TOM FRANCIS
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Muxed Feelings

Muxtape has provided my working soundtrack almost exclusively the last week or so. It’s a Super-Simple Service that lets you upload twelve songs, lets anyone listen to them, and ‘favourite’ them. I only just discovered the latter. I was highly enjoying this tape and thinking to myself “I love that this whole site is so laser-focused on what it does, but I do wish there was a way to bookmark the ones you like. Oh, there it is.”

After a long quest to get Seedling’s The Upshot in MP3 format (alas, no OGGs on Mux), mine is complete. Here’s what’s on it and why:

Cat Power – Willie
There’s a lot of classy, soulful, plonking ballads to pick from on The Greatest, but this one just seems to make everything okay. Something about its expansive confidence and nonchalant pace.

Mates of State – Goods (All In Your Head)
This was just written for late summer sunsets, turning from giddily exciting to wistful and almost sad with no audible seam.

Seedling – The Upshot
There’s something beautifully emphatic about the cut-down arrangement of this, the forcefully plucked strings behind her resigned voice. Disastrously, the band split years ago, and they’re obscure enough that they don’t even have a Wikipedia page. My only consolation is that I got to hug them all at their final gig.

New Pornographers – Chump Change
By rights I should have gone with The Laws Have Changed, but I think I over-listened to it. Skimming through my shortlist, the opening bars of Chump Change just elicit a smile like no other track.

Architecture In Helsinki – Debbie
Clever, rhythmic, curling and bizarre. It says something for the propulsive blithering of the chorus that I can tell you, without checking, that it goes, “Hey there, hey there, let me down down, Debbie down, Debbie Debbie Debbie down down Debbie down, Debbie down, Debbie Debbie down down down down.”

Decemberists – The Legionnaire’s Lament
This is the one track of theirs I can listen to endlessly without ever tiring of its neat lyricism and heartfelt botch of authenticity. Any song whose narrator’s camel is in disrepair gets extra credit.

Sparks – Dick Around
Manic, preposterous, majestic rock opera epic, without even the slightest wink or nod to the absurdity of penning such a thing with ‘dick’ in the title.

M̼m РGreen Grass of Tunnel
I don’t think there’s another track during which you could scientifically measure the increase in my body temperature as it starts. It’s warm and enveloping in a way a sound alone surely cannot be.

Low – Canada
The slowcore king and queen of sinister are actually at their most impressive when they veer into other moods and sounds. Canada isn’t exactly upbeat, but it rocks extraordinarily.

Delgados – Favours
Booming, crashing and beautiful. The churning chorus reaches such an exhaustingly elevated pitch and holds it for so long that you finish half-wanting to gasp for breath on Emma Pollock’s behalf.

Ben Folds – Rockin’ The Suburbs
Quite apart from being ridiculous fun, it’s time I acknowledged the genius who unwittingly wrote the ‘About’ section of James for me. As musically worthwhile satire goes, I don’t think any other song so utterly annihilates this many hateful songwriters with its first two lines.

M83 – Lower Your Eyelids To Die With The Sun
You’ll know if you’re going to hate this in the first thirty seconds – and the chance that you will is the reason it’s at the end. But if you don’t, everything you do for the next nine minutes of your life will be unaccountably profound. This is normal.

There’s also MuxFind, which lets you search for Muxtapes featuring music ‘similar to’ a band or song you search for. Since there are a lot of Muxtapes, that tends to mean you find the song you’re looking for. And can play it free. Clearly there’s a legal explosive ticking away beneath this, but for now it remains an awesome way to find lovingly compiled collections of stuff you’ve never heard but which bears a spiritual connection to what you’ve searched for. It’s a much stronger and more effective form of recommendation than automated social aggregation like Last.fm or comparitive content analysis like Pandora.

You Don’t Have To Be An Engy To Work Here But You Do

If you don’t habitually read six thousand words of comments after a scrollbar-breakingly long post, you may have missed that Cloak Raider’s put together an awesome comic strip of my suggestions for the Engineer unlockables, using Garry’s Mod. The portable Sentry in particular is winsome to the max: I picture the Engy pushing it round like a trolley. The wheels are even little Team Fortress 2 logos, although that might just be coincidence. Click through for the full thing:

Looks like Valve had a chance to get started on my list while I was away. Nice work so far, guys, but in future I’d appreciate it if you’d run any name-changes by me first.

Someone Already Made An Ubersaw

Who? I’ll give you a clue: it was one of these two:

Check also out this one:

By she:

Ow.

Team Fortress 2 Unlockable Weapon Ideas

Update: This post was written in May 2008, when only the Medic had new weapons. Since then, some weapons have been added that have similar concepts to these. Valve even gave me a special sparkly Equalizer (similar to the Last Ditch Digger here) and a lovely shoutout in the Solider update.

Obviously we’ve all thought about this a bit at one point or another. I thought the most interesting way of doing it would be to think up just one alternative to every weapon, device and ability in the game. Then I realised there are 29 of them, and did it anyway. I hadn’t originally planned on illustrating them – for reasons I hope will be obvious once you see my illustrations – that just kind of happened. Sorry. Continued

A Riposte To Valve’s Defense Of PC Gaming

For when Deus Ex runs at double-speed on your dual-core processor, Assassin’s Creed adds compulsory black bars to your 4:3 monitor, Crysis locks off options you know your graphics card can handle, or your newly installed Mass Effect refuses to run because your broadband is down, bookmark this image. Come back here, watch it a few more times, and feel the flappy-limbed catharsis. I know I will.

I feel like this all the time.

Via this awesome thread Tim found in his Google Blogs RSS feed for the term ‘PC Gamer’. What say you to that, O champions of the medium?

Sire, My Regard For You Is This Big

I promise not to become someone who links everything they ever do anywhere, as if the mere fact of their involvement is reason enough for you to care. But I happen to have posted two things that fit within James’ remit on the PC Gamer blog recently. Jim mentioned today that he’d tried to look it up online with no luck, to which my mental reaction was “Dear God, he’s right! The world needs to know about Thedret the Exaggerator!”

As far as I know, the steps described in this article should let anyone create their own Exaggerator, but I’ve never tried to repeat the phenomenon. It would seem to undermine it, somehow.

Crysis Suit Modes Revisited

Just got round to revisiting Crysis on my new machine – the torture-test for high-end hardware. And it’s good news: everything on maximum at 1600×1200 purs along at 30fps. I say maximum, I haven’t tried the hack to enable all the DX10 stuff under DX9 yet – I will do.

After I first played it, I wrote a post about how I’d change all the Nanosuit’s augmentation modes if it were up to me, but it was lost in the great hard drive failure of recently. Replaying now, I find that I agree with myself entirely, and repeat my thoughts here for your amusement:

Cloak: the problem with Cloak as it stands is that it provides an extremely effective but rather tedious way to play. Cloak, run forwards ten metres, lie down in the nearest bush, decloak and wait for it to recharge. That’s fine in the middle of tense combat against multiple enemies, but most of your time is spent exploring a new, densely forested area where you don’t know if there are enemies are not. You instinctively want to approach cautiously, as you should, but the cautious option just takes a really long time and often turns out to have been pointless because there was no-one around anyway.

I’d like a Cloak mode that drains suit power at a rate proportional to how visible you are. I.e. how much work it has to do to keep you hidden. If no-one’s actually nearby and looking in your direction, it drains no power because it doesn’t have to do anything. But if you’re right in front of someone and they’re looking right at you, it drains rapidly because it’s having to render you entirely invisible. Your suit already knows how clearly you’re being seen by enemies – there’s a meter for it in the bottom left of your HUD.

It’d let you explore safely when you don’t know if there are enemies around, and when your suit power starts to drain, you find cover and look out for enemies. But if you’re in the middle of a firefight and want to slip by your enemies, you only have a small window to do so. Right now, I can just walk away from any firefight at any time, which makes them all a little easy.

Speed: at the moment this makes you go a little faster, makes your sprint speed preposterously fast, and then has a third, in-between speed for when you’ve run out of energy but are still sprinting. Your super-fast sprint exhausts all your suit energy in a second or two, which makes you feel a bit like you’re running on five year-old Duracell batteries. It’s one of those design decisions where they wanted to give you an extreme ability, but couldn’t find a way to balance it without an extreme nerf, and the result is rather awkward.

I’d want that third fast-but-not-crazy-fast speed to be the normal movement speed in Speed mode. Speed. The super-jumping of Strength mode should be part of Speed mode instead, and I really liked Jedi Knight’s system of being able to charge a jump by holding the key before releasing – so that you can still do small hops. None of this should drain your suit energy, but it also shouldn’t regenerate unless you’re standing still.

Holding the Sprint key wouldn’t make you go any faster, it’d slow down the world around you instead. The only games that don’t need slow-mo are the ones that already have it.

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Armour: here the problem is that if I know I’m about to be taking fire, the absolute last mode I want to be in is Armour. Because it’s the only mode in which shots drain your suit energy, which deprives you of the only two effective ways to escape a sticky situation: cloaking or super-sprinting.

Clearly, it shouldn’t. Instead of absorbing damage like an extra health bar, it should work the way armour normally does: full energy means you only take half-damage, no energy means you take full. Energy neither regenerates nor drains when in armour mode.

Except when you press Sprint. This would render you completely invulnerable until you run out of energy, but you move like the walking tank that you are: slowly. It’d let you pull stunts like cloaking to the middle of the road when you see an enemy Humvee coming, then switching to Armour and going invuln to make them crash into you. Or similarly, surviving a head-on vehicular collision that results in an explosion fatal to everyone else involved. Or throwing yourself off a huge drop and surviving. Or wading towards an angry tank, planting a detpack on it, and blowing it up right in your own face.

Strength: so the problem with Strength mode right now is that it outright fucking sucks. It should be the coolest mode, but everything you do in it drains nearly all your energy, and is woefully less effective than simply shooting people. Also, shooting people drains your energy. Jesus.

As I say, jumping has no place in this mode, it shouldn’t be about mobility, it should be about hitting stuff. A Strength-mode punch or melee attack should always kill, obviously, and furthermore should flip a Humvee like it ain’t no thing. Hell, you should be able to flip a tank if you can get right up to it and hold ‘Pick up’ long enough. I have no objection to Strength mode steadying your grip with weapons, as it currently does, but causing that to rapidly drain your vital suit-juice is just the most despicable and moronic form of the Limit Everything design philosophy.

Sprint mode would be a kind of murderous charge, barreling forth shoulder-first and canoning anything you hit flying out of your way – including vehicles and walls.

Don’t Make Me Play Football Manager

“Portrait? I don’t have a photo ready for this, but I’ll see what I’ve got in My Documents. Ah yes, an animated GIF Tim sent me of David Hasselhoff wearing David Hasselhoff briefs, which zooms into his crotch recursively, forever. Perfect.”

Over at the PC Gamer blog today, the full story of my doomed attempt to play the one game I know for sure I’ll hate: Football Manager. It doesn’t go well.

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.

“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.

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