TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

What A Shame

People being a chaotic, belligerent, vicious lot, it’s rare for anything publicly defacable to remain pure. But the comments section for this video is just such an oasis of uniform brilliance, some 238 random people all being genuinely funny rather than trying to stand out or one-up each other. What little rebellion there is among the commenters – the few that add smileys or add incorrect punctuation – is quickly Thumbs-Downed by dilligent voters, and will soon fall below the default viewing threshold.

If you’re signed in to your YouTube account when you click this, by the way, I’d love it if you could help preserve this rare and beautiful social event by contributing, or showing the Smiley Rebels the business end of your virtual thumb. They are a dangerous and subversive splinter faction that must be stopped.

Update: God damn it! I hope the dribbling hicks who just broke this didn’t come from here. Jesus, has that meme ever been funny? Since, like, the nineties? What a shame. We need two more people to thumb the dunces down and they’ll disappear from public view. Can you help?

I just discovered today that the User Reviews for a gallon of Tuscan milk sold by Amazon.com is a similarly superb collaborative work of a straight-faced communal sense of humour. I hope there are loads of these Everyone’s In On It havens dotted around the net. And I hope that some day Andy Baio bags and tags the phenomenon like the Attenboroughesque social-tech naturalist he has become. I leave you a milk review by Buster Foyt:

“This milk worked well when I first got it, but within a few days it wouldn’t hold a charge. I called their customer service department and, I don’t know if it’s in Bangalor or Ireland, but I couldn’t understand a word that they said and they began to scream at me.

“Finally, though, they sent me another one – but that wouldn’t hold a charge, either. I’m beginning to wonder if this is truly meant to be a portable product. I still haven’t been able to retreive my email and the video is murky.

“It’s a bit heavy, too, to wear on your belt. The good news is that it keeps your hip cool during this sultry summer weather – for a while.”

The City That Rarely Enters Sleep Mode

I’m wrapping up this triplet of GTA posts with the one I should have started with: why it’s worth talking about in the first place. I can’t agree with its most frequent criticism – that it’s merely the same game tweaked – because none of the three things that keep bringing me back to it were present in any meaningful sense in its predecessors. Those would be:

Online

Right now I have raw ache in the back of my throat, from laughing. Earlier this evening Tim actually cried. It’s probably the fourth or fifth time three or more of us have piled into the Free Mode map – just GTA sans missions, optionally sans police, and plus de joueurs. And so far it seems like our vocal chords will wear thin before the game mode does.

The objective-based modes are fine, but they’re just fun missions in which you can also do ridiculous stuff. Free mode is based around our own objectives. They don’t have to be particularly well-conceived ones. Tim wanted to know if a bike could jump through the doors of a helicopter. Rob wanted to know how many of us – each with varying Wanted levels – could ride together in a bus. I wondered if we could accurately bail from maximum-altitude helicopters above Central Park and land safely in the lake.

No, all of us, and no. What we did discover was that a helicopter propellor will swat an airbourne moped far enough that, even after the laughter had died down, I was able to truthfully say “Guys, I still haven’t landed.” And that while a bus makes a forceful and hardy getaway vehicle, there’s only so long it can wait for me to fumble with its diabolical automatic door under a monsoon of gunfire and a barrage of unbraking black-and-whites before it really ought to get going. And that, on a breezy day, ensuring your helicopter is geostationary over a large body of water is no guarantee that you’ll land in it when you bail.

New York

Liberty City – this Liberty City – is faithful to New York on a level GTA has never tried before. As well as the structure and detail, it captures the character and subtlety of a real place that games struggle to make up.

New York is my favourite place, and having a digital replica lets me explore it in ways I couldn’t even if I lived there. I don’t like to call these things too soon, but I don’t think I’ll ever actually find myself superbiking through Times Square in a thousand dollar suit. I hope I’ll never have to snipe Union workers down by Pier 45. And though the urge to throw myself off the Empire State enters my mind every time I top it, I can’t imagine it would really be as fun as it was in GTA IV. Doing these things gives me a feel for New York I couldn’t get otherwise, even if I spent significantly more on a trip there than I did on this console. It’s a new, cheap, bloody form of holiday.

So Rockstar can’t take all the credit for its exquisite sense of place, looming scale, gently fading ambience, but we get the full effect. It’s a city you can almost smell. So many different parts of it are beautiful in so many different ways, at so many different times. The runway lights at Francis bleeding blindingly into the mist on a foggy morning, Central Park blushing amber at sundown, rain-slick midtown Manhattan festive with red brake lights reflected in the wet tarmac, Times Square mall-bright in the dead of night, and the lazy, immobilising heat buzzing off the cracked streets of Broker on a dazzling day.

Next to the majesty of the city they built to set it in, GTA’s actual game seems puerile and sad. You could write an epic in this place, it could have a force and resonance we’re not used to. Violence could mean something here, it could be shocking again, and provoke something from us. That’s partly why I can’t join the chorus praising Rockstar’s storytelling; an arbitrary variety-show of charicatures, taking turns to step up on a non-interactive stage to tell a meandering story so apparently slave to the episodic mission structure that it’s impossible to believe in. It’s not that it’s worse than a typical game story – nothing is – it’s just unworthy of this setting.

Euphoria

Traditionally, people in games are acting out pre-recorded animations until they’re killed, whereupon a simple mechanical physics system takes over to simulate how their limp body falls and how it reacts to what it hits on the way down. That means any time a game character collides with something his pre-defined animations didn’t account for, the developers have to decide whether he should fail to react to it at all, or die.

GTA IV is the first major game that can handle the in-between cases. It licenses a piece of witchcraft called Euphoria that can blend physical simulation in with set animations, so that whenever anything hits anyone, they’ll be knocked by it in a physically convincing way, react to it in a humanly convincing way, then return smoothly to one of their normal animations. I have no idea how it works.

Actually, I know almost exactly how it works – anyone who’s thought about this problem for a second since the birth of 3D gaming could tell you how the eventual solution would have to work. The mystery is how the hell it ended up running smoothly on a home console. It’s essentially having to simulate the musculature of the human body in real-time, plug that into a mechanical physiscs system and motion-captured animation, and then make it work on as many interacting bodies as you care to run down in one spree. On a system where some developers won’t use ragdoll because it’s too processor-intensive.

The upshot for the player is the most reactive game I’ve ever seen, and a proper milestone in the progress of game ‘feel’. Both of my other obsessions in this game – our suicidal crash-tests and the intense impression of existing within this city – draw their power from the physicality Euphoria lends to every interaction in the game.

Achievement unlocked: wrote about GTA IV for one thousand words without mentioning the phrases ‘American Dream’, ‘fresh off the boat’, or ‘living breathing city’.

No-One Drove In New York, There Was Too Much Traffic

This one goes out to anyone who ‘cannot wait’. I will help you wait.

Everything that bothers me in GTA IV is a case of the game trying to guess what a I want to do, and failing bizarrely in some really easy cases.

Please look in the direction I am travelling. For a game about cars, you’d think this would have come up. But no, every time I turn a corner, reverse, or stop reversing and drive forwards, I’m left barreling forth blindfold into heavy, cop-ridden traffic. Is it hard to detect which direction I’m travelling? Is it hard to move the camera? Is it unimportant to see what you’re about to drive into? Are cornering, stopping and changing directions quirky edge-cases you hadn’t considered? What is unusual about the way I’m playing that makes this a problem for me?

Please get in the car I am closest to and facing when I press the ‘get in car’ button. This is my cause of death around sixty percent of the time. I’m knocked from my vehicle, I run back to it under a hail of gunfire, and standing in front the door, physically touching the car and facing the drivers seat into which I wish to get, pressing the ‘get in car’ button causes Niko Bellic to turn around 180 degrees, run ten meters across a busy highway, open the door of an ice-cream van, punch the refreshment vendor inside, drag him from his lofty perch and then fall on top of him as the thirtieth bullet he’s taken during this procedure strikes his last functioning organ.

Please target the enemy I am looking directly at when I press the ‘target enemy’ button. Here’s how you can tell which one I mean: if I fired without targeting, which would require me to hold a trigger in some kind of elusive quantum state between off and on, my bullets would hit this guy. That guy. That is the guy that I mean, the guy I am facing and pointing my gun at. And who, by the way, is pointing a gun at me and about to fire, so let’s hustle a little here.

But just to be absolutely clear, I’ll detail some examples of who I do not mean. I do not mean the civilian driving a van in the opposite direction three lanes over. I don’t mean the other gunman fifty feet away and forty degrees to my left, who is completely invisible to me as he has fully concealed himself behind a concrete pillar. I definitely don’t mean the cop, who currently only wants me for a mild traffic misdemeanour and has no intention of firing at me or calling for backup unless I do something utterly, inexcusably, surreally moronic like turn around and shoot him six times in the pancreas instead of defending myself against the armed drug dealer who’s about to murder me.

Please leave cover when I press the ‘leave cover’ button, the ‘jump’ button or attempt to run, as fast as I can, away from cover. This is where I’m stuck right now. A mission where I get to walk freely around a venue before choosing my moment to attack three people within it. Once attacked, they flee.

The first time I got that far, I’d taken cover behind a wall, and urgently needed to abandon my hole-up-and-let-them-come approach for a run-after-them-and-kill-them ploy. My instinct was to move in the direction I wanted to run away from this wall, hammering the sprint button. This caused me to tango stylishly up and down the wall with my back to it, three times.

Thinking remarkably logically for the circumstances, I tried pressing the ‘take cover’ button, which I hoped might have become a ‘leave cover’ button. Niko span round to face a locked door on an adjacent wall and hurled himself at it, rolling impressively and then gluing himself to it with the same adhesive I was already wrestling with.

By this stage three different men were firing on me not two metres away, but I couldn’t fire back because every attempt to leave cover reset my aim to be parallel to the wall I was stuck to. Clearly the Machiavellian club owner had taken the precaution of coating his walls with a sort of fly paper for gangsters; once touched, forever ensared.

After trying the imagined ‘leave cover’ button two more times, thrashing Niko wildly around in his sticky prison, I resorted to the ‘jump’ button. He left cover, faced the wall, and took a giant leap directly into it, sliding nonsensically down its surface and taking a full second to recover to normal stature. I should say ‘at least a full second’, since at that point, yet again, the last healthy centimeter of me was shot off.

Seriously, I’m asking: is there a button to leave cover? Everything I try works when I’ve glued myself to a plain wall in a sleepy street, but in a tight backroom full of gangsters, every button initiates equally unhelpful, time-consuming actions that leave me facing the wrong way or adhered to the wrong thing. Until I find one that doesn’t, I’m never touching the cover system again.

There are other failures, the usual GTA stuff: your moron friend ran out into enemy gunfire and died, mission failed. The cutscene ended with you standing dumbly in the open with four armed drug dealers firing at you, mission failed. You fell slightly behind a fleeing criminal on a straight road with no exits, mission failed. You failed the mission, mission failed and you have to return to your contact, then come back here, then do the three other stages of the mission you’ve already completed successfully three times, then when you complete this part of it using the foreknowledge you gained last time, we’ll suddenly introduce a new arbitrary failure state you couldn’t have prepared for and you’ll have to start again.

But that stuff I can forgive – it’s all about the missions, each of which is finite and most of which are optional. And all could be fixed with a simple ‘skip mission’ option after two failures (or even a cheat – are there any?). The improvements GTA IV makes to the formula more than compensate for the series’ traditional failings, it’s only the infinitely recurring control problems that can’t be ignored. Talking about those improvements would probably help dispel the impression that I loathe the game, but unfortunately I’m out of terrible out-of-focus photos of a low-res screen to punctuate this text, so that’ll have to be another post.

In One Thousand Two Hundred And Ten New York Minutes

The critical adoration of GTA IV has been really interesting to me, because I’m sometimes one of the critical adorers. There’s always this period when half a dozen journos have played the game, the rest of the gaming populace has not, and a war breaks out where the few desperately try to convince the many that it really is as good as we’d all hoped it might be, and the many insist that it is not.

The many, with no actual information to fight with, must use the journalists’ own words against them: “You said there were pop-in and framerate issues, therefore it cannot warrant a ten for graphics!” “You mentioned flaws! How can you give it a perfect score?”

Some of the many are fighting on an entirely different side, a sort of religion for whom the game is a necessarily perfect deity, and all criticism is dangerous lies. When reviewer Rob Taylor mentioned he completed the main storyline in 24 hours, you could almost see the tears well up in a million fanboy eyes as the e-mails stammered: “But I thought it would be at least forty!”

That interview aside, the few remain mostly silent after their opening salvo of reviews. The real assault comes when the game is out, and they become solely responsible for every technical, personal and emergent flaw nine million people experience in this digital playground.

The reason this is particularly interesting this time is that I’m a proper outsider – I never read a preview of GTA IV, only saw one trailer, and had no idea about its key features (Euphoria physics, the mobile phone interface, the new Wanted system) until a few days before release. I wanted to know if coming to it fresh like that, and playing it semi-casually, leaves you with a different opinion than years of trembling previews, ravenous info-consumption, and one intensive week-long binge.

Terrible screenshots brought to you by Taking A Photo Of My Screen imaging technology.

I was trying to guess, before release, which of the many tiny problems the reviews mumblingly dismiss would be the one that caused banshee shrieks of rage from the playing public. It seems that – apart from a lot of retaliatory ‘0/10’ user reviews from score-terrorists incensed either by imagined bribery tainting the official reviews, or an equally imaginary quality chasm between the two consoles – the slippery handling is the source of most angry noises. This is interesting because it’s almost certainly the result of a difference between how reviewers played the game and how consumers usually do.

Playing all day every day for a week is intense, and a publisher with any doubts about their game at all wouldn’t want critics to do it: recurring flaws are inescapable and frustrations magnify. But it does mean that any problems limited to the early sections are on your mind for only a day, and soon pushed out by whatever delights the real meat of the game holds.

The handling thing, by all informed accounts, is a problem with the early sections. I can vouch for that – I’m not halfway through, but already I never have to settle for anything that steers like a cow. And I also get the impression that the main storyline does something really special later on. But the early sections are incredibly long, and even if you play for three hours a day, they’re what you’re going for almost all of launch week. And I’m pretty sure that’s all there is to this disparity of perspectives.

You could take that as a condemnation of the way expansive games are reviewed, but personally I think it’s a strength. If the handling was bothering me to the point that I was considering giving up, I’d want reviewers to dismiss it as a droplet of gripe in an ocean of awesome. I want the after-it-all perspective, not a horoscope prediction of how I’ll feel the week I pick it up. One of the most useful things a review can ever say is “Bear with it,” because that’s something very few gamers do.

It’s not a big deal to me, perhaps because I’ve always found a perverse pleasure in steering GTA’s most unwieldy vehicles. Would I score it as highly as the pre-release reviewers did? Not yet. I’m twenty-one hours and 25% in, though I would guess at least halfway through the main plot. I’m stuck on two really irritating missions, but I’m going to bear with it because people I trust have told me to.

I doubt I’ll end up with exactly the same opinion as them, though. It would have to hit a crescendo of BioShockesque proportions to completely wipe my current complaints from my mind. What are those complaints? That would be a very dry, whiny and technical discussion, so I’ll devote a whole post to it.

That Band You Like Has A New Thing Coming Out

I’ve wanted a service like this for years: I tell it my favourite bands, it lets me know when they have a new album. I have far too many favourites, far too many of whom rarely release anything, to keep track of them manually, and too few people share my particular cross-section of interests to be comprehensive sources of information. I sometimes find out the third best band in the universe had a new album two years ago and no-one told me. Worse, I sometimes don’t.

Finally, there’s something a bit like that. I’d thought it would make a good Amazon feature – anything comes out by anyone I’ve rated highly or bought something by, mail me and you’ll probably get yourselves a sale. But it’s a Last.fm mashup that’s finally answered the call. This is great for me, Tom Francis, but possibly awkward for you, non-Last.fm user, because you can’t quickly make a Last.fm account and add a load of bands to it. The site insists that you use its Scrobbler in the background while you listen to your music normally, so it can spy on what you really listen to rather than taking your word for who your favourite bands are.

It’s called Soundamus, and it just generates an RSS feed of all new releases by all the artists you’ve listened to according to your Last.fm account. It’s actually slightly awkward for me too, because however much I love Buck Rogers, I don’t really care that Feeder have a new album. But on the other hand, this system is far more comprehensive than any that relied on me to remember who I like. The reason this is a problem that needs fixing in the first place is that I’m incapable of remembering that more than the last fifty bands I listened to even exist.

Here’s my Feeder-heavy feed, if you’re curious.

A Slice Of Fried Gold Rush

Having played about ten rounds on TF2’s shiny new map today, it remains enormous fun. It’s mostly the game-mode rather than this specific map I love: that your progress is so plainly visible, and related to a physical object in the world, gives it a drama and immediacy that control points and capture tallies don’t come close to.

Splitting it into sub-maps like Dustbowl is also very smart: the map is cleverly designed to make that very last stretch to the final checkpoint of each map mercilessly exposed and close to the defenders’ spawn, and fighting for that last stretch makes the match feel close, even when it’s really not. A few times as attackers it’s felt like we were inches from victory just because we had the cart so close to the final checkpoint on the first of the three map segments. In truth, even if we’d made it we’d have been utterly screwed on the next two much tougher legs without any spare time in the bank.

Which raises the other main point: we’re really not very good at attacking. The game mode sounds like it would be impossibly hard for the attackers, but our playtests at Valve showed almost the opposite: more often than not the cart tipped into the final cap and blew the shit out of the place. The game was harder for attackers back then, too – the cart gave neither ammo nor health to those near it.

This leads me to the conclusion that it’s going to get progressively easier to attack and harder to defend, until it’s about even. I’ve learnt from experience – if I hadn’t already predicted it – that initial “omg so imbalanced” reactions to Valve stuff are generally disproved with time. I was dead wrong about the last cap on Badlands – now that players have learnt to defend it well, it’s a mercy that it’s so fast to capture if you do manage to break through. Hopefully once we all know the routes better, formulate counters to killer Sentry positions and learn to have fewer than nine medics per team, attackers are going to have a chance. For now, though, I’d just like to see that cinematic physics explosion once.

Update: After some disastrous Demomanning this lunchtime, I gave up trying to be a team player and went back to Spy. When you’re a defender disguised as an attacker, the cart heals you, so you can actually survive as much spy-checking as the attackers are likely to be able to put on you with all the fire they’re taking elsewhere. Then if they reach it, you can reveal instantly to block the push.

In my experience so far, they tend to be extremely surprised by this and take several revolver bullets to the eyes before they competently react to the situation. Since their life-span is usually limited at this point, what damage you take from the encounter is then regenerated by the cart when you re-don your disguise. At one point I stood on top of the cart, disguised as an enemy Heavy, yelling abuse at my ostensible team: “ENTIRE TEAM IS BABIES!”. It’s not really applicable versus concentrated attacks, but it lets one player completely halt the trickle of lucky breaks that can otherwise inch the thing forwards and prevent rollback.

Once things heat up, of course, I go rogue and surgically remove the Medics from the team. More than most maps, Gold Rush has a very clear frontline, which lets Medics hang safely back round the corner from their patients. That’s a bitch for the damage-dealing classes to deal with.

Achievement Unlocked: Typed Achievement_Unlock

Bracing Oneself

Both GTA IV and what the common people call an ‘electronic gamer console’ are now waiting patiently with me in the office. I discuss with PC Zone’s Log about how to prepare for this revolution.

Pentadact: Do you have it yet?
Log: Picking it up after work
Log: I want to see to what extent, precisely, it redefines gaming
Log: I’ve pulled up the tent pegs from my existing definitions
Pentadact: Now you’re hovering anxiously over the terrain of possible human experience, looking for some soft ground to plunge them into.
Log: And my tent flaps are moisturised for a thorough stretching <- too far Pentadact: We’re going to need new dictionaries.
Log: I’m going to buy a rule book just so I can watch as the pages shrivel with obsolescence.
Pentadact: I’ve removed the rubber grommets from my paradigm, just in case it needs shifting.
Log: Idiot, you’ll scratch the floor of your preconceptions
Pentadact: Oh, those are due for demolition tonight.
Log: I forgot. You’re absolutely right
Pentadact: I just hope it doesn’t raise the bar. Mine’s already flush against the beading on my kitchen ceiling.
Log: I feel like I’m in the opening sequence to Torchwood

It’s A Democratic Gaming Landscape, Bitches

The BBC were in our office again today, but this time they had the courtesy to interview our own editor rather that Edge’s at our desks. It was for a segment on the 10 O’Clock News tonight about the launch of GTA IV, so naturally they wanted to talk to the editor of the only gaming magazine in the building whose platform it’s not coming out on.

Anyway, Craig found the clip online so you can actually see his poncy pontifications on the state of gaming today. Jump to the 26m50s mark for the goods:

Or a few minutes before that for the whole segment. They wanted Ross to say games were bigger than films these days, and rather admirably he declined to state anything he didn’t independently know to be true.

That claim was bandied about years before it was true by any meaningful metric, and even today it’s uselessly vague. A game costs eight times as much as a cinema ticket – are we really celebrating that the second biggest-selling game in years reached an eighth of the people that one not exactly world-shaking Hollywood flick did? Well done Bungie. Maybe one day you’ll make something as popular as The Hottie And The Nottie.

Non-Problems Of The Obscenely Over-Privileged

The planets have aligned and my sign is in the “You Need New Stuff” part of the sky this month, and I’ve ended up with three different things I feel like I desperately want, all costing roughly the same chunk of money.

I can definitely buy one. I can buy two if I want to flinch with guilt every time I think about either of them. Technically, I could buy all three, but even if I was prone to that kind of opulence, I just don’t have the time to play with three complex new toys. So, I need some advice. Which of these will genuinely be a life-improving joy, and which am I just being stupid for even considering?

1. New PC Bits: £250
I currently rock an ageing AMD FX-60, and last week my PC broke hard. It’s currently unusable, and I’m not sure how much of it is salvageable. I hate trying to fix PCs, and it was horribly outdated anyway, so the smart thing to do is buy a new heart and soul for the beast.

You know the E6850, the Core 2 Duo CPU that was, not long ago, indistinguishable in performance terms from the fastest gaming CPU commercially available, despite being a quarter of the price? Just lately, it halved in price. I don’t know if that price-slash wave has hit the UK listings I’m looking at here, but the upshot is that the fastest chip I could want costs less than I have ever paid for a new CPU: £120 ($240, but think of it as $160 because electronics always cost 50% more over here). With a motherboard, heatsink, RAM and possibly a new case, that runs into the £250-£300 range.

Voice of Sanity Says: Oh come on, you’re a geek. Even if you bought new bits, you’d have this PC fixed before they arrived. And the truth is that before it broke, there was nothing that PC couldn’t do – except not break in the near future. The only game in the world it couldn’t run perfectly well was Crysis, which you’ve had no desire to go back to since completing it. If you did, your office PC eats it for breakfast. And it’s not like anything else is going to be remotely that demanding in the foreseeable future. Even the very latest stuff with absurdly high minimum specs, like Assassin’s Creed, couldn’t have run better on your old rig. PC gaming’s hardware race stalled long ago, no-one told Crytek, and they fell flat on their faces. Don’t join them, point and laugh.

I should add, before it becomes a thing, that my voice of sanity is slightly creepy and more than a little insane.

2. An Xbox 360 with GTA IV: £200
I watched Rob Taylor playing this in the office for a bit earlier tonight. He’s the Xbox World reviewer who gave it- actually I’m not sure if I’m allowed to say what he gave it yet, but a higher score than our own magazine has awarded in its fourteen year history. The word is that GTA IV is good in a way that previous GTAs have not been, and this happens to coincide with it being set in the only place I care about, starring the first character I don’t hate since GTA3, and me having an absurdly big screen to play it on. If it’s as good as it sounds, it’ll be something of a momentous event in gaming, and I want in.

Watching Rob play, a few things struck me:

a) It looks really fun to drive. Car chassis bounce around on their wheels like the Halo Warthog, and more importantly, you just smash through stuff. Everything smaller than you smashes and splinters and splats in your path, and it makes chases dramatic.

b) Dying is hilarious. When you hit something bigger than you, hard enough, you go flying through your windshield. Each bump and knock your ragdoll takes after that knocks off a chunk of health proportional to the force of impact, so you don’t always die. But it’s always a brutal, flinch-worthy slow-mo spectacular. This is really important. Trials 2 and N are really very fiddly, frustrating games, but the fact that every death triggers a laugh or a gasp completely alters the emotional rollercoaster of the experience into something you can lose yourself in for hours.

c) It really does look like the screenshots. At least, it looks like the only one I care about:

The burning sunset ambience – I was worried it wouldn’t come up in the normal course of play. It does. I love New York, and all I really want from this is New York at sunset, New York in the rain, New York at night,

d) For the first time in the six GTA games I’ve played, they finally came up with a non-moronic way to lose heat. It’s just a really smart, logical system that rewards you for the kinds of breakneck chases you’ve previously been doing just for the fun of it.

Voice of Sanity Says: You’ve never owned a console in your life, you hate every console game you’ve played, 360 games are ludicrously expensive, you don’t get them free from work, and you’re considering spending 200 on the latest in a series that you don’t even especially like. We all know it’ll come out on PC in six to eight months, and if you really want to role-play a vegetative, neanderthal teenager, you can even play it on your big screen with a gamepad sitting on your futon then. This ‘gaming event’ you want to be ‘in on’ comprises a gaggle of slack-jawed bloated twats dribbling over gibbering message boards about laughable gameisms as if they were James fucking Joyce.

3. An EEE PC 900: £300
It’s absurd that I don’t have a laptop: the two most notable features of my job are PCs and traveling. And my only priorities in a laptop have always been portability, durability and price. As you move into smaller models, Ultraportables they’re called, the price rises exponentially until there’s nothing worth having for less than £700. Then the graph collapses and there’s the EEE: smaller than anything, cheaper than anything, and entirely solid-state.

The 900 has a two-inch bigger screen than the first model, and a 20GB drive instead of a 4GB one.

Voice of Sanity Says: Here, try using this Time Phone to call the you of three months ago. Ask him about his laptop priorities. I’ll give you a clue: there was one of them, and it wasn’t on your list. Battery life. The new EEE lasts two and a half hours, slightly more than those high-spec gaming laptops you wrote off as absurdly impractical, and slightly less than the six year-old broken hand-me-down Dell lying unloved behind the futon you’re typing this from. It’s also great if you like keyboards too small to type on, screens to small to watch anything on, drives too small to install anything on and specs too low to play anything on. That’ll be £300, moron.

Update: Thanks, internet! As per the prevailing gist of your suggestions, I have put all thoughts of the EEE from my mind and splashed recklessly on the other two.

My delivery estimate for the 360 and GTA is Tuesday, launch day, though even if it comes then I doubt everything will go smoothly setting it up. I’ve been playing San Andreas on a gamepad in anticipation, and learned four slightly contradictory facts: a) standard-def resolution actually looks fine on my large display, b) San Andreas is artistically the most drab, ugly, poorly-lit game ever made, c) I actually enjoy driving with a gamepad more than with a mouse and keyboard now, and d) the gamepad support in the PC version really sucks.

Early that same week, I’ll have a heap of things that will eventually become a Core 2 Duo E6850 with 4GB of RAM, a very fast 500GB hard drive, and a neat black case. I went with my own research for the processor, Komplett’s bundle for the mobo and RAM, PC Gamer’s recommendation for the hard drive, and customer reviews for the case. We, PC Gamer, recommend a chassis that has its power supply at the bottom rather than the top, and I, Tom Francis, fucking hate that configuration. So I went for the cheapest one that had five-star ratings and a few people raving about how easy it is to fit.

Wanking ‘Not Inappropriate’ To Government Commerce

The British Office of Government Commerce have finally discovered what webcomic author Ryan North has long known: if you put the letters OGC on their side, it looks a bit like a seated man clutching his own erect penis. Unfortunately it cost them £14,000 to commission the logo which edified the resemblance, and remarkably they’re not scrapping it. The Telegraph story on the matter doesn’t name the spokesperson defending it, but he’s my new favourite nameless spokesperson:

“On consideration we concluded that the effect was generic to the particular combination of the letters OGC – and it is not inappropriate to an organisation that’s looking to have a firm grip on Government spend.”

Or, a penis.

Dispensing Justice

Some of these crack me up. I’d always wondered if the last one was viable. It probably isn’t in practise, but I can die happy now that I’ve seen it done.

Getting Owned

YOU ARE SO SMALL! IS FUNNY TO ME!

To celebrate the release of the decent-but-not-great Meet The Scout short, I’m finally getting round to putting up a story about that class that I wrote ages ago. Well, kind of about the Scout, kind of about the primal psychology of competitive multiplayer gaming. Non-TF2 players: I’m currently writing a post that isn’t about TF2. Then three more that are.

I’d been trying to go cold turkey on Team Fortress 2 for a while, since I’d started to really care about winning and losing. That’s dangerous.

At one point I was coming up on an Engineer who was officially Dominating me, inches from his unguarded back (I was a Spy). He crossed the train tracks, while the “Train Incoming!” alarm was going off.

And I’d got to this mindset where there was just no fucking way I was stopping, there was no fucking way he was getting away from me this time. And so, of course, I was hit in the face by a train and he got away.

When you can’t see the funny side of something like that, you have to worry. I could not. It was about as funny as cancer. So, I decided, no more TF2 – at least until the next update.

But then in the course of researching a really fun piece for our Culture section next issue (now this issue! On sale now! Buy buy buy!), I kept running into Scout tips videos, Scout quotes and Scout ownage clips.

There’s a kind of philosophy to the Scout: there are many situations he simply can’t even begin to tackle, so he has to know his limits and pwn within them. I never got the hang of that – I have a hard time with the idea that I can’t take on the entire enemy team single-handedly in every conceivable circumstance – but I felt I could get it.

So tonight I went Scout. We got owned.

There’s a very particular feeling to getting owned. It’s unique to computer games – it doesn’t feel this way to lose at a sport, or chess. It has to be something violent – and not rugby violent. Gun, knife, fire, blunt force trauma violent.

It’s such a horrible, galling feeling of violation and misery that most gamers have come to refer to it as “getting raped”. I’m actually on a quiet and not very effective campaign to persuade them to stop using that word, because it suggests a pretty disgusting disregard for the weight of its real meaning, but the fact that otherwise sane people use it gives you some idea of how unpleasant the sensation is.

They’re everywhere, they’re in your face, and no matter what you do you get repeatedly and violently humiliated. TF2 rubs it in by proclaiming to everyone when you’re being “DOMINATED” by someone – they’ve killed you four times since you last killed them.

Non-gamers probably wonder why we wouldn’t just stop playing at this point, but that’s the worst thing you can do. If you do that, the feeling lingers, taints everything you do after. The only cure is reciprocation: winning isn’t enough now, however unlikely it may be – you have to own them.

This was proving hard. Scout is my lowest-scoring class – I’ve never once had a really good round with him – and even so I was by far the strongest player on my team. I virtually was my team.

I was responsible for more than half the kills, despite not being a combat class. I was our only defense – all our Engies pessimistically retreated to our last capture point, leaving the ones that were actually in play completely unguarded. And I was solely responsible for every single capture we made: five of them in a row, every time lost as soon as I died.

This is the slightly depressing thing about team-games: sometimes it doesn’t matter how good you are, you’re going to lose, hard. Most losing teams finish a game hating each other far more than they hate the enemy. In fact, several attempt to join the other team at the start of the next round.

You can’t shake the illusion, though, that it must be possible to make a difference. It must be possible – just theoretically, not necessarily for me – to be good enough to transcend your team.

It was getting exasperating. I could kill everyone who came for our last cap before they got there, I could re-capture our next control point again and again, but no-one was there to hold it when I inevitably succumbed to their three Soldiers, three Heavies and two Pyros. And even the Engineers weren’t able to stop Scouts from getting to our final capture point when I wasn’t there.

I wasn’t even playing well: in most one-on-ones, I’d lose. The rest of my team were just significantly worse than that. At one point I gave in to the pointless urge to chide them: “Is anyone actually going to do anything about that Sentry?” I asked pointedly, being the only class who truly didn’t stand a chance against it.

“i was going to pretend it wasn’t there” said one.

Eventually I gave up trying to hold out against six stronger offensive classes while all our heavy firepower pussyfooted around in the corridors behind me, neither defending reliably nor daring to attack. I just ran past everything, including the Sentry.

This is a weird experience. Almost no-one can stop you, even if they’re good. And so you pass whole squads of enemies marching out to the front lines, and they all see you, and they all fire, but by the time the Heavies’ barrels have spun up you’re gone, and suddenly you’ve got a lot of people thinking about your psychology.

“What’s he doing?” they’ve got to wonder. “He’s heading for a capture point he can’t take, because his team haven’t got the two before it yet. So do we care? Only if he’s going to curve round and come up behind us. But we can’t wait here forever to see if he does that.”

So most people just carry on, glancing behind them a lot. I expected one to head back to look for me, but none did. So I hung out at their spawn, watching Pyros leave their supply room, waiting until they were far enough away that they couldn’t get back to it quickly, then striking from behind.

I had to abort a lot of these strikes – Scouts don’t have much health and don’t do their damage very quickly – but I stayed alive and caused a lot of confusion, irritation and death.

I ended up in the middle of the map, having just taken out a Soldier and a Heavy’s Medic at no small cost to my health, and I suddenly noticed it was unlocked.

My team! My team had actually done something! They took the capture point directly outside their base without my help! Well, cutting off the enemy reinforcements probably didn’t hurt, but still! One of the kill messages showed that the enemy Sentry in our base was down.

“like i said,” the same guy commented, “it’s not there.”

I had 16 health and a Pyro was coming towards me shotgun blazing, so I had to abort my capture to snatch a medkit. But soon he was dead and it was capped, and I was on my way to the next one.

This time I was heading to a point I could cap, but the stream of enemies pouring out of their base ignored me again: they were that sure they could re-take the middle point. They couldn’t possibly lose the upper hand. They were owning.

I nearly died taking their next one. They already had two people on the middle point to re-take it, but Scouts count double and the middle cap is the slowest to take. An enemy Scout had spotted me and doubled back to make sure I wouldn’t get it. I hid in a very obvious corner of the capture zone, and miraculously it took him a fatal second to figure out which one, during which I nailed him.

Suddenly we had four of the map’s five points, and I knew the last one would be unguarded. Only losers set up defenses on the last cap before it’s in play – that’s us, not them.

I immediately ran into a Heavy coming from their base, hastily doubled back and took the other route in before he could fire. This time he probably didn’t have to think long about my psychology: he knew I was going for their final point, he knew it was undefended, and he knew there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. He was the strongest class and I was the weakest, his team were winning and my team were losing; but he was slowest class and I was the fastest, and he was already heading the wrong way. I know exactly what that feels like. It feels like getting owned.

There’s a glass wall between the final capture point and the supply room that respawning players come out of to defend it. So I saw them: a Pyro, a Heavy, the Engineer who was dominating me, all pour out of that gate just as I was coming up to the capture point. I had 28 health.

I put my gun away, jumped onto the cap, and hit the taunt key: the key that leaves you unable to attack, fixed to the spot and helpless for the next few seconds, all for the sake of spreading your arms, surveying all before you and nodding cockily, baseball bat in hand.

My mental calculation was right: they could easily reach me before my taunt finished, but not before I captured the point. And since it was the last point, that meant winning the game. Which renders all enemies unable to attack, and triples the damage of your every blow.

It was obscene. The match was won just as three guys closed in on me, and I already had my steel baseball bat in hand. None of my team-mates were around, of course, so the spoils were all mine. Critical hits don’t just do triple damage, they make a cracking, booming sound like lightning, and when they kill they send the victim flying.

I pounded my way through their entire team, smashing each of their faces in with a furious series of thunderous bangs, ending, at last, with a Dominating Engineer. TF2 has two little jingles: one for getting Dominated, one for getting Revenge. The latter has never sounded so good.

I had to be in a bad mood to truly enjoy this – if it had all been harmless fun, I couldn’t have relished being so cruel. I had to still be stuck in the grimly competitive mindset that made me want to stop playing TF2, I had to spend the first half of the match having a thoroughly miserable time, and I had to have useless – or near-useless – team-mates.

I probably made twelve people feel really, really annoyed about that match – they lost to a cheap, nasty tactic, to one man on a team they could easily beat, and then they got smacked repeatedly in the face by a magic baseball bat while completely defenceless. And this game has made me enough of a dick to find that really, really satisfying.

This Just In: Frogs Aren’t Morons

I forgot to tell the entire world about this when I discovered it a while ago. If you put a frog in tepid water and then, very slowly, heat it up – the frog gets the fuck out. If he could talk, he’d be like, “What the fuck, asshole? I was hanging out there! Why the fuck have you got to be such a goddamn dick all the time? Jesus.” Then he’d hop off to hang out with someone who wasn’t an asshole.

Dear people trying to make a point about things changing slowly: I don’t doubt the humans you’re talking to are morons. I don’t doubt you could boil them. But don’t bring frogs into it, you need a lid to cook those motherfuckers.

PS: It is true that Cane Toads ate Australia. They’re sorry about that, but it’s kind of our fault for flying them out there and Australia’s fault for being so delicious.

Der Uberdoktor

Medic Unlockables announced! Discussed! Condemned? Perhaps!

Incredibly Important Update: The second unlockable weapon for the Medic is called the KritzKrieg, not the Critzcrieg as it’s spelt in the screenshots and, like, every website ever. See the end of this post.

Chris Livingston‘s been inadvertantly sappin’ my TF2 posts from this blog, by posting interesting stuff about the game regularly enough on his own that I invariably end up composing a 500 word comment over there and then feel like I’ve said my piece.

Chris’s blog’s ad banner: too awesome not to use.

But there’s lots to say about the latest torrent of news. The first batch of unlockable items have finally been detailed in full, and those long-leaked Achievements you’ll need to earn to get them are now concrete and specific. If you already know all the juicy details, skip the next three paragraphs – I’m just going to run through them quickly.

About a third of the achievements are easy: they’re things we’ve all done if we’ve played Medic for any length of time, like building an Ubercharge before the gates open during the Setup time. And after achieving a third of them, you’ll be able to switch out your regular Syringe Gun for the Blutsauger – a Syringe Gun that drinks enemy blood to give you 3 health for each hit, but which never scores critical hits.

A further third of the achievements are tough, but worthwhile pursuits. I don’t think I’ve ever used my Ubercharge at the same time as two other Medics, and I probably never will accumulate ten million healing points. Once you have done two thirds of the achievements, though, you get the KritzKrieg: a healing ray that whose Ubercharge gives the patient 100% critical hits instead of invulnerability.

The other third of the achievements are silly things, jokes – some sound like they were made up specifically to fit the name. Consultation, for example, is the award for healing another Medic while he kills five enemies in a single life. There’s one for building up an Ubercharge and not using it, instead attacking the enemies and managing to kill five of them without dying. When you rack up all the Medic-specific acheivements, you can has the Ubersaw: a Bonesaw that gives you 25% Ubercharge every time you hit, but hits 20% slower.

So, there are a lot of awesome ideas in there, but also a lot of obvious concerns. Like:

Once you’ve got the Ubersaw, why would you bother healing chumps anymore?

This doesn’t worry me much. To get the Ubersaw, you need all the achievements. One of them is to heal 10,000,000 health. Others are so hard that you’ll probably end up doing that just in the course of trying to get them. Valve reckon the ten-mill-heal alone is three months of playing nothing but medic, doing nothing but healing. My point is that if you’ve got all these, a) you’ve earned the right to take a break from healing, b) you probably understand the fundamentals of the class by now, and realise that injured people sure appreciate a bit of beam love, and c) I’m just guessing, I don’t know you, but I’m thinking you like healing.

If one Medic Ubers someone, and another Kritzes them, don’t they become an unstoppable killing machine?

I don’t see it. It’s not like when an Uber comes in, currently we all just stand there thinking “Eh, he’s not critting, I’ll probably survive.” We run. An Uber already is an unstoppable lethal force. I don’t know about you, but when my Uber wears off, the only people left alive are the ones I couldn’t get to. To me, Ubers are mainly for breaking otherwise impenetrable nests of Sentries, and crits do exactly the same damage as normal shots against Engy kit. If you’ve got an Uber and a Kritz ready to go, the strategy I’m scared of is sending in an Ubered Heavy with a Kritzed Soldier pumping in fire support.

Doesn’t tying practical benefits to achievements encourage – almost mandate – the worst kind of achievement whoring?

Yeah, but where the achievements are good, that doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if a dozen people pile on a private server somewhere and try and game the system instead of playing properly. That’s never going to be the mainstream, and so long as your achievements are for things that class should be doing, the net effect is going to be a bunch of people doing what they should be doing.

Should you really be incentivising bad tactics like Ubering a Scout?

This is a problem. I’m not a fan of panning a change before it goes live, but in this case not much prediction is needed. I want the KritzKrieg, I’m going to be Ubering Scouts. I’m going to be asking friends to go Heavy and punch people while I Uber, instead of actually doing something useful for our team. I’m going to set up a tit-for-tat with another Medic so we can both get our Consultation on instead of tending to the dying around us. I’m guessing a lot of other people will too, but I don’t have to rely on that prediction – this system bribes me to screw it up for my team. Most of these things sound like fun, but that’s probably no consolation to the eleven people who just lost because of me.

I could write whole essays on the genius of TF2’s lighting. I won’t.

The only mitigating factor is that, since one class is getting three new weapons and thirty-six achievements while the others remain unchanged, we’re going to have enough Medics on each team for the first time ever. So losing a few to stupid japes half the time isn’t always going to be crippling. It’s just going to be, you know, stupid.

Unlocks aren’t always going to be tied to achievements, but to me that’s not really the problem. Achievements are fine, but the silly ones shouldn’t be compulsory – they shouldn’t even be incentivised. Call them something else, or hide them from the interface so people don’t know to try them, but get recognition if they stumble upon the idea themselves. Just make the useful, informative, beneficial majority of the achievements the only ones that count toward the useful, desirable, beneficial unlocks.

Still, I’m not half as anxious about this now that the Overhealer‘s out. I’m actually not going to play Medic for long after the update – I want to exploit the inevitable glut of doc-jockeys to a) get some serious Heavy on while the healin’s good – he’s one of my favourite classes but for some reason among my least-played, and the least played among all TF2 players. b) get some serious dressing-up-as-a-Heavy on while the healin’s stupid. I’m assuming the many, many healing-related achievements will outweigh the few Spy-killing ones to manufacture a net gullibility boon that I can exploit for maximum backstabbery. Which brings me to c) be standing right behind them, knife glinting, when they finally activate their first KritzKrieg. I don’t need an unlock to crit, nurse.

P.S. Does anyone know enough German to figure out why they’re spelling it ‘Critzcrieg’ when it’s presumably a pun on ‘Blitzkrieg’? Is there some convention I’m missing? Critzkrieg looks so right.

Incredibly Important Update: After two actual Germans testified in the comments that this spelling made no sense, I could bear the confusion and mental anguish no longer, and e-mailed Robin. He writes back to say that there was a miscommunication with the guy putting together the info that got given to these sites, and the real name is in fact The KritzKrieg.

That precise spelling and capitalisation is pulled directly from the game’s source code a mere 17 minutes ago, so it’s pretty much gospel – and at least 300% righter than everyone else on the internet. This post has been changed. The world has been changed.