TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

Serenity

The following piece is bristling with devastating spoilers, so only continue if you’ve already seen it or don’t intend to.

Opera is rubbish. Space opera is only mildly better. No-one turns out to be anyone’s father in Serenity; royalty are not involved. There isn’t even a struggle between good and evil, and it has characters instead of charicatures. That, vaguely, is why it’s better than Star Wars.

I’m sorry, I love sci-fi, I happily endure the trashy bits and the awful acting, and lightsabers are awesome; but ultimately, I like things that are actually good. I prefer to genuinely enjoy something than keep my tongue in my cheek. Specifically, it was when I was crying, laughing and biting my fist at the same time that I decided Serenity is better than everything else.

The crying bit was the only one that owed itself partially to the preceding series – no-one could watch the film and not like Wash by that point, but for Firefly fans he’s an old friend, and his loss is absolutely wrenching; all the more so for being completely unexpected (sorry, people who ignore spoiler warnings). Usually when a character dies on-screen I’m praying we’re not going to be insulted by some flimsy device to bring them back or pretend it didn’t happen – revealing it to be a cheap trick to toy with an emotional involvement it never earned in the first place. This was the first time I was hoping for one of those, however dumb – it was the first time I’ve cared more about the character than the film itself.

Probably the most audacious part of Wash’s death isn’t the permanent loss of by far the best character, it’s that you’re laughing when it happens. If the surprise death in LA Confidential is jarringly sudden, it pales in comparison to this. Wash dies mid-gag – a good gag at that – and immediately after doing something brilliant. It’s cruel, but it’s not callous or cynical writing – it’s an acknowledgement that main characters don’t automatically get fifteen seconds of extra life after fatal incidents, that they don’t always go out sacrificing themselves, that the timing isn’t predictable. Violent death is quick and horrible.

There’s barely a minute’s grace before the jokes start again. It ought to feel incongruous, but then the humour was never flippant to begin with – most of the jokes revolve around the fact that they’re all going to die almost immediately. It was always a diversionary device for the characters with the funniest lines, so it’s never more appropriate than in the wake of a tragedy. As ever, it’s Wash’s inherent reasonableness and Jayne’s nihilistically pragmatic approach to machoism that compete for the most laughs, and you have to wonder again why no other sci-fi is anything like this funny.

The tension – the fist-biting bit of my emotional cocktail – is partly down to the stepping up of the scale of the story. Firefly was always about a bunch of fugitives trying to stay off the radar and make money; Serenity is the first time their story has spilled over into something affecting the whole universe. The personal scale of Firefly’s plots was part of its charm, but Serenity proves that a plot which connects that to the truly epic can be even more seductive. And the perfect link between the two has been very carefully set up throughout the series: River. It always made it clear that she was significant in some way, finally discovering this significance – and its magnitude – brings Serenity’s universe into focus.

The Alliance isn’t cosmetically unlike Star Wars’ Empire, but the context is crucial – in Serenity, the Rebellion’s already been quashed. There’s no war, if you don’t like them you just have to stay the hell away from anything resembling quality of life. And though the Alliance is the bad guy, it’s not the only one, and in the intro to Serenity you actually get their perspective (and it’s not that much less reasonable than the outlook of a patriotic country today). When the crew’s ploy forces the Alliance to face their figurative demons literally, both Mal and his nemesis lament the loss of innocent life – an unpleasantness other sci-fi feebly avoids with clones, drones and aliens.

That nemesis is another application of the fierce intelligence with which Serenity hacks away at sci-fi convention. An empire is led by bureaucrats, not a samurai and an electric pensioner. The guy you send to capture a sensitive target is your best black ops man – neither a freelancer nor a government official. Someone who is actually employed to do this sort of thing, and ruthlessly, spectacularly efficient at it. He’s stylish, certainly – the killing of the scientist in his first scene is one of the most macabre screen assassinations in memory – but it’s an elegant application of necessary force rather than a superfluous flourish. And when it comes to killing everyone the targets have ever known, that luxury is dropped without hesitation. Like every good agent, his violence is committed in a passionate belief in the cause, and the same understanding of the necessity of secrets, under-handedness and technically illegal operations that a real spy needs. This guy reassures his victims that they’ve lead a virtuous life before he executes them. He’s not evil, not even cruel, just ruthless.

It’s also brilliantly refreshing to see an a bad guy who, when the girl sneaks up behind him during the hero-nemesis fight, turns round and kicks her really hard. Nemeses are sick of getting knocked out with vases! If you keep doing that shit, women of action films, they’re going to have to hit you quite hard!

It’s not just rare for sci-fi to be this intelligent, it’s rare for something this intelligent to be so emotional. Memento and LA Confidential, though unquestionably cleverer than Serenity and utterly gripping, never put my engagement with the excellent characters to use in making me feel things. Or at least, what they made me feel now seems vague and academic compared to the wonderful trauma of watching Serenity. It has brains, heart, and space zombies.

Flying

I’ve got to level 14 before, with another character, and since he was agility-oriented and I like to be different, I went for Super Jumping. It now turns out that’s widely considered the best all-round transport power – fast, obstacles are no obstacle, and great for escaping tricky situations. Screw those guys. I chose Super Jump because I thought it’d be cool, and it really, really was. But Flying is cooler.

I’ve no regrets – the transport power you pick is a hugely important decision, and it has to make sense for your character. Jump was perfect for The Defenestrator, the man who could dodge anything. For a while Brain Storm was going to have Teleport – she’d already gone for Recall Friend as a pre-requisite to it. But the only connection between storms and teleportation is that Teleport and Phasing come under the Lightning skill tree in Diablo 2, so I realised I wasn’t bound to that. And that I might never get to level 14 again, and Flying is kind of an essential experience for a superhero. Besides which, what could be more storm-related than hanging out in the clouds?

It’s unbelievable. I was standing with Ms Liberty when I got it, as I am when I get any skill, so the backdrop to my revelation was the extraordinary Atlas Plaza – dominated by a statue so huge it defines the sky of the place. I spied a blimp soaring as high as the skyscrapers, and instinctively took off.

There’s a reason we humans keep dreaming about this – it feels amazing. Flying is not a means to the end of feeling like a superhero – being a superhero is a means to the end of flying. That’s the real fantasy. Screw saving people, having power, making a difference or facing odds. Taking off is what it’s all about. That wonderful ambiguity of the action – is she being lifted by some invisible force? Does it pull on all her body equally? It doesn’t look as though there is a gravity-strength force acting on her, she looks serene. Is she simply lighter than air? How then would she be controlling it? Is it like swimming? She’s hardly moving, she just zooms. That she flies where she intends to is immediately apparent in her movements, but how the thought becomes action is utterly occluded. No bird can match this, there’s no mistaking Brain Storm for a plane. That is a person who is freaking flying.

I soared to the blimp. I soared past the blimp. I landed on a skyscraper – switching off my fliability just as I approached its surface, knowing without ever having done or seen it before that my upward momentum would continue to carry me those last thirty centimetres to land elegantly, at a gentle trot, on its tarmac surface. I looked down at the blimp – which ought to be branded ‘Cloud Nine’ by the way – then threw myself at it. I slipped, of course, on its rubbery dome, and plummeted unspeakably towards the city below. Again, the activation didn’t seem to involve a keypress – I wished to slow my fall, and it just happened. My downward velocity arced beautifully into a swoop, came up into a steady rise, which became a magnificent soar.

I still haven’t played City Of Villains – the beta is on, but I’m not in yet. It hardly seems relevant at this point. I guess I shouldn’t recommend CoH with the new game around the corner (which will include Flying too), but the new one’s an unknown and this one is definitely great. You can reach 14 in two weeks without trying too hard – sooner if you get lost in it over a weekend as I’m prone to do. I maintain that the game would have 50% more players if you got your transport power at 10. So many people stop short of fourteen, and none of them would stop if they could fly.

Introducing: Brain Storm

She’s an Illusion/Storm Controller, meaning she gives people headaches then makes it rain. Actually her powers are bizarre and extraordinary, the kind of wonderful exuberance you’d never find in World Of Warcraft. Long before she was even in double-digits, level-wise, she could turn any enemy – even ones a level above her – against his friends, from a huge range, without aggro’ing him or the mob, even if it misses and even once it wears off. Before that she already had the Gale power, which sends a whole mob flying backwards to land on their respective asses. To this day it remains the perfect escape skill, and also the most impressive and quickest way to save a civilian from a gang of muggers too low level to be worth killing. Her main attack, though, is probably the most satisfying of all: Spectral Wounds. It makes the enemy think they’ve been seriously wounded, and for reasons the description never adequately addresses, if they believe they’ve been fatally wounded, they die. Since the damage is so high, to compensate for the fact that it eventually wears off, most enemies simply expire immediately – meaning the damage never wears off. Best of all, the animation for the power is a dismissive wave of the right hand. I simply gesture to a thug and he hits the ground dead, clutching at his chest. Magic.

Oh yeah, I’ve started playing City Of Heroes again. It was partly the new Issue (whose effects I have yet to spot), partly the imminent Villains beta (not sure why that’s a reason – seems like I should hold off since I’m going to have to start again anyway), and partly Jim’s feature in the latest PC Gamer. Irregardless, it’s probably my favourite MMORPG. Eve dizzies me with its potential, but I still feel like I’m cut off from it, unable to get at the good stuff without phenomenal effort and organisation on my part – not things I enjoy. City Of Heroes is sometimes called unambitious, but I think people under-estimate the audacity of the ambition “Make a Massively Multiplayer game where you really feel like a hero and combat is incredibly fun.” A goal is only modest if someone else has actually achieved it before.

So Brain Storm is a heroine, and fighting with her is incredibly good fun. Her bio, which I wrote while drunk, refers to a degree of ‘sass’ – it’s actually more like bravado. Most of her powers are long-range, and as a Controller she’s weak and ought to stay back. But over the last few levels I’ve given her powers from the Combat pool – basic melee abilities any hero can choose past level eight. Although the infighting ability doesn’t draw any aggro, it does mean I’m usually the furthest forward in my party when someone blows it and opens fire. However it happens, I end up scampering back down the tunnel we came through with a horde on my tail. I turn around and Gale them, of course, and then the other heroes sink their weapons in, freeze them in blocks of ice, smash them with fireballs. But there’s always one still on me, and as I cast my mind-altering hallucinogenics, I always needed just one more thing I could do to them while my main powers recharge, or one quick move to shave off that last sliver of health once I’ve Spectrally Wounded them. The answer: Kick. It’s called Kick. You kick them. Kick!

It sounds feeble, but the simple addition of this ability to her powers changes the feel of the character completely – there’s suddenly attitude there. I intentionally designed her appearence to be just a woman – an especially fragile one, in fact. When she uses her extraordinary mental powers to decimate a horde of rock monsters and the survivors all come charging toward her, it’s absolutely brilliant that she can give the nearest one a good hard kick, usually knocking it back several meters. It says “Fuck you. I am not a wuss.”

The combat was always brilliant, as was the powers system. I actually had trouble getting my head around the idiocy of World Of Warcraft’s after CoH – why doesn’t my level 3 Shadowbolt just replace my level 2 Shadowbolt? Why have the upgrades for the skills I actually liked suddenly dried up? What always sucked, unequivocally and indebatably, was the moronic concept of XP debt. It’s still there, but it’s halved. That makes a huge difference, it’s still reprehensible, appalling, pathetic that the system exists at all, but ‘huge’ doesn’t even cover it. It makes all the difference. If XP debt was still full, the fun I had tonight – during which I died three times – wouldn’t have brought me out of the red and I would be irritated by the game, the joy sapped out by the grind, and preparing to go back to my System Shock 2 replay tomorrow. Instead, I’m buzzing, bursting to tell you about it, and looking forward to getting lost in it all weekend.

Concerned

Concerned satirises Half-Life 2 with affection, though. The title refers to the protagonist’s pen-name – he’s the author of one of the letters Breen reads out on his compulsory telecast at the start of the game. That strip is probably my favourite of the many tie-ins with the experiences of Gordon Freeman, who presumably arrives a week or so later.

Probably not intentionally, the positive outlook of the main character also plays to my own subconscious desires to live in City 17. It says something about a game’s artists when they create a dystopia so beautifully it undermines the dystopian bit.

This Month In Awesome

1st: New PC Gamer Out

My contribution to this one was the Long Play on Darwinia, in which I essentially beg people to buy it. The weird thing is, it seems to be working. I still play Darwinia regularly and it remains my favourite strategy game of all time, and it genuinely hurt to find out hardly anyone bought it. I’m happy to discover that plenty of them just needed a bit of friendly cajoling from someone with strong feelings on the matter. It also feels surreal and wonderful to have an effect – it’s not good to get used to the idea of having your words in print, and realising that people actually read them and pay attention jars you out of that nicely.

I’ve had a chance to play the new Darwinia demo they’re working on – a level not seen in the game – and it’s incredible stuff. Doesn’t just blow the last demo out of the water, it’s actually one of my favourite levels ever. I’ll link it as soon as it’s finished and up properly.

3rd: Tim’s Birthday

This one’s in the past now, and it was great. I discovered Chicken Tikka Taka Tak, sang Dandy Warhols in some kind of demonic kareoke console game (I believe the game scathingly classified me as a ‘hopeful’. Jon Hicks, however, said only my “Woo ooh ooh”s needed work – my baritone lounge crooning was fine. Damn straight) , dehatted a Nintendog and swung another around the room on the end of a rope. It seems there may have been other people present too.

8th: The OC

Yeah, everyone is straight out of an advert for one thing or another, but Seth is wittier than some of the best Whedon characters, and the constant sunshine is oddly addictive. It’s melodrama, it’s trash, but it’s frequently very funny and prominently features astoundingly good music. I am genuinely looking forward to its return.

9th: Discs Finished

Sweet, sweet release. The monthly deadline gives this job a kind of rhythm that builds to a kind of wild panic right up until the envelope containing the masters leaves my hands. Then I suddenly lose thirty kilograms and go and have a Carrot Cake Milkshake. I’m actually going to miss that when I stop being a Disc Editor. The pains of being wholly responsible for a big, important thing do pay off when it’s finally over.

12th: City Of Villains Beta

Some months back now, I accumulated so much experience debt from repeatedly dying on my way through a high-level area between me and my mission that I realised it would be quicker to start a new character than continue with this one. Experience debt is a huge, hideous, gaping wound in the otherwise unbroken awesomeness of City Of Heroes, and I felt pretty okay about giving it up until someone told me they’ve halved it now. Issue Five just went live, and now I’m longing to get back in and see what else has changed. Unfortunately my account has expired, so I’m not sure if I should re-register so soon before getting to play what is in effect the sequel.

Anyway, the point is, I’m pretty excited about City Of Villains now. I’m not expecting it to be massively different to CoH, I’m just expecting it to work.

Sometime: Fahrenheit

I can’t imagine I’m going to like this as much as its reviewers have so far, but there’s no doubting its perfectly pitched atmosphere and tactile control tricks. I intend to enjoy it as pulp – a sort of scienceless CSI.

21st: Lost

Will we find out a damn thing about anything? Craig says he heard we will, but it seems almost too much to ask. My main hope from the new series is that The Others will regain the sinisterness they had when all we knew of them was the super-human, super-unsettling Ethan. The last glimpse we had of them was too ordinary – we need to find out something namelessly horrifying about them to make them scary again.

I’m also hoping for more on the response to Boone’s call for help just before he tumbled off that cliff. If you haven’t listened to it carefully yet, do so now. It is interesting stuff.

23rd: Winter Assault

Dawn Of War was great. This will have new stuff. It will be great. END PREVIEW.

23rd: Fable

People keep telling me I’ll find this interesting, so I will play it. The voice-acting seriously risks ruining it for me, though – I found it unbearable in Black And White, and from what I’ve heard it’s the same mockingly insincere stuff here. In other respects, too, it looks a bit like a child’s drawing of an RPG rather than one made by RPG lovers. I don’t mind some streamlining, but it looks like it’s lost all the character of an RPG, leaving everything generic and placeholderish. I haven’t played it for even a second, so this is just scepticism.

Various Times: Other Birthdays

Mark, Ross and Beast all have birthdays (apparently on the same day) this month, as do at least two friends from outside of work and my gran. Literally fifty percent of everyone I know was born in September.

28th: My Birthday

I might like to go up in a balloon. Seems like a birthdayish thing to do. I also like the idea of silent flight. Engine noises ruin travel for me.

30th: Kieron‘s Birthday

I am quietly hoping to just do whatever other people are doing for this, instead of doing something sociable with lovely Gamer people for my birthday (short of working with them, if I go to work). You’re kind of responsible for people’s enjoyment if they’re out because of you, and that’s the kind of pressure for which mere Disc Editing cannot prepare you. I’d feel better if I wasn’t the main event, more of a niche side-show.

30th: Serenity

The spectacular finalé to what is sure to be the best September ever. If you haven’t seen Firefly, see this. If you have, you’re already going to see this. If you’ve already seen it through ‘connections’, I hate your face.

Rain

It was pretty dark when I left work tonight. It felt odd because it’s summer, and I left as early as I could (six) (after a quick bout of Ragdoll Kung Fu) (/self-important brag). Clouds – that’s what I blame. Absurdly the guy walking out of the building ahead of me immediately turned back when he reached the door, nearly knocking me over, and waited with what I suddenly realised was a small crowd of people apparently unable to cope with the outside world while it was raining. Some of them had coats.

I’ll tell you what’s good music for this: Sketch Show – Chronograph. One of those from-nowhere gems John Peel used to unearth, brush off and show to us proudly. It is pointedly headphone music, a willful disconnection from your surroundings – which should ideally be modern, wet and sickly with electric light.

That is atmosphere. It’s weird how long you can go without experiencing any atmosphere to speak of, and without noticing that you’re comparitively numb during this period. The second a mood like tonight’s early storm wakes me up, everything becomes interesting, refreshing and promising. Today was completely different to yesterday, it had its own feel. Consider the following exchange from Seinfeld:

Kramer: What’s today?
Newman: It’s Thursday.
Kramer: Really? Feels like Tuesday.
Newman: Tuesday has no feel. Monday has a feel. Friday has a feel, Sunday has a feel.
Kramer: I feel Tuesday and Wednesdays.

Today is a Wednesday, and I felt it. I’m not sure anything but Fridays have a feel for me normally, and it’s a shame. You remember days with feels. I remember lying on my back with a friend from uni, listening to Seymour Stein with the windows open on a summer day on which we had one lecture each. I remember turning up to those same lectures on another day, late, in winter, biting my gloves off as I locked up my bike and bustled into the orange lecture theatre with an aura of unwelcome cold air. The difference between these days and forgettable ones is not what happened, just the weather. Sometimes it’s memorable, and everything is interesting.

Last night had atmosphere too – walking home from a meal made uncommonly cheap by a combination of special offers and the plastic prong of a salad fork found in Rich’s lettuce. Bath at night, like any British city of a certain size, is usually post-apocalyptic with pockets of angry, red-faced public druggies. But when it’s a warm, still night and all you can hear is the dark, sinister serenity of Coaxing Méche from the Grim Fandango soundtrack, it’s suddenly the soft stone of the ancient buildings, the park by the river and the wide open spaces that you notice.

The short story is that an MP3 player is necessary to slow the passage of time. I suggest an iRiver of some description, but only ever buy the international versions of their players from now on – the American ones are crippled by the forced introduction of ‘MTP’, a Microsoft protocol the device has to use to connect to your PC, designed to support Digital Rights Management (file copying restrictions to enable new ways of paying for downloadable music). The problem with it, apart from that, is that it’s sickeningly slow, bans you from copying file types Microsoft doesn’t understand – even if the player itself supports them (most notably the wonderful OGG) – only works on PCs with Windows Media Player 10, won’t let you open files straight from the device or even Explore them in the normal way, hides the directory structure and the firmware from you, frequently hangs when copying files to the player and occasionally corrupts the ones it does claim to have copied successfully. The international versions still use ‘UMS’, which means they work as a fast, restriction-free removable hard drive. And there’s virtually nothing you can throw at an iRiver that it can’t play. Just so you know.

You also need to stop eating so much. I think I was even putting on weight as my existence became comfortable. This is no way to live. Everyone should spend at least half of their life hungry and listening to music. Comfort is a bit like death, you just exist and decay. There’s nothing wrong with improving your situation to a satisfactory level, but you can’t just stop once you’ve done it – you need to keep exploring, feel like you’re traveling whether you go anywhere new or not. We are all pretty stuck in our geographical ruts, but with new music for when we’re in the world, and new everything else for when we’re not, we ought to feel like we’re at the frontiers of human experience. All the time.

Another good one for rain – anything by the Postal Service. Ben Gibbard – the common factor between them and Death Cab For Cutie – is the only person writing romantic things that don’t leave me cold. Plans, the new Death Cab, is wonderful. I’m kind of a neophile with them (and music in general), in that Transatlanticism was the first album of theirs I wholly loved, and this is frequently better. Marching Bands Of Manhattan is the one to try if you get the chance.

Let me clarify something rather suddenly and unnecessarily: we regularly have great conversations at work. Our business is a ridiculous one, and so consultations with colleagues tend to be about other-worldly matters or puns. I intend to write some of them down. But since we’re not all philosophy students, looking back at one exchange I transcribed at university still induces mild pangs of nostalgia.

Andrew: Does anyone want this last piece of cake?
Ben: Nope.
Andrew: Well, you’re wrong, because I do.
Ben: Then I misunderstood the nature of the question. I thought you were calling for each of us to say whether or not we wanted it.
Andrew: Ha! I knew you’d think that!

Me: If you wanted him to think that, that’s what you meant by it. What you mean is just what you want the other person to understand by your words.
Andrew: No it’s not! If that was true, how could anyone lie?
Me: Well, you can mean something you know isn’t true. Like, if I said my face was blue, I’d mean that my face was blue even though I knew it wasn’t.
Andrew: But I had mental pictures…
Me: You can’t go the mental pictures route. Rob doesn’t even have mental pictures.
Katy: Yeah, that’s weird.

Andrew: Who said I wanted him to think that, anyway?
Me: I guess we got that from the way you were shouting “Ha! I wanted you to think that!” whilst jumping up and down and pointing at him.
Andrew: I didn’t say that!
Ben: Yes you did.
Andrew: No, I said “I knew you’d think that.”
Me: Yeah, he’s right, actually. So are you saying you didn’t want him to think that?
Andrew: Yeah.
Me: But you knew he would, and you said it anyway.
Andrew: Yeah.
Me: So it was with a heavy heart and a deep sadness that you said this, knowing you’d be horribly misunderstood.
Andrew: Yeah.
Me: And that was why you were jumping up and down and pointing at him?
Andrew: I was angry!
Me: And laughing?
Andrew: With anger!

SWAT 4: The Movie Script

OFFICER DOWN, OFFICER ANDAGENTLEMAN, OFFICER DIBBLE and HANK stand in a rain washed street, weapons at the ready. HANK plants a breaching charge on the back door to a building. OFFICER DOWN takes out a gun-shaped camera device. Continued

On Bringing It

We were on Gulf Of Oman, a map with which I now have Demo Level Syndrome – it’s my favourite by a clear margin because I know it inside out. The coast is the hotspot, unless we (the MEC – they’re at a disadvantage on this map so they usually lose, and that means I get auto-assigned to them) are losing already. When it’s fought on the beaches, and this time it was, it’s raw chaos, constant death.

I was lucky enough to have an enemy run straight in front of the tiny side-window I was looking glumly out of as the driver of my APC executed an agonising three-point turn. I perked up and mowed him down. It was a good omen. We quickly capped an otherwise deserted flag, I jumped in a jeep and sped immediately to the next one, running straight over a sniper on the way and bailing out without breaking when I arrived, crushing another enemy between my abandoned car and their sandbags.

I managed to get out to the back of the base without dying, thanks to my medbag, and considered lying in the sweet spot – a little dark corner behind the flag, out of view from most of the base, but easily close enough to capture it when no enemies are. Then I realised that the two-story bunker I was hiding behind was the same type as one I played around with on another map. I discovered you can jump up onto one ledge, then jump and prone (dive) through the window on the second floor. Best of all, this one was close enough to the flag that, in the back right corner of the second floor, I was in a position to capture.

Except, of course, that it was swarming with enemies. The capture bar stayed firmly red, horribly outnumbered as I was, until someone came up the ladder. I was, of course, lying down with an automatic weapon pointed at exactly where his head appeared, looking through the scope even though the range was about thirty centimetres. As my bullets hammered him out into mid-air, his foot caught in a ladder rung and – while the rest of him disappeared below – stayed sticking up unpleasantly in front of me. I didn’t make much progress before reinforcements arrived, and the heat was off me enough to shoot people in the back of the head as they fought off the invaders. To the next flag!

I travelled by jeep again. This time I only got to run one guy down when I arrived, but an important guy since I hit him just as he was about to fire his SRAW rocket at me. I ducked round the back of the base and hit the deck as a bad guy came round the corner. I got a couple of hits in but the killing blow came from behind him – a friend had creeped in from the opposite side. As I whipped out my medbag to heal up from my new wounds, my friend was flung thirty feet into the air by a torrent of explosions. An attack chopper swooped in angrily, then stopped. I stared into the big glassy eyes of the beast as it hung there, wobbling, three feet from the ground and six feet from my face, apparently unsure of its next move. I guessed the pilot was worried his missiles would blow him up at this range, but what he tried instead was even more suicidal. You know that dumb thing they do in films where the chopper tilts and comes towards its victim, slowly, attempting to mince them with its blades? You know the three, maybe five reasons why it wouldn’t work in real life? Battlefield 2 models all the basic laws of physics those problems stem from.

I survived the blast – the medbag turns you into a kind of supersoldier – but naturally enough the pilot didn’t. I scrambled out from under the wreckage before it blew up again, and found myself in the middle of the base. The only cover was the sandbag bunker – identical to the one at the last base – but I only had time to make it to the front entrance. I brought my L8A5 to bear on one unsuspecting Assault troop before getting inside, and took few enough hits that I didn’t have to switch back to the medbag for long before I could be ready for the inevitable inrush of enemies looking for cover themselves.

After a minute of this not happening, I peered out and found one standing directly outside, facing away from me. Once his body toppled over the sandbags, his friend rushed over to investigate and went down just as easily – though I fancied there was a glimmer of recognition when his view passed me in a panicky search for his assailant before he died.

At that point, it was officially on as far as the US Marine Corps were concerned. They flooded in, even as I frantically reloaded and emptied clip after clip at marine after marine. It was miraculous – I barely took a scratch. By the time I ran out of ammo the entrance to my abattoir was strewn with the bodies of servicemen and I was crazy on adrenaline. I got one more in the face with my pistol, but didn’t have time to reload it before the next came in. He shot me three times before he succumbed to my blade, and as I clutched it menacingly at the door, crouching over his body, drenched in imaginary blood and willing, daring anyone else to try it, a little black object bounced up to me with a barely audible ‘chink’.

I took my hands off the controls and sat back. It was like that British guy in Event Horizon when he finds the bomb on the ship with three seconds left on the timer – there’s no way you can stop it, there’s no way you can escape it, and all that remains is to say “Fuck.”

I quit out after that – I couldn’t top that round even at my best, we’d lost anyway so my team essentially sucked, and I was utterly exhausted – shaking, even. When I quit out I discovered I’d only been playing for just over ten minutes. Battlefield 2 might be a shoddy program, and probably the most demanding game commercially available at the moment, but it’s what a PC is for. As with Half-Life 2, the astonishing fidelity of the world, the physics, the kinetics of it all plug your nerve endings straight into the world, hardwire you to it in a way that can shake you to the core of your being in ten minutes.

More impressively, I’m going to put it above N in the list on the left because frankly that’s pissing me off a little right now. It doesn’t handle curved surfaces well, and uses that as a challenge on a couple of levels. That’s a sin.

State Of Things

I’d just like to say, this comments thing has been awesome. Thanks to everyone who’s added words to this page – they’ve been consistently clever and well-spelt. I knew you were all awesome, of course – I looked at my stats very carefully before deciding to have comments on the main page. According to the percentage of you using Firefox, James readers are approximately 1800% cooler than the general populace.

To celebrate I have worked out how to make Firefox realise I have an RSS feed, so that little orange broadcast icon should appear down the bottom. You can add it at as a Live Bookmark, or cram this link into a feed reader. You can even feed that feed to your personal Google page.

I am excited. We are about to get hit by a tsunami of amazingness, and I don’t see it stopping before the end of the year. Next month sees the return of Lost and The OC – the two most addictive programmes ever – and finishes off with the release of Serenity, the film of the third-best series ever, and a pretty much guaranteed entry into my elitist top films list. October is FEAR month, and given that I’ve now played the bizarrely early demo through about thirty-six times, I see myself getting lost in that pretty hard. Somewhere in that interim Hitman: Blood Money and Call Of Duty 2 are both due, but take that with a pinch of salt until you hear it from someone who knows anything. Contracts left a bitter taste in my mouth, so excitement over Blood Money is running low, and Call Of Duty 2’s promise is basically that it’ll put you through living hell, but both are bound to be an experience. I feel like I am owed Dreamfall fairly soon, but I don’t know where that’s coming from.

Let’s hope all that happens before mid-November, because in all probability subsequent events will be rendered irrelevant. I will not be playing other games for a few months. For the purposes of that claim, ‘reality’ counts as a game. I am waiting, of course, longing for sweet, sweet Oblivion. Which has Wonder Woman in it.

Quest Ideas

1. The Invincible Hero

You are ein superhero – perhaps of your own design. One super-power that wouldn’t be up to you, though, is invincibility. You cannot die.

But wait! Where would the challenge be?

I put it to you, sir, that you cannot die in any game. Termination of your current existence leads to reloading of an old savegame, or respawning in a different location. In the first case, the death is erased from history and never happened, and the second is not death by any sane definition of the word. Death, look it up, is pretty permanent.

Currently, games punish you for your character expiring. A huge problem with all games is that they don’t know by how much – the inconvenience may be a matter of replaying the last few seconds, or trundling down the road from the respawn point (not just deathmatch games – WoW and San Andreas both use this). Or it could be hours of work, or a huge, utterly dull journey back to where you were. This is disastrous. It’s enormously off-putting to new gamers, incredibly frustrating for existing ones, and any dissatisfaction you felt with the game – particularly if it’s related to the reason for your character’s demise – is magnified tenfold. Modern games like Half-Life 2 do a good job at trying to limit this, with both frequent auto-saves and unlimited quicksaves (of which, by the way, it stores your last two – an achingly sensible precaution I’ve been begging for for years). I’d like to see time-based autosaves (every five minutes, keeps the latest two of these) in tandem with crucial event autosaves (so you can go back and make an important decision differently hours later) and manual quicksaves (for the personal touch). But let’s see what happens if you can’t die.

Superheroes don’t die a lot anyway – hardly ever. The risk is never their own demise, it’s that they might fail. And the objective they might fail at is almost always saving someone.

But wait! Failing is just like dying, only worse because you don’t see why you should have to restart when you’re not dead.

Yeah. Let’s do away with that too.

So you can’t fail?

The exact opposite: you can fail. It’s okay. You carry on. Lives were lost, it was partially your fault, but there’s no reason to force you to erase that part of your life and save everyone.

What’s to stop people reloading and making sure they do save everyone?

There’s no overwhelming reason to stop this, but I will anyway just because it ought to be interesting: you can’t save. You can pause the game, in case the phone rings or whatever, and when you quit the game it auto-saves before it exits, but when you start it back up it loads that save and deletes it. Short of restarting the game completely, you have to live with your mistakes.

So how do enemies stop you from saving people?

By killing them, duh. There are three ways for this to work:

a) The hostage situation. Easily the best excuse for stealth in any game – you have to take out the hostage-takers before they realise an attempt to do so is even underway. If they smell a rat, they’ll do it. Sometimes you’ll save one but in doing so alert another HT and lose the corresponding H or Hs. Sometimes you’ll do it perfectly, an artwork of silent takedowns, goon avoidance and lateral thinking. Sometimes you’ll screw it up and everyone will die, and however many goons you beat up in vengeance, you’ll still feel empty inside and you’ll still know it was your fault. This is what games should be all about – making you feel bad.

b) The time limit. There’s nothing stopping you, but bullets will slow you, enemies will wrestle you to the ground and powerful blows will knock you down. And if you don’t get to the bomb before it detonates – the psycho before he reaches the victims – the controls before the plane crashes – hundreds of people will die. Being fast means dodging bullets, incapacitating nasty bad guys swiftly and dashing by the rest.

c) The villain. He’s as fast as you, as strong as you and also completely invincible. He’ll pounce on you as you try to get to the innocents or the weapon of mass destruction and throw you to the floor, fling you across the room, grab you by the neck, smash you to the ground. Sometimes it’ll be the other way around – he’s trying to get to the objective and you’re trying to stop him. In both cases it’s a case of administering a blow that causes your opponent enough grief to give you time to get to the objective and do what you need to do before they catch you up. I’d love to see a system whereby prone-time is proportional to the force in newtons administered to your head – so if you use the physics system perfectly and drop the corner of a concrete block on his eye, he’s down for the count.

Naturally any mission could be a combination of these – you only have a certain time after the goons discover you to get to the hostages before the villain does, and if you meet each other first it’s the fight that’ll determine the winner. It should also go without saying that we’ll need a ragdoll recovery system, whereby someone flung across the room with ragdoll physics knows how to get back up and into normal animations without too big a glitch. No small feat, but I’ve heard it’s now possible. Knocking a villain down will allow you to drag him into a position to be victim to an even more devastating attack – chuck him under a falling block of masonry, throw him into a meat-grinder. And being invincible shouldn’t mean this stuff doesn’t hurt – getting shot in the face should be a blackout as well as a knockdown, and when you awake in a second’s time, you’re groggy and weak. A good punch causes vision blurring, and sometimes you’ll be taking so many hits you can hardly see or run in a straight line.

Success would mean feeling like a real hero, genuinely making a meaningful difference and feeling cool. Failure would be tragedy rather than irritation – no chore, no inconvenience, just irreplacable loss and anger at yourself. Sadness is something other mediums relish in making you feel, but games aren’t very good at yet. It is – like fear on a rollercoaster – a good thing. Irritation is never good, and games are extraordinarily adept at inspiring it at the moment.

Quest Que C’est?

The missions are rubbish in San Andreas. I’m sure there are good ones, it’s just that they are, on the whole, as I say, rubbish. They seem blissfully unaware that the AI is egregious, and repeatedly force you to rely on NPCs whose incompetence is so complete that it often seems like suicidal depression.

The quests in World Of Warcraft are rubbish. Again, some stand-outs, but 97.3% of them are utterly mindless, even if they are prefaced by some awkwardly strained attempt to dress the brain-killingly monotonous formula in some kind of fantasy trappings.

But those are easy targets – two games I’ve played a lot but have no great love for. Let’s stab closer to my heart: Eve’s agent missions are rubbish. I enjoyed one once, but in Eve it’s not even a case of similar or formulaic ones. You get the same mission, word-for-word, time and time again.

City Of Heroes has the best missions of any MMOG I’ve played. They are, nevertheless, rubbish.

/cry

Back in the days when the denominations of our time were ‘levels’, bad ones were things you hit and got stuck on – they were chips on a smooth surface. With MMOGs and GTA games, we occasionally run into good ones. And we have this sad little thrill of pleasure, and like the game more for it. We’re being- what’s the opposite of spoilt? Unspoilt? Things suck.

The First Rule Of A Positive Blog

I’m not allowed to complain about anything except as a precursor to saying what we should be doing instead. I only let myself bitch about Elite Force 2 and Jedi Academy because I was leading into describing the ideal Star Trek and Star Wars games. Additionally, I must keep the solution very short, specific about alternatives, and universally applicable. This is the checklist for good quests. Every quest must be a good one, since quests are 91.2% of what we do in these games.

1. Why The Hell Should I?

Guild Wars was a revelation for me. It’s not a MMOG, but if it was I couldn’t have said what I said about City Of Heroes. I loved the missions. I hungered for them, completed them with relish, happily retried if they proved too tough. Were they better missions? A little, not enough to account for this difference in attitude. I loved them because they said “Primary Quest” in green next to them. I was saving the world. Remember that? The thing we do, in all games? When you step down from “Because the world depends on it, man! Save us!” to “Because an irritating prick told you to,” or “For 10 copper pieces and a piece of cheese,” excuse us for pressing Alt+F4 and having a cup of tea if at first we don’t succeed.

In World Of Warcraft, you have absolutely no goal. It is a completely aimless game. You just trundle around talking to people to see if you can do favours for cheese, or a sword you can’t use. It’s not a deal-breaker if the quests are good, but whenever you’re on one you don’t like or find frustrating – which for me was all of them – you’re seconds from giving up. It’s just cheese. You don’t have to do it. Find someone else to do a favour for.

The lesson: tell me what to do. Give me a million sidequests and let me roam the world at will, but give me a categorical imperative, a meaning to my life, something to work towards. In WoW it could be as simple as highlighting one quest-giver in green and saying that’s your guy, make sure you do all his misions eventually.

2. I Do Not Care That Jeffrey Is Dead. Jeffrey Was A Moron Who Got What He Fucking Deserved.

If Jeffrey can’t fucking hack the mission, why doesn’t Jeffrey stay at fucking home and let someone with actual fucking cognitive abilities do the fucking mission? And if he won’t, when Jeffrey dies, it is not my fucking fault. I’m sick, sick to death – we are all sick to fucking death – of babysitting digital idiots. Sick to fucking death. Death. Sick. Fucking. Cut these missions. If they’re central to your game, kill yourself. We hate you.

But wait! In Guild Wars a quest-giver will frequently accompany you on the quest! Yes. It was brilliant. I loved all these missions, and I never got frustrated with them. It helped that the AI was good, the NPCs tough and effective, but the lion’s share of the difference was that I could resurrect them if they did die. If their good AI and high hitpoints failed them, it still wasn’t mission failed. A masterstroke. If you’re thinking this couldn’t be carried across to GTA, perhaps you’ve never died in GTA. In fact, none of us have. You can’t. You’re incapacitated, and you get revived in hospital. Why not give me that revive ability? I don’t even need defibrillators or a medkit, I could do CPR or even just help the guy up. The mission is only lost if I can’t do that, because I failed.

3. Don’t Make Me Repeat Myself.

If I’ve done a mission, Eve, City Of Heroes, it goes on my permanent record. This guy has done that. That information is as precious as what level I am, what items I own. Never, ever ask me to do it again. GTA – your new travel skip feature is a baby step in the right direction, but falls woefully short of eliminating the repetition that makes your missions such a chore. What you fail to realise is that the huge drag is not driving from the quest-giver to the quest, it’s driving back to the quest-giver to ‘get’ the quest again before you can retry it. If I die, let me drive from the hospital to the mission. Let the mission be as I left it. If I fail – and I strongly advise against missions with fail conditions – reset the location and start me just outside it. That is, if you’re not going to let me save. MMOGs have an excuse for that, you don’t. Not even console memory limitations – you’ll let me save, but not when it would actually save me some time. You also force me to spend ten thousand dollars on a nearby house just so I can save the game when I need to quit – which is usually because I’m so fucking sick of repeating myself.

That’s it, actually. Quests already have ideas, content, characters – they only need to avoid three things that make them dull and frustrating, and they’ve made it to goodness. We could be spoiled again. It’s all obvious stuff, but I and every angry forumite around aren’t going to shut up about it until they are recognised as rules, not suggestions to try on one or two.

Still to come: I have totally had some awesome ideas for interesting new types of quests that someone should try.

WordPress Wizard

Reasons To Freeze To Death

John Walker lauded my musical taste when he heard The Mountain Goats coming out of my speakers a few weeks ago, but in fact it was not my doing. Soma FM’s consistently excellent Indie Pop Rocks (But College Rock Sucks) station was choosing my music at the time. I’m ashamed to say that I hadn’t even noticed that a particularly good song was playing, such is the usual standard. But I have now investigated, after he enthused so keenly, and lo, they are le awesome.

Rainy – before you ask – wistful, impossibly pretty acoustic indie folk, is how I would crudely characterise it. It made me think of Molasses and Neutral Milk Hotel, but they have all the earnest charm and arcane lyrics of The Decemberists and when they get silly, as they do on Dance Music, it’s as much fun as when Jeffrey Lewis does. If you don’t know who any of those people are, you might not like them. But since you can get an MP3 right here, you don’t have to risk it. And if you do like it, check out all those other people. The linked track, You Or Your Memory, is one of the softest, but firmly a grower and my current favourite. Hast Thou Considered The Tetrapod is a close second.

I’m basing all this on their latest, The Sunset Tree, since that’s all I know. That’s what you should get, by your preferred method, and listen to immediately. I haven’t found myself so absorbed by the atmosphere of an album since discovering the Ugly Casanova one a few Christmasses ago. It’s one to get lost in.

Phew

Turns out the last item on my Redesign To-Do List – “Shoehorn old text into new template” – was the hardest. I still have bits to add to the Film and Television sections, but they’re bits I don’t care an awful lot about, so it’s debatable that I should waste your time with them.

Checklist for the new design:

• Fills screen
• Co-opts ‘trendy’ rounded corners
• Mutilates WordPress to own evil ends
• Heavy Flickr exploitation
• Comments over-promoted

I think that’s most of it. The last one means that your comments appear on the front page, letting you graffiti and deface this site as you please. The main purpose of this drawn-out conversion to WordPress was to enable comments, so please scrawl on everything, especially the ‘Best X’ type pages. You don’t need to log in, all fields are optional and comments are unmoderated so they’ll appear right away.

If I could also direct your attention to the rewritten Games section, the three new Philosophy sections, and the new Comics and Blogs links. The free MP3s linked in the top right there will get updated (in fact, they already have been before this went up, so I’ll switch the old ones in after a while). Brace yourself for the odd broken link there, because I’m pointing you to other people who’ve uploaded them, and they may get scared. To my knowledge they’re legally free tracks, but you never know.

I discovered there’s been a new trailer for the Firefly film, Serenity, since the one I saw. Head over to Television for a link. I could paste it here, of course, but I’m trying to get rid of you.

Apologies to anyone who disliked the crazy-long nature of the old design – I honestly thought WordPress would automatically curtail the main page and archive old posts, but it doesn’t seem to. I’ll work out how to do it manually before it gets too long.

Lastly, the reason all the posts here are about specific things is just that I’ve been posting and reposting the content for the media sections – normally it’ll be mostly more traditional blog-style posts here.

Futurama

It’s incredibly rare, even among these great programmes, for the main character to be my favourite, but Fry definitely is. He doesn’t fit easily into any established stereotype – he’s an idiot but not to the extent of Homer, he’s a loser but not everything goes wrong, he’s hopeless with women but dated Amy, and he’s inept at everything except computer games. To me, he’s a modern-day hero: vain and stupid whilst nerdy and unpopular.

He’s a pizza-delivery boy who falls into a cryo chamber on the turn of the millenium and is defrosted a thousand years later. He befriends a heartless alcoholic bending robot called Bender (it takes a few episodes to get used to the fact that one of the characters is called Bender) and a renegade career-implant officer, the one-eyed Leela. They find work as the illegally underpaid delivery company owned by Fry’s descendant, the senile mad scientist Professor Farnsworth. Also in the company are Zoidberg, an incompetent lobster-alien doctor; Amy, a rich and clueless intern the Professor keeps on because she has the same blood type as him; and Hermes, a Jamaican bureaucrat.

The other main component of Futurama’s appeal is that it’s set in the future – the world is richly imagined and exciting, which takes it to a completely different level to The Simpsons. Cleverly, the satire of The Simpsons isn’t lost in the transition to the year 3000 either – roughly half of everything in the future is a comment on something in the present – and the humour itself is somewhere further in the senseless and crazy directions than The Simpsons. In one shot of a storage cupboard, two folders on a shelf are labelled ‘P’ and ‘NP’ – implying that by 3000AD a mathematical conundrum over the computability of a certain class of algorithms has been resolved. Matt Groening is kind of a nerd himself, but here he’s teamed with David X Cohen, and the team nerdiness level is at such dangerous heights that one DVD commentary mentions they regularly play D&D in their lunchbreaks.

Lastly, the sideline characters that crop up in just a few episodes are among the greatest ever devised: most notably Clamps, Flexo, Morbo, the Robot Devil, the generic fat mechanic guy, Santa Claus, Horrible Gelatinous Blob, the Harlem Globetrotters, That Guy and Elzar. I think quotes do more good conveying the appeal of Futurama, and luckily I have thousands of them.

Series Notes: the first three series are interchangeably great, then the fourth starts with a run of mind-blowingly good episodes, the premiere being probably my favourite ever, and so epic and exciting that it leaves me feeling like I’ve seen Futurama: The Film. It doesn’t stay that good, though, and then series five has two, maybe even three episodes that are basically worthless. The others are as great as the old stuff, but those few anomalies don’t even have a single joke in them that makes me feel bad about writing them off like this.

Quotes:

Soldier: This is the worst part: the calm before the battle.
Fry: And then the battle isn’t so bad?
Soldier: Oh, right. I forgot about the battle.

(a crustacean confiscates Bender’s cigar)
Bender: Wait, I need that to smoke!

(Bender is caught having stolen the priceless atomic tiara)
Bender: Wait, I can explain! It’s very valuable!

Bender: (to a turtle) Maybe you’d feel better if I had a drink.

Bender: (to a turtle) At least we’ll die on our backs, helpless.

Al Gore: And next up we have Professor-
Professor Farnsworth: I demand the floor!
Al Gore: Well, yes, it’s your turn to speak.
Professor Farnsworth: Well nuts to me! I’m taking the stage.

Fry: Hey, you have no right to criticize the 20th century! We gave the world the light bulb, the steam boat and the cotton gin.
Leela: Those things are all from the 19th century.
Fry: Yeah, well, they probably just copied us.

Fry: It’s just like the story of the grasshopper and the octopus. All year long, the grasshopper kept burying acorns for the winter, while the octopus mooched off his girlfriend and watched TV. But then the winter came, and the grasshopper died, and the octopus ate all his acorns. And also he got a racecar. Is any of this getting through to you?

Leela: We’re going to deliver this crate like professionals.
Fry: Aw. Can’t we just dump it in the sewer and say we delivered it?
Bender: Too much work! I say we burn it, then say we dumped it in the sewer!

Leela: That’s Zapp Brannigan’s ship!
Fry: The Zapp Brannigan?
Fry: (confused) Who’s the Zapp Brannigan?

Leela: Stop it, Bender, we don’t need to beg.
Fry: So what do you suggest? A daring daylight robbery of Fort Knox on elephant-back? That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard.

Leela: Where’s Fry?
Bender: I didn’t kill him. Professor?
Professor Farnsworth: No, I’ve been busy.

(Fry has Bender dig up his brother’s grave to take back a lucky clover he stole)
Bender: Paydirt! I got the clover, and his wedding ring. Sorry ladies, I’m taken! Hey Fry, you want me to smack the corpse up a little?

Bender: (carrying pillows) These aren’t very heavy, but you don’t hear me not complaining.

Bender: (locking Leela in the laundry room as part of a mutiny) Don’t worry Leela, soon we’ll be able to look back on all this and laugh. Ahahahahahaa!

Bender: (the ship is going down with Leela, Bender and Fry still aboard) Leela, save me! And yourself I guess! And my banjo! … And Fry!

Zapp Brannigan: (explaining his military plan) If we can hit that bullseye the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards. Checkmate!

(Fry is styling his hair in the exhaust of the ship’s engines)
Leela: Fry, do you have any idea how long it takes to reconfigure those engines?
Fry: When you look this good, you don’t need to know anything.

(Leela is proposing staying at her artificially reduced age rather than returning to her normal one)
Professor Farnsworth: (horrified) But you’ll have no way to return to your normal age except growing up, as God intended!

(Leela and Bender confront the Professor)
Leela: We’ve got to talk to you about Fry.
Bender: Yeah! We want some money! Wait, what’s this about Fry?

(Fry is staying with Bender)
Fry: Where’s the bathroom?
Bender: Bathwhat?
Fry: Bathroom.
Bender: Whatroom?
Fry: Bathroom!
Bender: Whatwhat?

Bender: Of all the friends I’ve had, you’re the first.

(Fry is preparing to revive his fossilised dog)
Bender: A dog, eh? Interesting… no wait, what’s that other one? Tedious…

(Bender and the others are ascending the side of a hotel, Bender looking in on the guests)
Bender: Get a room, you two!
Man: We’re in a room.
Bender: Then lose some weight!

Clips: native.avi (12MB) rock.mpg (3MB)