money, especially if I steal a load from a bank. I should also be able to mug innocents by hitting them a few times (I understand if I’m not allowed to properly kill them – it’s a kid-friendly game). Beating up heroes too low level to give me XP should get me money, too. I should want to beat the hell out of more or less everyone I see.

The instances themselves only really need two improvements: a logical random level generator and no missions against villains. At all. Currently ninety percent of all the missions I’ve done have been against villains – many of them against the very villain faction I work for. Which doesn’t feel like betrayal, since most of them attack me on sight in the streets anyway, even on my way back to their boss to be trained to the next level. Idiotic.

Missions against heroes should be a case of beating up cops to get to something to steal it, fending off small groups of powerful (NPC) heroes who enter the instance to stop you, or beating up innocent people to make a scene, baiting a specific hero to come out and be ambushed. Villainous things. Defeating the evil snakes because someone asked me to is a god damn service to society, not a nefarious caper.

That’s why it disappoints me. The reason I’m playing it anyway is that the Always Black forum has a supergroup, and I was never really in one of those for Heroes. And it’s fun, in so far as it resembles Heroes.

FEAR

Wrote this back when it was relevant. I hope enough time has now passed that I can post it without pretensions of currency.

Central to FEAR is this idea of being surrounded by armoured grunts in a classy office, bullet trails streaking in all directions in slow motion, dust and sparks exploding all around, then blowing one of them in half with the shotgun and launching into a flying kick at another while he shouts a slow-mo deepened “Fuck!” They got that exactly right, and it’s one of the all-time top ten essential gaming experiences everyone should have before they die.

But it sometimes feels like they didn’t know what to do around that. Their attempts to deviate from that formula for variety’s sake – excluding the horror sections – are all rather awkward. The extra-tough enemies are dull, the turrets are a chore to destroy, the flying robots are desperately incongruous and almost impossible to defeat stylishly, and the psychic demons that can hurt you and be shot are a catastrophic midjudgement. Instead of being scary and fun to fight, they’re neither – that they’re vulnerable to bullets makes them mundane, and that they zoom mindlessly towards you makes them insultingly poor opponents.

The one exception is the stealth troop type – they’re both genuinely different and great fun. But even that gives rise to a further frustration – they’re horribly under-used. Especially given that they are both scary and fun to fight, and that’s clearly what they wanted from the later levels. Instead, they’re replaced by the aforementioned physical demon things in the last levels, and then and there FEAR drops from one of the best games ever made to merely something with a lot of potential. All other quibbles are barely that – quirks, more like; blemishes in a beautiful skin.

It still feels like a 90% game to me, despite everything, so I shall specify some of the things it does better than anyone else ever before. I hearby give FEAR the following awards:

• Best FPS Combat – a big one, but well-earned.
• Best Enemy ‘Barks’ – for ‘Fuck!’, “Shit!’, “Fuck, shit!”, “Shut the fuck up!” and “No fucking way!”. I honestly never thought I’d have to take this award away from Far Cry’s mercenaries with their twin classics “Yeah yeah!” and “I’m going to shoot you in the face!”
• Best Costume Design – the grunts are all functionally identical, but they sport a range of genuinely stunning uniforms. They’re sleek, they’re formal, they come in tasteful colours (particularly the crimson/white/black one later on) and yet they look like they mean business. Sadly there isn’t a specific credit for costume design in games, since technically they’re not costumes (“These clothes are my skin!” – prize for placing the (mis)quote), but I’m inclined to credit these outfits to John Turner, Senior Character and Weapon artist.
• Best Shotgun – sorry Half-Life 2, but holy shit this is a good shotgun.
• Best AI – I know it has its flaws, but the deciding factor is that these are the only enemies that continually surprise me.
• Best Explosion – and I mean ever. I’m not even restricting this to games. This beats Akira.
• Most Arbitrary Plot Twist – for the one after the credits. “Er, okay.” I’m willing to be corrected on this one – I know there’s a lot of hot competition.
• Best Enemy – for the grunts. If I have to be specific, let’s say one in a blue-grey/white uniform, using a shotgun. Cool, challenging and incredibly satisfying to beat up.
• Best Enemy In A Supporting Role – for the stealth dudes. Creepy, cunning and brilliantly acrobatic.
• The Sands Of Time Award For Worth-Copying Contribution To The Genre – for the melee combat. Take note, everyone: we need melee moves, they need to be powerful and we need to be able to do them without switching away from our regular weapon.