TOM FRANCIS
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Trust Me With Your Ears: Volume Three

A regular feature in which I ask you to listen to a sound file with absolutely no idea what it’s going to be. This one should be interesting – for some people one part of it is going to be very obvious, for some the other part is going to be very obvious, a few will immediately recognise both, and a few will have no idea about either.

As ever, listen before reading any comments if you don’t want it spoiled, and speculate away if you have an idea.

Plan B Is Complete

Thirty-five hours of play, six hundred and fifty billion people dead, sixteen game-years passed, fifteen thousand words written, a month and ten days in the uploading, and it is done.

The game did right by me again, generating a story worth writing about, creating drama, and saving the toughest problem – and hence my most obtuse solution – till the end. The final clash really did last exactly seven turns, too, letting me add a Half-Life 2 reference to the Star Wars, Star Trek, Babylon 5, Iain M Banks, Futurama, Douglas Adams, Eddie Izzard, Team Fortress 2 and Penny Arcade references.

The first thing I wanted to do after finishing that preposterous game was to play a nice and small one – just a couple of races, a dozen or so stars, only a few billion dead, no hard feelings. Playing on the Immense scale is like a mental gymnasium: there’s really no limit to how much there is to think about or how hard you want to go at it, except your own willingness to work your brain muscles out. Playing on a small scale after that, I felt like my ears were still ringing from the data noise of the galactic apocalypse.

It was kind of nice.

Multiwinia Mathematics

Here’s an interesting stat: if you play the 49MB demo of Multiwinia, you’re more likely to buy the game than you are after any other Introversion demo.

Here’s a slightly sad one: you probably haven’t. The game’s gone weirdly unnoticed, despite being great. Alarmingly few people are trying the demo in the first place, according to Chris, so the fact that it’s brilliant isn’t counting for much.

It’s a simple strategy game that unfolds in five or ten minutes, depending on the map, and you play it against bots or other people. I’ve found that I like the bots: they fall for my ploys, they don’t gang up on me as much as humans, but they still have me worried throughout, and occasionally win the day.

The fundmantals are about groups of stick men being spewed out of capturable spawn points at regular intervals. But while there’s plenty of strategy in how many of those you direct where, most of the spectacular insanity that makes the game compelling comes from a completely different source.

Crate drops are random in timing, placement and content, but contain powerful weirdness. You can summon the nuclear subs from DEFCON, the horrible digital ant hills from Darwinia, a flamethrower turret, or a Cannon Fodder deathsquad. You can also unwittingly unleash a race of Evilinians, a fractal forest, or a gigantic UFO from the future.

And it’s so pretty you’ll think it’s Christmas.

Here’s a nice stat: Google Analytics tells me that James readers are 800% cooler than the general internet populace. That means a good percentage of people reading this have tried the demo and bought the game. So I leave this as an exercise for the reader: if you’ve got it, played it and liked it, say so somewhere public.

My Script For A Team Fortress 2 Short About The Spy

To commemorate my 100th hour playing as him, and since he’s clearly next in Valve’s update schedule, it seemed appropriate to take a swing at a Meet The Spy script. Continued

Clear Screen

Impressed, astounded, I stare at the black screen for eleven minutes, then admiringly reach for the power button to reboot.

Too good for the links bar everyone ignores on the right (it has Google Ninjas if you click the title!), Chris Livingston’s Clear Sky review goes deep.

The illustration is my own work.

Trust Me With Your Ears: Volume Two

A regular feature in which I ask you to listen to a sound file with absolutely no idea what it’s going to be. Sometimes, after listening, you still won’t have any idea. Other times it’ll be obvious.

This was inspired partly by trying to clear out my downloads folder – I shoved all the unknown MP3s onto my player and listened to them on my way into work, never having any idea what kind of thing was coming next, only that I had for some reason deemed it download-worthy. It took me a long time to remember what the hell this was, and I still have no idea where I got it.

Retro Team Fortress 2

James commenter Mr. Brit comments on 1Fort to point to Ubercharged.net’s coverage of mrfredman’s remake of Team Fortress 2 in significantly fewer colours, pixels and audio fidelity. It touches my soul inappropriately.

Details and download.

Sounds Like The Spy Update Is Next

The latest post on the TF2 blog has nothing more specific than “a bunch of exciting changes coming down the pipe for the next class update,” but the title of the post is:

Robin also jests about facestabs coming to Left 4 Dead, and generally I get the feeling they know how annoyed people are about the Spy’s erratic backstab detection. “Exciting changes” sounds like something other than just unlocks (which are more ‘additions’), so my bet is that one way or another, they’ll address the issue.

The prospect fills me with dread. The Spy class is where I live, and my home is about to be redesigned and twelve thousand strangers invited in. However much you trust the decorators, it’s a hard notion to embrace.

On the other hand, I’m a lunchtime or two away from 100 hours in those black gloves, so perhaps the timing would be good for a break. But Valve, I hope you know your ideas have to be at least as good as Doctor Disaster’s Sentry Spraypaint detailed towards the tail end of the comments here.

Either way, I think I have to post c) now.

Status Report

Gone dark lately because a) I have a lot to organise, b) I have a lot to play, c) the next thing I was going to post I’m not sure I should post, and d) the thing after that would be about Spore again, and quite big. So here’s something quick and self-indulgent: stats!

• The seven feeds to which I am the only current subscriber on Google Reader (update! Cross-checked with Graham and Google Reader gives slightly different subscriber figures to different people. Nice one, Google!):

  del.icio.us/gonnas (Graham’s public bookmarks – seldom updated, but always worthwhile)

  Upcoming releases for last.fm user Pentadact (Soundamus – much-needed idea, but get cluttered with so many re-releases and embarrassing people I only listened to that one time that I might unsubscribe)

  James Comments (also three times more active than any other feed I’m subscribed to)

  roBurky (fairly infrequent, but all good stuff so far)

  1Fort Screenshot Gallery (I think more of Chris Livingston’s army of fans would be subscribed to his screenshots if they were aware it was possible)

  Comments on your photos (because Flickr’s homepage says “NEW comments!” even when I read them a week ago)

  Zeno’s London (my cousin’s blog, a literary agent and a great writer. It was great while it lasted, but he recently procreated so all content will likely be replaced with baby photos from now on)

• Among James readers – the only demographic I have stats on – Chrome is close to overtaking Internet Explorer. Already more people use it than Opera and Safari put together. Meanwhile, Firefox is as dominant among James readers as IE is among the internet at large: a huge 70% share.
   
• Eight people read James on their iPhones. One person reads it on his PS3. I applaud him.
   
• By a very narrow margin, most people reading this sentence have never been here before. ‘Sup?
   
• I have forty-three nearly-finished posts in my drafts folder.
   
• We’re coming up to three thousand comments. It’s hard for me to contemplate that without part of my brain prolapsing.

Field Studies 6: The PC Gamer Sporecast

Update: I’m a complete fucking idiot. The image that was the whole freaking point of this post was still set to Private on my Flickr account, so I’m guessing no-one saw it. Here goes:

The PC Gamer Sporecast

If you’re playing Spore this weekend, I made a thing you can subscribe to to get awesome stuff showing up in your game. Sporecasts are hand-picked collections of content, and they’ll take priority over random stuff when Spore is populating the galaxy.

I don’t really gain anything from people subscribing to this – if it were fame, love and comments I were after, I’ve already got those by making a pathetic toaster as my first ever building.

Sporecasts are just a way for uncreatives like me to feel like they’re contributing to the Spore community. Unfortunately the tool for making them is terrible right now, and flat-out refuses to acknowledge the existence of most buildings, vehicles and spacecraft, so I’ll have to add some of my favourites of those later. This is also why the vast majority of Sporecasts out there are just three or four shit monsters.

Not in the PC Gamer Sporecast, or any Sporecast, because Spore’s Sporecaster sucks.

ZomBuster’s behatted Antlion is in there, and I ran into him at the Space stage yesterday. I struck up a trade route with their race, but then one of my allies – the moustache bananas – started invading Antlion worlds. Naturally, their whole race had to die. I roped an Antlion ship into helping me – they’re nasty black Piranhas in my game – and went on a rapid bombing run to systematically exterminate every city on every planet in their empire. They surrendered pretty early on – I’m playing as the Stompwings, who achieved Galactic God status long ago – but I kept on bombing. I’m not sure if I mentioned, but I really like bombing.

Tip: get the Shield module for your ship as early as possible. It’s not some shitty 20% defense for 10 seconds, it renders you completely invulnerable for several minutes, enough to lay waste to an entire planet.

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.

Plan B Chapter One Is Complete

LaZodiac asked if I’d update here when a new entry of my game diary for Galactic Civilizations 2 goes up. They’re going up every weekday these days, so that might flood James somewhat, but the Days do group loosely into chapters. I’ve just reached the end of the first of those, so now’s a good time to start if you haven’t already. If you’ve already read it all in the book, a) you are attractive, and b) it now has a Digg button, perhaps you’d care to swing by and click it?

On a similarly autoprostitutional note, I have a reminder here for the four people who intended to vote for me in the Games Media Awards and forgot to actually do so. It just says, “Do it do it do it do it!” I think it’s written in blood. At this stage you should vote for me even if you actively dislike my writing, because all the other candidates were killed in a freak sporkstorm and the only other nominees are now Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe and Pol Pot.

The reason I bring this up now, apart from that surprisingly under-reported tragedy, is that I just realised today that I forgot to vote for myself.

Field Studies 5: My Spore Review

After some dillying, my Spore review for PC Gamer UK went up today. I went at it with more or less the opposite mindset to most of the reviewers I’ve read. Not:

“Okay, this is supposed to be a big deal, but does it really provide a long-term challenge as a serious game?”

But:

“Ooh, what’s this?”

I didn’t give it a special license to not be a game, in fact I’m pretty hard on the ways in which it fails as one, but I bore with it as much as any other game that isn’t trying to scratch the normal itches. It seems mad to me to compare it to Civ, Diablo, Warcraft or any other Platonic form of the genres it borrows, because it’s so obviously not about those mechanics. The point of comparison, if you really had to make one, would be Second Life. And it fares rather well.

We have a little piece of page furniture in PC Gamer reviews that is widely resented among the writers, and often a pain to do: the Thumbnail Review. I thought Spore would be a particularly daunting one to summarise in a few words, but it turned out to fit easily:

“Simplified and misbalanced, but a jaw-dropping safari through the human imagination.”

I knew some mags and sites would damn it with the mild praise of a score in the seventies – in fact I thought more would than have. But to me, anything under ninety percent seems criminal and absurd. How could you possibly suggest this experience is optional, or merely decent? It is unprecedented, wild, hilarious and compulsory.

A lot of people have the game now, so footage is cheap. But here are a couple of things not many people are likely to have yet:

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

Update: it’s out? Thanks Major Tom.

Update: impressions below.

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.

Heroes Of Medicine

I usually play a class to whom Medics are little more than helpless witnesses to my crimes. But now that Valve have successfully bribed me to play more Heavy, I have a newfound appreciation for the power of a good physician. I’m not a talented Heavy, but any time one of these chaps stuck with me, it was over for the entire enemy team. We never lost.

So while it is not in a simple Heavy’s power to grant a medical degree, I can thank you by taking screenshots that make you look awesome. And with a hearty YOU DID WELL.

[PCG] TimTim is a Kritzer, and responsible for my first proper Uberkritz combo. We only killed a few people during it, we three, but the sight so terrified the enemy that they huddled into their spawn room. A further five of them were cut down there after the charge wore off, thanks largely to the high crit chance our recent massacre had given Natascha.

[PCG] GrahamGraham and I stormed back and forth so rapidly on Badwater Basin one lunchtime that the 12-strong enemy team seemed to be immaterial. For one round we never left the cart or died, breaking my all-time points record and dominating many.

roBurkyroBurky is a combat Medic, which means if he ever does run off to pursue some meandering foe, you can relax in the knowledge that he can work a dark magic with that Blutsauger and resolve the situation faster than if you gave waddling chase yourself.

Donkey For PresidentI don’t know who this chap is, but he chose to stick with me for more than one round. This tends to be the secret to Heavy-Medic dominance – waiting for each other when you spawn. If your respawn cycles get out of sync, it’s rare to reunite because of the abundance of needy injured and juicy minigun targets scattered all over the map. WE MAKE GOOD TEAM.

Lack_26James regular Lack is also ein Kritzkrieger, a profession that’s become markedly more potent since the charge time was significantly reduced. I was spewing sparkleslugs frequently enough that Supreme Soviet, for being Ubered 50 times, was one of the first Heavy achievements I earned.

My Sandvich

My chewy friend doesn’t really help me survive situations that would otherwise kill me, he just saves the time it takes to trundle over to a medkit or wait for a small one to respawn. It probably annoys Medics, but I’ve found it effective to chomp him while being healed if I’m seriously injured, since the restoration rate stacks with the relatively slow post-damage heal of the Medigun.

His main virtue, however, is that he replaces the shotgun. Technically this is a disadvantage, but it makes it so abundantly clear that the class should never have had one in the first place. Valve were so nearly fearless in making the classes utterly distinct, common shotguns were their only timid choice. The Heavy’s much more interesting to play when he has no instant-fire mid-range weaponry, and only his fists as a backup weapon.

Post-script: I think I may have fixed the CPU overload errors that have been screwing with James intermittently recently, with a little help from Bluehost. If they’ve now stopped, the problem was the spectacular size of my comment spam folder. If you have a notion of how much disk space raw text takes up, you’ll understand my full meaning when I say that Spam Karma had caught seventy megabytes of robo-comments. I hadn’t told it to delete old ones entirely, so every time any php script queries the comments SQL table – well, my logs state that one query yesterday afternoon took 1,014 seconds to complete.

If they persist: fuck.