TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

Hyperthreaded Depleted Uranium Turbothanks

To anyone who nominated me for a Games Media Award. I am a finalist! With any other award it’d be corny and false to say the nomination is what counts, but with GMAs that’s actually true. Like last year, the nominations are open to the public but the judging is by a panel of games media types and PRs. I’d love to win this year, but I’ll be honest, I’m not super concerned about my popularity among games media types and PRs. The really nice thing is to have a bunch of people put your name forward out of the blue.

In return, I will try to be slightly less inadequate over the next week about posting stuff, both here and on PCG. Starting with some fun news from Valve about Team Fortress 2 I’ve only just had time to write up, and a short series of stupid posts here that have nothing to do with anything. Yes. This plan makes sense.

If you are a judge, you don’t have to vote for me, but you should definitely vote for:

• PC Gamer for Games Magazine. We’re actually pretty good. The thing I really enjoy about our mag these days is being able to read a preview knowing it’s not just going to be, “This looks like a game that has some classes and some weapons and the graphics seem good”. There’s going to be something mechanically or conceptually interesting and we’re actually going to spend the words telling you about that. Also we do reviews. Oh no! That’s mine! How did that get there?
   
• Rich McCormick for Rising Star. Rich has already established himself in our office as the person capable of the most tortured pun when we’re sitting around coming up with headlines, and this company is the Abu Ghraib of pun torture. Here’s his piece on Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden. It’s a crime that Jaz McDougall isn’t also up for this slot, partly because it would lead to hilarious in-office brawling, and partly because his work on PCGamer.com is making me laugh every day.
   
• Christian Donlan for Specialist Writer Online. I’m also a fan of Simon, Ellie and Dave, but I think I’m right in saying this is the first time Christian’s been up for this, and it’s way overdue. His stuff on Eurogamer and in Edge always shines, and he is quite literally The Nicest Man In Games Journalism, a title which I must some day kill him to steal.

Machine Of Death Is Out In Two Months

That short story collection I wrote for, Machine of Death, is actually getting published. It’s out in October, in big floppy paperback, and it’s going to be illustrated. It includes stories by:

• Randall XKCD Munroe
• Ben Zero Punctuation Croshaw (who I just interviewed)
• Ryan Dinosaur Comics North
• Tom Who’s Writing This Francis

Illustrated by people including:

• John Scary Go Round Allison
• Kate Hark! A Vagrant Beaton
• Aaron Dresden Codak Diaz
• Dorothy Cat And Girl Gambell
• Christopher Dr McNinja Hastings

I have no idea who’s illustrating mine yet, but you can’t really lose with this list. The final lineup very charitably calls my story ‘brutal, desperate and real’, so it’d be kind of hilarious to see Kate Beaton do it.

I have a flight to catch and a lot to do before and on it, so hasn’t totally sunk in yet. Here’s my story, and here’s the comic that inspired the collection. Oh yeah, and here’s the awesome cover:

Private Dick

I’m making a game! I will probably never finish it! But I thought I’d start talking about it anyway, to keep my goals straight and get feedback on my ideas as I go.

I’m doing it because Spelunky, one of my favourite games ever, was made by one guy in a program called Game Maker. Obviously it doesn’t follow that “If design/coding/art genius Derek Yu can do it, I can too!” But it does make you realise that game-making programs aren’t just for shitty test games. Since that was pretty much my last remaining excuse for not doing this thing I’ve had a constant urge to do most of my adult life, I started doing it.

My game is about a little dude in a trenchcoat who sorts out – or completely screws up – delicate problems like hostage situations, with a few pseudo-science special abilities. He’s sort of a drunk, asshole Inspector Gadget – hence the working title, Private Dick.

I wanted to see if, with little time, less talent and no experience, I could make a game that would achieve some of the things I’ve always wanted from the games I play. I want a game where:

A gun going off is a big deal. Existing games tend to be divided into ones where guns go off constantly, and ones where guns don’t exist. The latter don’t have enough guns for my tastes, and in the former guns become meaningless. You shot a man in Reno? I shot 384 men 7 times each in Vegas, and I still didn’t complete that game. The reason guns are an exciting element in a thriller is that they can enact sudden, massive, shocking, permanent change. I want to see them play that role in a game.

Failure isn’t terminal. In most games, you do what you’re supposed to or you die and retry. Even if you don’t physically die, failure means a restart. I want a game where life goes on if you fail the mission, and most of the ways you can fail don’t kill you. The story adapts to the outcome of your missions, and death is a rare, shocking, worst-case scenario. I don’t want anyone to have to repeat anything unless it makes no sense to continue. Edit: More on this in the comments.

You can change things in non-destructive ways. You can change them in destructive ones too, but that comes as standard in gaming. I don’t know if I can make anything you could meaningfully call emergent with my resources, but I want to make a game whose levels you can tinker with, reconfigure to your liking, and see those reconfigurations interact with each other – not just with you.

Movement is superhuman, but constrained by physics. I need it to be superhuman because I want getting around to be quick and satisfying, but I want it to be physically coherent. Most games don’t do this: almost all platformers let you move your guy around while he’s in the air, by some unexplained force. I’m not going to do anything fancy with physics in my game, and it’s not going to be primarily about movement the way platformers are, but I want the movement to make physical sense. Anything that doesn’t isn’t convincing to me, and that hurts a game’s feel.

It’s this last thing I’ve been working on so far, a few evenings a week. I’ve nearly got it FYS – Functional, Yet Shit. This is my standard for implimenting a mechanic before moving on – there’s no sense fine tuning or fully animating until I know how it fits in with everything else. Getting movement to that point will put me about 10% of the way to a playable level that includes all the main elements I want in this game. I’ll be surprised if it takes less than six months, sad if it takes more than a year, and amazed if I stick with it that long.

Writing about it here is one way I’m trying to improve its chances of reaching a playable stage. Explaining it to someone else forces me to keep my thinking clear, explaining it to you guys might be a good way to get feedback, and explaining it publicly makes giving up all the more embarrassing. So far I haven’t told you much, but if you’ve ever worked on a game I’d love to hear any general advice.

I’m already ignoring the golden rule: focus on one thing and do it well. I don’t know what I can do well yet, or what’s worth doing well, so I’m roughing out everything that might work and I’ll focus from there.

My plan is to talk more about what I’ve done so far than my future plans, so I’ll write about movement once it’s FYS.

On Second Thoughts, I Give Up

Where do you- I mean how do you- Why would… if… what.

The Liberal Democrats just sent me a leaflet telling me not to vote Labour because they don’t have a chance of getting in. This is a real thing that happened, not something funny Ian Hislop said.

Really, guys? You’re now sending out leaflets to promote the same moronic and anti-democratic logic that’s kept you out of power for ninety two years? This is something you’d like to do?

If you want to use exploitation and deceit to gain popularity, there’s a much less stupid way to do it. Keep your policies exactly the same, but have Clegg announce he’ll keep the Trident missile system and won’t give amnesty to long-term illegal immigrants. You’ll find you then win. At that point, feel free to scrap the Trident missile system without telling anyone, and grant amnesty to long-term illegal immigrants.

Before the debates, Kim wrote to David Cameron to ask if he had any actual policies or if his whole campaign was just about what’s wrong with Labour. She got a letter back detailing what’s wrong with Labour.

On Wednesday Gordon Brown got in trouble for calling a bigoted woman bigoted in a private conversation that Sky broadcast. Then last night he used his closing speech of the debates, his last chance to focus attention back on policies, to repeat his limpest slanders of his two opponents.

Now the Lib Dems are asking people to vote against the party they believe in to keep out a common enemy, as if this will give their one vote the game-changing power it apparently wouldn’t have if they cast it democratically.

I can’t help but notice that all three parties spend their efforts begging people not to vote for someone, and the end result is that not enough people vote.

They’ve all done a great job of killing my interest in British politics, after the televised debates briefly rekindled it, so I’ll shut up about it now.

Fresh Fox

My browser had been acting weird since I tried – and uninstalled – Tab Mix Plus in the hope of solving an age old irritation with Firefox. I open everything in new tabs, and Javascript links wake up in this new existence with no clue to where they came from or what they were supposed to do. It didn’t work, and it made a lot of other things not work, so I started from scratch. Which really makes you realise the Firefox add-ons you can’t function without.

Adblock Plus
I was kind of amazed when I reinstalled Firefox once, and was shown a recommended add-ons window with this at number one. It’s not like the dark days when the original Adblock had to be manually supplimented with an external filterset for it to eliminate anything you didn’t specifically ask it to. These days this, the recommended add-on to the recommended browser for your PC, comes with a default evolving set of filters that rip out the ads that pay for the sites you use.

It’s unequivocally website piracy, and if it actually did become widespread, the internet would stop. There’d be nothing left. Just James, I guess, Wikipedia and Twitter. Those might have ads too, I wouldn’t know, I’ve been using Adblock a lot longer than them.

Still, until it’s illegal, I’m using it. I’m virtually a communist, I think advertising is fundamentally morally wrong and would be banned in any healthy society. Luckily, in mine, it is!

Greasemonkey
This does nothing in itself, but lets you install scripts that apply only to certain websites, and redesign them to your tastes. I use this almost solely to fuck with YouTube – the star script here adds a slick little Download button below every YouTube video, giving direct hard links to the source files for the clip in a variety of resolutions and formats.

Image Zoom
All the browsers are pretty good at dealing with images larger than your screen, but a more common problem is ones that are too small. Image Zoom lets you click both mouse buttons to blow an image up to the biggest it will go in the current window. Particularly good for animated GIFs.

InFormEnter
The only thing more useful than Adblock. You type some commonly needed stuff like your username, e-mail address, real address, maybe your low-security password, and in any form you can hit a key and select one of them from a list. I got to a point in my life when if I had to fill out my details on one more fucking sign-up form, I was going to prise my Tab key out with a screwdriver and try to cut my wrists with it. InformEnter was the alternative.

Intelligent Middle Clickums
Stupid name for an updated version of an outdated extension to solve my original problem: open Javascript links in a new tab in a way that actually fucking opens them in an actual new tab. It doesn’t work for everything, but it also doesn’t break your whole goddamn browser.

Mycroft Project
Not listed above since it’s not an add-on, but a search engine. You know you can set the search box in the top right to search different sites, like Wikipedia? Well, one of the sites you can set it to search is a site of sites to search with the search box you’re searching in. I use masses of these, and I’m thinking of new ones – like Play.com or Metacritic – all the time. Mycroft’s a place where users have rolled their own custom search engines for sites like that.

No Quicktime Plugin
I don’t know about you, but the only thing I want the built-in Quicktime plugin opening is the puzzle box from Hellraiser. But by default, Firefox won’t even give you the option to download dozens of different filetypes, assuming you’ll want to force them into a horribly stretched and barely functioning proprietary Apple product instead. I used to set all these manually to ‘save to disk’, but I’ve just discovered you can click the Plugins tab in the shot above, and disable it altogether.

Avoiding Suspicion At The US Embassy

I had to visit the US Embassy in London today, to renew the Visa I need to go on press trips. They won’t let you take any electronics in there, and they won’t hold them for you either – not without ‘severe delays’ and a chance they’ll cancel your appointment, which costs $121.

So when I was heading out before dawn this morning, I put down my phone, picked up my MP3 player and left. Then I realised I was forgetting my phone and grabbed my phone, then I realised I couldn’t take my MP3 player and put back my MP3 player, then I realised I couldn’t take my phone and put back my phone, then my phone rang and I picked up my phone, put it down, picked it up, hung up, put it down and left. Continued

Month In Links: December

This is a thing I do now. Most of this stuff I mentioned on Twitter, but it’s not an ideal channel and I don’t like that I never link stuff here anymore. Continued

This Week

Woke up confused on Thursday morning, after a night spent talking to a dog with a human head, dodging feathers thrown by a woman on a rocking horse in the rafters, avoiding a man with a fox snout moulded onto his mouth, exchanging glances with a badger couple, and applauding a woman who set her nipples on fire with a candle lit by an electrified cucumber – the Future Christmas party. The text from Craig that woke me up said the new Team Fortress 2 update namechecked me. !?

The office is nuts at the moment because we’re just finishing the shortest issue cycle of the year, so we were already exhausted when we headed up to Reading for Play with PC Gamer Live: our big free LAN party. Met a lot of names I knew from comments here, as well as Twitter and the PCG blog.

The event was partly to launch our PC Gamer Top 100 site. We’ve done our Top 100 article in the new issue, now we’re gathering votes for a gigantic public one. In the mag, Deus Ex has won for the first time ever – it’d be awesome to see it win the public vote as well. Vote!

One of the main games we played there was Team Fortress 2, so Craig got in touch with Valve beforehand to see if they could lend us some cheaty weapons to hurt our readers with during the event. To their enormous credit, despite being days away from launching a major update, they did. We were able to turn ourselves into slow but nigh-invincible Medics with eternally critting bonesaws, Scout-speed Heavies with deadly boxing gloves, and Soldiers with rapid-fire rocket launchers that do one hundred times the normal damage and heal us with every hit.

The next day the update was out, and I was determined to play fair. But then Robin, who sorted these ultra-weapons out for us, showed up in one of my matches and challenged me to a ridiculous weapon duel. I’d already seen him use the rocket launcher he loaned us, so I was picturing a jousting match with that when I agreed. I hadn’t considered what Valve’s personal versions of the new Demoman weapons might be.

Powerful and on fire I can deal with, but invincible makes things tricky. It meant the match was primarily about stopping him from getting to me, which meant buffeting him with streams of rockets as he charged. Inevitably he’d get too close, and I’d have to rocket-jump away and spray a salvo down on the map as I flew.

I apologise to the many, many people killed in the crossfire, and also the people I just shot. Not everyone in the game knew who Robin worked for or guessed that my weapons were probably his doing, so some names were slung. Sorry dudes!

For those that asked, I’m afraid I don’t have my ‘special’ pickaxe to show you yet – looks like there are still some teething problems with this update that ought to be ironed out first. I think it’ll be a regular pickaxe with a subtle sparkle to it and eventually a custom name, rather than a cheat-o-matic megapick. I still plan to use it to the exclusion of all else.

The rest of the week was consumed by stuff you don’t care about, but it’s been awesome and exhausting in equal measure. I think we might finally be approaching the relaxing part of Christmas, so today I do nothing that doesn’t have ‘Fortress’, ‘Commander’ or ‘Trek’ in the title.

The Year In Forty Photos

I won’t bore you with any kind of account of my year, but here are some photos I took during it. I guess I didn’t take all of them since I’m in some of them, but I don’t remember so good about those ones.

I’ve been working my way through Said the Gramophone’s 75 tracks of the year with an odd cocktail of revulsion and delight. Among the delight, this wonderful song by Vic Chesnutt. Often songs that aren’t about what they seem to be about never let you in on the twist – it was years before I realised Belle & Sebastian’s Century of Elvis was about a cat. Vic’s is from the school of “Two minutes in, just come out and say it.” Continued

The Decline Of Mr Sad

Finally had to throw out my Halloween pumpkin yesterday – he was not in a good state.

New York

Restaurant at London Heathrow misunderstands the relationship between round pegs and square holes with their Asian menu.

In the seven years since I was last at Ground Zero, they have put up a banner with a link to a website where you can read about the progress you’re not seeing.

A melted girder from the World Trade Center at the memorial museum.

A thousand paper cranes.

Kim and I wandered into this weird, twisting, faintly industrial shopping center somewhere in the meatpacking district.

A Mexican Day of the Dead vignette (I think) in a shop window.

This is where you start in Deus Ex.

This is me playing Deus Ex near where you start in Deus Ex.

Manhattan seen from Liberty Island.

A statue seen on Liberty Island.

Kim and the jellies of the aquarium on Coney Island.

Pink tendrils.

Even for a shark, this guy was kind of a creep.

He made this sonorous blooping noise as he gnawed his flipper.

Everything North of the Empire State.

Everything South of the Empire State.

God-rays over Jersey City.

Their dad was taking the real photo from the tunnel below me at Grand Central.

The whole of 4th Avenue was closed for the longest and thinnest market I’ve seen in my life. No-one we asked about it anywhere else in New York had ever heard of this phenomenon.

Kim and I both bought hats.

Chocolate bars at Dylan’s Candy Bar.

Gumballs at Dylan’s Candy Bar.

Times Square on a sunny day.

The gloom of Times Square on a sunny day.

I was as sad as Kim looks to find that Max Brenner the Chocolate Man, a hot chocolate emporium beyond compare, has closed down.

Even death turtles are pretty okay with.

The Rivington, which we splashed out on for our final night, is the only hotel I’ve stayed in to combine apartment-sized rooms, monochrome decor and a transformative shower.

Kim flew back to London and I flew on to Los Gatos for a press trip. We stayed at this Greek hotel.

Bag of feed spotted in San Francisco, the day I left.

Status

James was taken offline last week by my hosts, BlueHost, because something was spamming my database of posts incredibly rapidly with incredibly demanding data requests. It was using up so much CPU on the server that it was slowing down every other site it hosts.

I was in New York meeting a nervous walrus at the time, so I couldn’t do much about it. Now that I’m back I’ve looked into it, done some maintenance, taken some precautions, and asked them to put it back online. The upshot is that it seems to be fixed for the time being, but I’m going to have to keep a very close eye on it for a while. If it goes down again, I’ll post updates on Twitter here.

If you’re interested in the technical specifics, here’s what I found:

• A few lines of malicious code have found their way back into my source code, despite my having changed my password and kept up to date with the latest WordPress updates since that last happened. I’ve removed them and changed my password again, to something ridiculous. Not sure if there’s anything I can do beyond that.
• One visitor, presumably robotic, immediately started loading the same page dozens of times a second within a few minutes of James going back up. I’ve banned its IP, but I don’t know how to prevent that kind of thing in general, or why it would cause slow SQL database queries.
• Something was accessing parts of the database that aren’t supposed to be public. After careful investigation I discovered that, on this occasion, it was myself: when I accessed the database directly to do some maintenance, it was taking 6 seconds or so just to display or select the tables. Further back, there are still calls to these private tables that I can’t explain. I choose to ignore both these problems.

Thanks for sticking around.

Section 8, District 9, Station 10

Is a sci-fi multiplayer shooter out this week, extremely like Battlefield 2142. Battlefield 2142 was awesome, and so is this. You literally dive into the battlefield from orbit, with no parachute, then pound each other with raucous guns and squabble over objectives. Continued

I’ve Got Confessions To Make

The silence here lately has been down to a dangerous daily routine of falling asleep in front of Star Trek: The Next Generation, waking up at 5am and playing Prototype until work. Dangerous, but not unpleasant.

Prototype has caused me to break a mouse, and Star Trek has my brain quietly working on a master formula to generate Star Trek plots for Star Trek Online quests, and ways they could interact with a player-chosen crew. Continued

Burglary Aftermath

A while back I got burglarated, triggering lots of people to be very nice to me and my insurance company to give me – after some wrangling – a large sum of money. At first they’d tried to offer me vouchers to buy inferior replacements from a rather loathesome overpriced appliance chain. When I explained in the politest possible terms that Comet’s lines constituted a sort of unfunny parody of actual electronics, they offered me a cheque for the total sticker price of their suggested replacements. The fact that these were vastly inferior items was seemingly not a factor in Comet’s near-criminal pricing of them, so I did the maths and took the cash.

Since James commenters were actually a deciding factor in my buying some of this stuff in the first place, and since I was going to blog oozingly about a lot of these black digital delicacies before I lost them anyway, here’s what I was robbed of and what I got back:

The main things I wanted my EEE 1000 for were the battery life – six hours, more if you disable stuff – and the 40GB solid-state drive. It’s since been discontinued, and nothing worth buying has gone down the solid-state route since. The 1000 HE might have a hard drive, but it evidentally hasn’t hurt the battery life: this motherfucker lasts nine and a half hours. There are days I don’t last nine and a half hours.

I’ve been totally in love with both netbooks. It turns out the only surefire way to lure me away from my computer for any length of time is to give me another, smaller computer, on which I can write, browse, watch video and play Dice Wars, Spelunky and Deus Ex.

The new one fixes my only real irritation with the last: an akwardly placed shift key. I didn’t realise how much that was bothering me until I started seriously typing on the new one – I’m as fast and accurate on this as a full-size ergonomic.

Nominally two TVs, functionally one TV and one monitor. I was happy with my 19″ Cathode Ray Tube monitor for years after everyone else had moved on to widescreen, and might have been for years more if I hadn’t reviewed Mirror’s Edge for PC Format. Despicably, it letterboxes the viewing area on non-widescreen displays, so I had to at least try it widescreen for the sake of the review. The only one I had was my cheap (£270) yet suspiciously good 32″ LCD TV, so I hauled it to the bedroom and rigged it up. You could say I never went back, except that I did, and the dismal sight of that gloomy square portal on the digital world is what made me buy a second 32″ TV.

The impulse to buy something called a ‘monitor’ for your PC, rather than making do with a ‘TV’, is a bit of an anachronism. There used to be a difference when both were made out of magic ray guns, but these days it’s just that LCD monitors use a cheap and nasty panel technology, are eight inches smaller, and have feebler colour reproduction than the equivalently priced telly.

I would have happily bought them both back full price, since they were already stupidly cheap, but they’ve since been discontinued. The only way I could get them semi-first-hand was to go for Warranty Replacement units from Dabs. I don’t really know what that means, except £160ish instead of £270 and no remote control. Both appear to be brand new and work perfectly.

Things that look amazing on a star-bright 32″ monitor a foot from your face: Team Fortress 2, Mirror’s Edge, Unreal Tournament 3, Half-Life 2: Episode 2, BioShock.

These you actually can buy at Comet, but by insisting on the money rather than vouchers to do so, I got to buy them from Play.com for spectacularly less. It wasn’t easy to persuade my insurance company, Direct Line, to give me money rather than Comet funbux, and I had to do so at a time when I really didn’t feel like arguing. So by the time I did, I was determined to fleece them for every penny I could. I bear them a keen and savage ill-will I cannot muster for the guys who took my stuff. Their professions are equally amoral, but my thieves were at least swift and courteous.

It was my own stupid fault this got nicked – it was in my shed, which has a frickin’ window, and while the shed was notionally locked the bike was not.

Happily, it was nicked just before Future brought back a cycle-to-work initiative that gets you 40% off a new bike by deducting its cost from your gross pay – a nimble tax dodge. My friend Owen was also looking into getting a bike, which saved me the trouble of re-researching which is the best one to get these days. He’d learnt exactly what I did when I first bought mine: get a Specialized Hardrock Sport. It’s actually been redesigned since I got mine the first time, so my new one uses a lighter alloy and, frankly, looks cooler.

It turns out that when you’re robbed, the local council here pay not only to replace the broken lock, but replace all the locks in your house with ultra tough high-security deadbolts with five free-spinning cylinders inside that make them impossible to saw through, install new bolts inside the wood of your door so they can’t be kicked in, and upgrade the latch you shouldn’t have been using as a lock in the first place. What the hell, local council? Aren’t you supposed to be lazy, bureaucratic and heartless?

If anyone’s been totting up the numbers, they’ll have spotted I made quite a lot of money from being robbed. It’s not as much as it sounds, after paying three different ‘excesses’ to the insurance pricks for the crime of being victimised in three different ways, but certainly a net positive.

Usually the real cost is that your life is just a bit rubbish for a while as you go through the hassle of replacing all this stuff. But one person in particular was very nice to me when I lost all this, and she’s continued to be nicer to me since than I really seem to warrant. So instead, the last two months have been the best in years.

I give this burglary nine out of ten.