TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

I’m Not Allowed To Do This

But if you fancy spending a lazy Sunday morning burning through a bunch of custom Portal maps, I’ve put all the ones I’ve found in the right subfolders and zipped them up, so you can just extract it to your Portal folder and type “map ” at the console to browse through them. I don’t even remotely have permission to do that and it’s actually pretty immoral, so I’ll probably take it down Monday. EDIT: Taken down now, attack of conscience. Most of them came from here or here.

If you also want to cut out the hassle of playing shitty, misorganized maps, try station1 and ren_test2 first.

station1 is really nicely made, and doesn’t feel the need to be hopelessly difficult in order to show you how awesome its author must be at the game. It’s got its own visual style, which is nice, but the completely black material it introduces sometimes makes it hard to make out shapes and distances. The top of the central column, for example, in the middle of that screenshot – is it a platform or hole with a thick rim? My favourite thing about it is that it shows you your goal as soon as you spawn, so the adventure to achieve it feels very neatly self-contained, and it’s really satisfying to get back to where you started and finally get through that door.

ren_test2 is difficult. It’s more complicated and intellectually demanding than any of Portal’s Advanced maps, or getting Gold in every Least Portals Challenge. But it’s also geniunely ingenious. I won’t spoil the centrepiece of the map, but suffice to say there’s a switch that does something really, really cool when you press it. It’s simultaneously the smallest and the longest map I’ve played so far, simply because I had to sit there with a cup of tea and think the living shit out of it before I knew what to do. Even then, my absurdly convoluted solution had to go through several iterations before it worked, and I’ll admit that phase is actually just frustrating. It revolves around a bouncing energy orb, and I fucking hate those things. But most of the time and most of the fun is spent just staring at this one room, working out how to fix it.

If you do play it, know that the first switch you press unlocks that door you can see. It took me a long time to figure that out, because in Portal there’s not normally a concept of ‘locked’ and ‘unlocked’, only closed and open – and the switch doesn’t open the door.

Update! Ha! I must admit I was feeling slightly envious of the ren_test2 guy for thinking up such a great central mechanic for his level before me. I had an idea for something similar, but unless it comes off spectacularly it’s probably not as clever. Some consolation, then, to discover that he’s actually a level designer for a little company called Bethesda Softworks.

One of the reasons I’m playing everything anyone makes for Portal is that I am, very intermittently, very slowly and very ineptly, working on my own Portal map. It’s one room with one puzzle at the moment, and even that may be scrapped to fit into the bigger picture. So far all my puzzle ideas are things that require special coding or advanced mapping skills, so now I’m trying to come up with some more basic stuff I can make to learn the engine first.

I’m on the lookout for people to test this, if I actually get anywhere. If you just want to play it, don’t sign up – it’ll be better if you wait till it’s done. But if you want to help me out, drop me an e-mail and I’ll cc you on the next build.

I Was Here

San Francisco looked strange from the plane, like a building-farm. I was back there to see a very different studio this time, though I can’t talk about that yet, and also managed to do different stuff with my spare time. Last trip Steve Gaynor, who I only knew vaguely online, was nice enough to meet up for lunch, and this time 2D Boy joined me for a fancy tea. I very much like developers who are able to perceive journalists as humans rather than organs of the industry, even when perhaps not all of them warrant the status.

With a little luck and a lot of generosity, I was also able to hitch a lift with the guys who made Lugaru down to the birthday party of the guy who made Gish, alongside the guy who made Spelunky, there to sip Guinness with one of the aforementioned guys who made World of Goo, the guy who made Bridge Builder, and the guy who made Braid. There was a dangerous concentration of genius in the room, so true to my promise to pocket my journalist hat, I was careful not to ask any good questions of any of them. We played the X-Men arcade game instead.

I Read A Thirty-Eight Page Comic About Google’s Browser

Google Chrome is based on the notion of turning each tab into a separate instance of your browser, so if one crashes or is busy, it doesn’t have to affect the others. And so you can see which ones are hogging memory, CPU or bandwidth. It’s also about running JavaScript a lot faster, searching within sites by typing their name first, keeping popups within the tab that opened them, using web-pages as apps by getting rid of the browser framing, and surfing privately in a mode that saves no data or history to your PC. It comes out tomorrow.

I don’t think there are a lot of people out there riotously unhappy with Firefox – in fact, less than 20% of them are unhappy enough with IE to bother with Firefox. But this makes a good case that existing browsers can’t fully adapt to the way we’re using the net without a ground-up replumbing.

Whether and when I switch to it will depend on how customisable it gets. The point of Firefox to me is not tabs, stability or security, it’s the Extensions system. Life without Adblock isn’t worth living. I refuse point-blank to register for anything without InFormEnter to reduce the process to mouse-clicks. And I reach for ImageZoom like a myopic fumbles for their specs.

Impressions: it is blue and fast.

Here’s how fast:

It is fast enough that it loads pages with ads faster than Firefox loads them without ads, and I think that may be the point. And I have just spotted that its spellchecker considers “Firefox” to be an error. Yes, friends, this is the first James post written from Google’s browser. Update: its spellchecker also considers ‘Google’ and ‘spellchecker’ to be errors.

It’s possible it won’t ever be designed for extensions the way Firefox is, because something like Adblock becoming mainstream is probably the single biggest threat to Google’s business. I wouldn’t be surprised if Google would rather Firefox never overtook Internet Explorer.

Other things that may be The Point:

The most striking visual eccentricity of Chrome is that it has no title bar, it rejects Windows convention, monopolises your entire screen, and refuses to label itself as a mere application. Apparently the computers in the Googleplex lobby are running Chrome alone: no start bar or trace of an operating system beneath it.

They may have little or no interest in becoming the de facto browser. Firefox loyalists in the comments here – and Mozilla themselves – are smug in the knowledge that Firefox will eventually do anything Chrome can do that’s worth doing. Google have a huge vested interest in raising the general speed at which browsers can run applications: if Internet Explorer defends its user base by becoming fast enough to support a more powerful version of Google Docs, Google win yet again.

Something that is probably not The Point:

Every few minutes, Google Chrome grinds my PC to a halt for a few seconds, then lets it run for a few seconds, then grinds it to a halt again. Chrome Task Manager insists no part of it is using any CPU at all, but Windows Task Manager shows one Chrome process hogging 25-50% of my CPU during the chugging. Thing has a way to go.

I Propose A Less Serious Vote

When, inevitably, I become a super-villain (I find myself buying a lot of black clothing with high collars lately), this is how it’ll end. When my swarm of Gogglesharks march on Beijing, when my jetpack drops me gently in the thick of the clash of Tian’anman Square, bullets pinging off my power-armour, the sky black with my aerial drones, my image burned in phosphor over that of Chairman Mao, China’s Segway-surfing police force shredded like crispy duck.

Someone – probably called John or Jack – will urgently command their technically minded sidekick to Google me, + “fatal weaknesses”, snapping that “There’s got to be something!” The sidekick, who will have spiky hair, a differently coloured shortsleeve outside his longsleeve and a name like ‘Skeeter’, will find this post.
“I think I’ve got it! Routing it through the local police band… now!” And he’ll hit this play button:

The Gogglesharks will stop, mid-chomp, and point their eyeball arms quizzically to me. It will rain deactivated silver drones. Everything will stop dead for three minutes and twenty-seven seconds, forty hectares of carnage shakily frozen like the closing credits of a macabre sixties sitcom, the only sound the opening track from the latest Mates of State album Re-Arrange Us, the groans of the dying and the slightly squeaky wheel of a broken Segway whirring away. When it finishes, I will hang my head slightly and mutter “Okay, I’ll be good.”

So begins music week on James! I’ve got a ridiculous amount of new stuff I’m listening to at the moment, so I’m picking a track from each a day and posting it here until I get bored or you get bored or I forget or the week ends.

And just so you know, Jack and Skeeter, I foresaw this.

I Played Through The Crysis Demo Holding A Surprised Korean Guy

There’s no achievement for this, but as a nod to the two and a half thousand people who came for the gnome post and stayed, I gave it a go. It’s much, much harder.

This is Surprised Korean Guy in his natural habitat, roaming the beaches for things to find surprising.

An invisible dude came out of nowhere and picked him up by the windpipe. He found this pretty surprising.

I was surprised at how high I could dial up the pixel shaders, specular mapping and high dynamic range lighting without the framerate dropping unplayably low on my fairly old PC. If Surprised Korean Guy was surprised by this, it didn’t show over his normal level of surprisedness.

Oh God, they’re firing at me! They’ve gone crazy! They’re going to hit their surprised comrade!

Hang on Surprised Korean Guy, I’m going to have to hold you behind this tree for a sec while I save you from these psychos.

I’ve been told, too late, that Half-Life 2’s garden gnome can be jammed between the back of the seats and the roof. After extensive, noisy experimentation, I have concluded that Suprised Korean Guy cannot safely be jammed in any part of this car.

Oh God, he’s blacking out. Maybe I can set him down on this bed for a second, and he’ll be surprised all over again when I pick him up?

Oh right, Strength mode.

Er, this one must be from a different album, I don’t know how that got in there.

I think I actually got through about five Surprised Korean Guys in the end, mostly because their friends love to shoot them, and you can’t duck or go invisible while you’re carrying one. But in a strange way his ceaselessly alarmed face is a more comforting presence than the gnome’s smug grin. Anyway, five things about Crysis!

1. Some of the graphics settings eat your framerate. Post-processing isn’t a particularly good thing anyway, so lots of free frames per second turning that off. Shaders is the big one, both in terms of performance cost and visual fidelity. No use having it high if you can’t afford high-res textures, but having both on high is worth turning everything else down for – it’s truly beautiful. Shadows are the other big hit, and look virtually the same on Medium as on High. Objects is the one you want to crank up to minimise the pop-up of rocks and the like as you approach them.

2. Pretty much all the DirectX 10 stuff works in DirectX 9 under XP. Crysis was the only thing that seemed like it might justify Vista and DX10, but its exclusivity turns out to be just another big ball of sellotape and lies. Just renaming the Very High configuration to High means it’s no longer locked off in the Options when playing under DirectX 9, and lo, it works fine and looks amazing and, by most accounts, runs better than it does under DirectX 10. The tweak is easy to do, but it’s even easier to just download the modded config files and dump them in your Crysis/Game/Config folder.

This was the one game that truly was designed for DX10 and Vista from the ground up, famously so, and even it can’t offer a single compelling benefit of either. It’d be funny, if millions of people hadn’t paid four hundred dollars for it.

On a more positive note:

3. Holy shit this is incredibly good. Despite the above screenshots, I’ve spent very little time shooting trees and throwing tyres at chickens. I was expecting Crysis to be a messy playground, but it’s far too good a stealth shooter to spend your time just screwing around. With only one silenced weapon and a couple of night levels, Far Cry was still one of the best stealth shooters ever. This time they’ve had the sense to take that aspect and run with it, and the result is like the game of Predator.

I also expected it to be a little drab – we’ve seen some very washed out dense jungle scenes that just look a bit too realistic. But this level, at least, is gorgeously exotic and exciting. It has such a profound sense of place, I just want to hang out in these coastal shacks and swim to sandy little islands, climb mountains and admire the view. Just like Far Cry at the time, Crysis is a free holiday.

4. Play on Delta difficulty. Regardless of your skill level. It’s a fun game on Normal, but on Delta it’s truly extraordinary. It’s not about nerfing all the damage you do, they’ve actually done difficulty modes right. There’s no crosshair so you have to use iron sights aiming, enemies speak entirely in Korean so you can’t comprehend their tactics talk, there’s no grenade warning or enemy glow, the AI is more perceptive and dramatically more accurate, and health regen in Armour is slowed from a sprint to a crawl. Oh, and bullets kill you. They really, really kill you.

So the game becomes entirely about engineering the situation, stalking your prey in Cloak mode, waiting for one man to stray far enough from the pack that you can abduct him and toss him quietly off a cliff. It actually requires less twitch skill than playing normally, because you simply can’t win uneven firefights. You’re forced to strategise around them, and the interestingness of your options goes up dramatically as a result.

Going back to Normal afterwards is just embarrassing – the enemies are like comedy B-movie goons, the red glow on enemies who’ve shot you is like putting stabilisiers on a bicycle, and Armour mode might as well be called Invulnerability. Worst of all, it encourages just hanging back and taking pot-shots at long range, which completely misses the point of the game and all the really fun stuff.

Plus, Craig tells me that in the game’s config files this is referred to as ‘Bauer’ mode. Are you really going to play on something other than Bauer Mode?

5. It’s nothing like Far Cry.

More shots up here.

I Played Through Left 4 Dead 2 Holding A Goddamn Gnome

In the Dark Carnival campaign of Left 4 Dead 2, you can win a garden gnome at the fairground near the start – and there’s an achievement for carrying it all the way to the end. It is, in fact, the same goddamn gnome I carried through Episode goddamn Two, for the same goddamn reason: there was an achievement for it.

By the end of that ordeal, I prayed I’d never set eyes on his (“stupid fucking”) face again – but here he is, and here I am, and here we go.

The gnome in his prize box: you have to score over 750 points in a shooting gallery game to win him, which isn’t actually easy in the middle of a zombie apocalypse.

When I finally did win him, I discovered that he has something of a violent side:

Smokers want him:

He doesn’t like to look at zombie guts:

He’s afraid of rollercoasters:

He’s calm under pressure:

And while he doesn’t see dead people – or indeed anything – dead people see him:

It took several runs to even get to the finale. Twice I ran out of time in real life, and when I did have an evening free, I got so caught up apologising for accidentally setting everyone on fire that I played through a whole level before realising that I’d lost him.

Once I got into a few games that worked, with people willing to help, we found that Rochelle hates him:

Ellis worries about him:

Coach is serious about him:

And Nick doesn’t fucking trust him:

But through it all, the gnome is serene, the gnome is beatiffic, the gnome is- is the gnome strangling Rochelle?

It looks like the gnome is strangling Rochelle.

She seemed to like carrying him even less after that, but she did it anyway.

It eventually became apparent that my quest was under some kind of curse. I got into so many bad games that I eventually settled for playing with one quiet European stranger, who played virtually the entire campaign using only the katana, and showed no interest in the gnome. His businesslike dispatching of the slavering hordes seemed to say “I have more important things to do.”

He was good, though, and at last we made it to the finale.

(In case anyone mistakes this for a screenshot that doesn’t involve a gnome, he’s in the bottom right.)

In all my cursing of attempts cut short or failed through distraction, I never really considered that I might just not be able to do it. But Quimby and I immediately hit real problems with the final battle.

On our best run, we lasted until the rescue helicopter arrived, with enough time to spare for me to truly panic: where’s the gnome? I’d left him in the mosh pit, but all I saw were corpses. Dying I could live with, but succeeding? Without the gnome? Unthinkable.

Suddenly, over voice chat, the previously silent, previously gnome indifferent Quimby stated in an unplacable accent: “I have the gernome!”

He did, but he fell. And though I snatched the gernome from his body, a Tank barreled into me on my last hitpoint, and I lay dying, alone, inches from the helicopter, that ceramic asshole beaming obliviously by my side.

We needed help.

Happily, that’s about when freelancer Will Porter showed up:

Along with Craig:

And even the gnome seemed unusually pleased.

The fight that followed was still tonguey.

Sometimes crushy.

Sometimes not far off an actual nightmare.

But after three or four attempts, and an appallingly timed crash, we made it. I climbed aboard the chopper, gnome tightly in arms, and watched guiltily as the other three struggled to survive. I couldn’t provide covering fire with the gnome in hand, and I wasn’t about to try setting him down inside a moving helicopter with no doors after coming all this way. Craig made it, as did late joiner Dark Wolf, but Will was too fat or crazy to escape the fray.

Sorry lady, the class where your head stays intact is all booked up.

We might have something in economy though.

My prize. It’s over. I’m exhausted. The added stake of all the work it takes to get the gnome to that final battle charges it with a terrifying pressure, which triggers a wildly inappropriate surge of adrenaline. The very real possibility of losing him in the chaos at the last minute is horrible to contemplate.

Now that I’m finally done with it, I just want to relax. But I have a nasty feeling that chipped-hatted twat is going to drop from the skybox ten minutes into Episode Three, and I’ll be forced by my own idiocy to go through this dark ritual once again.

I Played Through Episode Two Holding A Goddamn Gnome

Halfway through reviewing Half-Life 2: Episode Two for PC Gamer about a month ago, Valve PR Doug Lombardi asks me if I know about the gnome achievement.

“No?”
“Did you find the gnome near the start?”
“Yeah.”
“You have to put him in the rocket before it launches.”
“But isn’t that right near the end of the game?”
“Yeah.”
“Doesn’t that mean you have to-”
“Yeah.”
“Oh I’m so doing that.”

A month or so later, I have. Continued

I No Longer Feel I Have To Be James Dean

Since John Peel died, it’s gone back to being a weird exprience to hear something on the radio and like it. But Five Years’ Time has been forcefully cheering up this miserable British weekend. It’s by Noah And The Whale, who I am hesitant to look up. It works perfectly this once, but I’m pretty sure you can’t get more twee than this without a special permit.

I Made A Taskbar Timer To Keep An Eye On Wasted Time

I definitely waste more of my time than I’d like. Mostly on Twitter, but also just with this mysterious business of general internetting. I’ll sometimes catch myself switching between 7 open browser tabs, each containing something I want or need to do, and doing none of it. And none of the productivity plug-ins or apps I’ve found do quite what I want, because my requirements are incredibly specific.

Update: Tom’s Timer 5 is now available, with cumulative tracking and stretch reminders! Continued

I Made A Physical Version Of Word Game Letterpress

For my parents’ birthdays, I made a physical version of the excellent iOS word game Letterpress. This makes me a terrible pirate, I hope no-one minds. I made this video to explain it to them.

I Like That You Can Slow Down

Great new music is being released rapidly and randomly. Let me review some of it and give you some tracks.

Continued

I Know The Commander Because He’s My Pal

Over at the PCG blog again, a Mr Half Loaf 2 sent this in, and I spent the remaining ten minutes of my lunch insensible with hysterics. And it’s four minutes long.

This whole clip just incapacitates me every time. The timing is perfect, Bob Page and Harley Filben both take on magnificently surreal new roles. Walton Simons is still kind of a dick. It even ends beautifully.

There’s a Malkavian mod for Deus Ex that messes with the dialogue similarly, but it errs on the side of purely surreal which makes it slightly less funny to me. Still, it looks like it turns Deus Ex into one of the most hilariously bizarre adventure games ever. Manderly is a pigeon, and the drinks machine is Agent Orange.

The ominous silence for a while here was because I’m tinkering with a dark, lengthy and ancient post from my drafts folder that I’ll hopefully put up this week.

I Eat What I Slaughter

Hot Chip, who sound like a fifties phrase for expressing pleasure at your current situation, are kind of exciting. I’m listening to a song from their latest right now, one I’ve listened to maybe five times before, and I just caught myself flicking through my Firefox tabs to see if one was auto-playing something else underneath because it sounds so completely unhinged.

Oh wait, actually one of them was: I forgot I fired up Last.fm to see if this same track was on there in full, and it is. Every post a rollercoaster!

The best I can do for a genre is glitch pop – it’s bouncy and infectious, but frequently revolves around some catastrophic audio error that ought to grate but doesn’t. This track, Shake A Fist, just outright breaks halfway through, then explodes, then spends the next few minutes trying to pick the original melody back up out of the shrapnel. Once it does, the shakey reassembly of that simple tune layered over the aftershock of its bizarre phase shift is weirdly comforting, like an old friend returned.

This is not a musical convention I’m familiar with, so as I say, it’s kind of exciting. Even in the fairly straightfoward opening track, the key word of the chorus “weather” is chopped into progressively looping chunks, so his voice stutters the length of the word like a backfiring hatchback on a traintrack. His voice is kind of whimpy, too, so it jars compellingly with the gusty things they do with it.

I get to give you quite a lot to go on if you’re interested in Made In The Dark (which sounds to me like a polite way of saying “ugly”), because although Fluxblog no longer carries Shake A Fist (though his write-up is still great), Last.fm has it to stream, I’ve uploaded Bendable Poseable (my favourite, above), and someone on YouTube has already done precisely what I was going to do: recorded himself Audiosurfing the opening track, Out At The Pictures. “The Pictures” is olde English for cinema.

He’s playing it on a harder mode than I would dare and doing a lot better than I would, but he still screws it up twice. I don’t really like the harder modes of Audiosurf – the stress of getting overwhelmed interrupts your attunement to the song, which for me is the whole point. So I’m glad this dude beat me to it. Thank you, er, LethaLImpuLse? It seems like every time I have to address a YouTube poster by name on James these days I have to precede it with a nervous hesitation.

I Don’t Know About You Folks

I’m ill, in the way where nothing seems real. I’m not sure what to do about it, because I was already doing everything I normally do to recover from illness when I became ill – in fact, the former followed from the latter so directly that it’s hard not to assume they’re causally connected. I’m getting more sleep than at any point in the last five years, getting more than my RDA of every vitamin known to man, eating actual food more than twice a day, and keeping warm at all times – not hard because it’s unseasonably warm anyway. I’m at a loss, body. What do you want from me?

I hate getting more than seven hours’ sleep, too. Apart from giving up a chunk of precious consciousness-time, and waking up more tired than if I’d had four hours, my brain spends all its REM-sleep time trying to think of the worst possible things that could happen, then informing me very vividly that they all have. Last night I got cancer, and had huge, dark lesions all over my face, then I was attacked by spiders. Thanks, brain! That was a fun nine hours! The physical tortures are actually the highlights: the rest of the time my subconscious invents new mental and emotional traumas, and these are much, much less enjoyable than being repeatedly stabbed then flayed.

Being ill doesn’t make the nightmares any worse, but the groggy detachment from reailty makes them harder to shake in the land of the conscious. It wasn’t until I dressed this morning and caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror that I realised I wasn’t mutilated and terminally ill. Anyway, all that is by way of explaining why this has lain dormant all week; I don’t like wasting your brainspace with this stuff and it’s hard to concentrate on anything else. Instead, now that I’ve done so anyway, I’ll append a less gloomy note to compensate.

(A Man’s Gotta Know His Limitations) Briggs, from the new Robyn Hitchcock album, is wonderful, and would be even if I didn’t have a thing for short-titled songs with massive parentheses. It talks about “Riding in [Briggs’] car in San Fransisco” and later addresses a girl called Mel, all of which sounded very specific and not the kind of thing you make up for rhymes, to me, so I decided the song must have an interesting origin in someone Hitchcock knew. I was a imagining a couple, Briggs and Mel, the former hot-tempered but well-meaning, the latter confused and isolated by his erratic behaviour. It turns out I may have been over-romanticising a little: Briggs is the villain in Magnum Force, a Dirty Harry film Hitchcock kept catching half of on TV.

He doesn’t particularly like the film, it’s presumably just the kind of thing that creeps into your head when song-writing. “A man’s gotta know his limitations” is Clint Eastwood’s catch-phrase in it, and the next line in the song “Or else he will just explode” refers to the final scene, in which Briggs – a corrupt official – is killed by a car-bomb Eastwood planted. For some reason Clint then utters his catch-phrase, although it’s not clear which limitation Briggs should have been aware of: inability to detect car-bombs? I haven’t seen the film, so I still don’t know who Mel is. Other songs inspired by films the songwriter doesn’t really care one way or the other about: one of Miss Black America’s, I think it’s Infinite Chinese Box. Apparently the guy was watching a film, then suddenly decided to stop and write a song about how he thought it was going to end, instead of watching it to find out. I applaud this kind of behaviour.

I Am Here

Hence the quietness.