TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

All Books Found To Be Reasonably Or Very Good

The latest twenty book reviews on The Onion’s AV Club:

And people think games journalists don’t use the whole scale.

Conversations With Strangers

Update! Some great conversations from the comments added to the bottom of this post (now with moar!)

Last night Waxy.org linked a service called Omegle, which instantly puts you in a one-on-one chat with an anonymous stranger. I tried it.

I said it “Supposedly” did this when I linked it on Twitter, because I thought it might be a bot coded to randomly insult people, as a joke on the stereotype that people on the internet are twats.

After three conversations, that was still my prevailing theory.

For my fourth, I decided to try and break the pattern by acting like an utter dick first.

You’re now chatting with a random stranger. Say hi!
You: I HATE YOU!
Stranger: my head hurts :'(
Stranger: don’t be rude i’m sensitive
You: I thought I’d try being the crazy one.
Stranger: thanks, asshole
You: Any… any time?
You: Maybe all the crazy people I talked to were trying the same thing.
Stranger: you’re an inconsiderate jerk
Stranger: what’s your favorite animal
You: This one: http://mfrost.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2009/03/29/otter2.jpg
Stranger: why did you already have that link open and ready, you’re a fucking freeak.
Stranger: WTF
Stranger: THAT’S CUTE
Stranger: LOL

A pause.

You: Did that make your head any better?
Stranger: temporarily, yes
Stranger: thank you for your kind gestures………

I had to admit that it probably wasn’t a bot after all. Which suddenly made starting new conversations strangely compulsive.

Stranger: Jesus loves you
You: I’m just not that into him.
Your conversational partner has disconnected.

Stranger: z
You: zz
Your conversational partner has disconnected.

Stranger: o herd u liek
Stranger: consensual sex in the missionary position?
You: Yep.
Stranger: hm
Your conversational partner has disconnected.

You: Rah!
Stranger: hello stranger
You: Hello.
Stranger: male/female?
You: I like to start conversations the way I imagine godzilla would.
You: Male.
Stranger: excellent
You: The godzilla thing or the male thing?
Stranger: bothhhhhhhhhh
Your conversational partner has disconnected.

You: Hi. I reckon your favourite colour is blue.
Stranger: I reckon it aint.
You: Oh. What is it?
Stranger: My favorite colour is red
Stranger: yours?
You: Probably green.
Stranger: well that tells me alot about your personality.
You: Oh yeah? Red suggests to me that you’re an angry man.
Stranger: quite the contrary
Stranger: a passionate woman
You: I say.

Both Steve and Meteoracle shared shots of their conversations with wildly unhinged racists, and Steve inexplicably turned down an offer of sex with a robot. But one of my favourites was actually recounted to me by someone I was talking to on Omegle at the time:

You’re now chatting with a random stranger. Say hi!
Stranger: please don’t disconnect
Stranger: i love you

J-Man:

Amusingly I was talking to a 14 year old girl, and she asked if I was single. I said yes, and she told me it was because I talk to 14 year old girls on the internet.

You: Your appointment to FEMA should be finalized within the week. I’ve already discussed the matter with the Senator.
Stranger: hi!
Stranger: whut?
You: He didn’t really have a choice.
Stranger: who did’nt…
You: When I mentioned we could put him on the priority list for the Ambrosia vaccine, he was so willing it was almost pathetic
Stranger: you did’nt kill him did you?
You: Why contain it? Let it spill over the schools and churches, let the bodies pile up in the streets. In the end they’ll beg us to save them.
Stranger: Lets see… I’m actually kind in to that
You: They can smell their deaths, and the sound they’ll make rattling their cages will serve as a warning to the rest.
Stranger: i love it
You: The world left them behind long ago. We are the future.
Stranger: lets kill m all
You: Our biochem corpus is far in advance of theirs, as is our electronic sentience, and their… ‘ethical inflexibility’ has allowed us to make progress in areas they refuse to consider.
Stranger: true… true
You: But, I must admit, I’ve been somewhat disappointed with the performance of the primary unit.
Stranger: Well, mine is work. dont know about yours?
You: We’ve had to endure much, you and I, but soon there will be order again. A new age. Aquinas spoke of the mythical city on the hill, soon that city will be a reality and we will be crowned its kings. Or, better than kings… gods.
Stranger: I’m not sure if we should become what we want to be. The goverment is lying about the fact that they will support us. Who will tell?
You: All right. I get the picture. You want a piece of the pie, or you’re going to toss the whole pie out the window. Fair enough. You can have anything you want. How about Europe? Your own continent. Just let me complete my preparations.
Stranger: Go ahead. let my see
You: What an expensive mistake you turned out to be. I’ve ordered the troops to kill you, because quite frankly I don’t have the patience to wait for one of those damn killswitches to work.
Your conversational partner has disconnected.

EGTF

You’re now chatting with a random stranger. Say hi!
Stranger: oh its you! hows it been goin?
You: Oh my it’s you too!
You: Very well
You: How’ve things been since we last spoke?
Stranger: fag
Stranger: go die in a fire
Your conversational partner has disconnected.

Ush:

Connecting to server…
You’re now chatting with a random stranger. Say hi!
You: *guitar riff* hello
Stranger: *drum roll* FUCK YOU
You: *thousands of people shouting at once* Well thats not polite
Stranger: *people who care* What
You: *a dozen horses screaming in unison* i mean you could have said “hi”
Stranger: * A 1000 orphans crying * I’m Sorry let me start again HI
You: *wind-up monkeys clanging together* Thats better, see? not so hard to be civil
Stranger: *Loud noises* are you from a forum
You: *the laughter of children remixed* Oh no, nasty dirty places they are.
You: *cello solo in an empty hall* where are you from?
Stranger: * 200 african americans* they are nice places to meet new friends
Stranger: *400 cups of tea clanking* im from britain
You: *trumpets blaring* i am from a country quite close to britain
Stranger: *I have ran out of noises* france?
You: *coins hitting a marble floor from a height* nope!
You: *sheet metal being torn* To be honest Im not going to say.
Stranger: * strange gruntiing noises* sweeden
Stranger: * fecal matter hitting porcelain* why
You: *discordant flutes* nope! because I am a naturally paranoid person. whats it like out where you are?
Stranger: * children crying* awful but the weather is getting better
You: *The worlds largest fishbowl being tapped with a hollow iron bar* ’twas a lovely day here! I say, do you like tea?
Stranger: *N/A* No
You: *echoing footsteps* Thats a shame. There is a lot to be enjoyed with a good cup of tea.
You: *A heifer in heat* Take Earl Gray, for example.
Stranger: to be honest i have never had a full cup of tea
You: *Steam whistle* You really should try one you know. Take Earl Gray, for instance.
You: *The dark hum of space* Strong and refreshing like regular tea, but with a hint of lemon that affects your pallette in a completely different way…
Stranger: I see
Stranger: anyway i best be off chap
Your conversational partner has disconnected.

sQUEAKYfOAMpEANUT:

You: >Ye see before ye a SWAMP
You: >What wouldst thou do?
You: >
Stranger: FUCK YOUR MOTHER.
You: >You approach the fearsome FUCK YOUR MOTHER, brandishing your sword.
You: >The FUCK YOUR MOTHER attacks!
Stranger: SUCK MY DICK, FUCK YOUR MOTHER
You: >FIGHT >ITEMS >FLEE
Stranger: >FLEE
You: >You cannot escape! The FUCK YOUR MOTHER is far too large!
Stranger: >ITEMS
Stranger: >ITEMS
Stranger: >ITEMS
Stranger: >ITEMS
Stranger: >ITEMS
You: >You open up your SATCHEL to ruffle through your ITEMS. You have with you a BANANA, a MICK’S TAPE, and a SMALL ROCK. What woudst thou do?
Stranger: >use BANANA to FUCK YOUR MOTHER
You: >You throw your mighty BANANA at the fearsome FUCK YOUR MOTHER, who falls writhing to the ground in agony.
You: >You have defeated the FUCK YOUR MOTHER!
Stranger: FUCK YEAH!
You: >You gain three experience points, and the TOE OF THE FUCK YOUR MOTHER.
You: >Ye see before ye a SWAMP
Stranger: >QUIT
You: >NO ESCAPE
Stranger: oh shi-
You: >YOU SHALL PLAY FOREVER

Kadir:

You: go
Stranger: get
You: a
Stranger: great
You: big
Stranger: fucking
You: bunch
Stranger: of
You: pickles
Stranger: that
You: smell
Stranger: like
You: they
Stranger: were
You: about
Stranger: to
You: go
Stranger: have
You: a
Stranger: flight
You: of
Stranger: greatness
You: to
Stranger: alpha
You: centari
Stranger: to
You: find
Stranger: ender
You: and
Stranger: his
You: huge
Stranger: influential
You: admired
Stranger: sister
You: who
Stranger: wrote
You: about
Stranger: the
You: war
Stranger: let’s stop right now and agree we need to be friends, okay??

I Was Here

San Francisco looked strange from the plane, like a building-farm. I was back there to see a very different studio this time, though I can’t talk about that yet, and also managed to do different stuff with my spare time. Last trip Steve Gaynor, who I only knew vaguely online, was nice enough to meet up for lunch, and this time 2D Boy joined me for a fancy tea. I very much like developers who are able to perceive journalists as humans rather than organs of the industry, even when perhaps not all of them warrant the status.

With a little luck and a lot of generosity, I was also able to hitch a lift with the guys who made Lugaru down to the birthday party of the guy who made Gish, alongside the guy who made Spelunky, there to sip Guinness with one of the aforementioned guys who made World of Goo, the guy who made Bridge Builder, and the guy who made Braid. There was a dangerous concentration of genius in the room, so true to my promise to pocket my journalist hat, I was careful not to ask any good questions of any of them. We played the X-Men arcade game instead.

I Am Here

Hence the quietness.

!

Some questions I’m getting asked a lot:

Tom, have you won any large perspex awards lately?

No, I- wait! Yes, there was one! The Games Media Award for best Specialist Games Writer in Print. Would you like to see it?

If I say yes, will you uncuff me?

‘Specialist’ Games Writer?

A writer for a publication solely about games, as opposed to someone who does the games bit in a general mag or paper. Those guys had an award that night too, but we didn’t know any of them and I’ve forgotten who won.

This was an actual awards ceremony?

An actual awards ceremony. I didn’t go last year, so I took the precaution of getting drunk with PC Zone on a barge beforehand to be ready for any eventuality. It was an extremely dense concentration of people I knew and liked in a medium-sized comedy joint, with tables somehow arranged so that more than half the guests had to twist and shuffle to see the stage.

Sponsor Deep Silver barged us down the Thames from Paddington to Camden, via London Zoo. Most agreeable.

Who else won stuff?

I was really happy to see Eurogamer’s Ellie Gibson get the online version of my award – we go way back, but I voted for her because of this. Sadly Rock Paper Shotgun didn’t get the Best Website nod they were up for – Eurogamer did. I consider it impolite of Ellie to win an individual and a group award in the same night. Edge beat us to Best Magazine, and I’m happy for them largely because their own Alex Wiltshire, who was up for my award, seemed so genuinely happy for me.

The single, twitching claret pupil of Edge magazine, nameless and livid. That’s me on the left, but I’m so hideous I had to cut my own face off.

The people there were overwhelmingly nice to me. I was overwhelmed. If I hadn’t recently become an Insufferable Prick, I may have wept. Alex was lovely, Log was lovely, Will and Steve from PC Zone were lovely, my editors Tim and Ross were lovely, my publishers James and Richard were lovely, even when I started shouting at one of them about online strategy (Insufferable Prick), Kieron and Alec from RPS were lovely, Ryan and Jonty from Official Xbox World were lovely, and Matt and Rick from Games TM – with whom I’d hoped to strike up an aggressive rivalry – were too lovely for me to do so. It was a whole evening of people sincerely overestimating my talent and worth.

Rock Paper Shotgun, and a guy I don’t know, tear up the dance floor.

You’re not actually that good. How were you able to win this?

Obviously a lack of shame, integrity and humility helped me a great deal here. This blog is not game-changingly popular, compared to the many higher-profile places the GMAs were mentioned with a nod to a different candidate, but it appears to be frequented by profoundly decent chaps and chapettes. I’ve never seen a site with comment threads this long that’s so entirely free of howling douchesatchels.

On top of that, 1Fort is, I think, game-changingly popular, and without prompting Chris wrote me an amazing endorsement there that convinced even me to vote for myself. I have no facts to back this up, but I suspect a post like this from a guy like Chris does more than an offhanded link from a site with ten times the daily uniques. Thanks, Chris. Please don’t DVORAK my keyboard.

Thanks in particular to Octaeder, John Walker, The_B, ImperialCreed, Chris Livingston, Seniath, J-Man, Mr Brit, Pod, Chris Evans, TooNu, Chijts, LaZodiac, spuzman00, Lack_26, Alex Holland, Alex Holland’s mother, and anyone who voted for me but didn’t specifically say so here.

My acceptance speech on the night was glib, ungrateful, nonsensical, misspoken and possibly inaudible due to nerves, alcohol and shock. But this is what I meant to say.

Trust Me With Your Ears: Volume Three

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

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

Status Report

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Google Chrome is based on the notion of turning each tab into a separate instance of your browser, so if one crashes or is busy, it doesn’t have to affect the others. And so you can see which ones are hogging memory, CPU or bandwidth. It’s also about running JavaScript a lot faster, searching within sites by typing their name first, keeping popups within the tab that opened them, using web-pages as apps by getting rid of the browser framing, and surfing privately in a mode that saves no data or history to your PC. It comes out tomorrow.

I don’t think there are a lot of people out there riotously unhappy with Firefox – in fact, less than 20% of them are unhappy enough with IE to bother with Firefox. But this makes a good case that existing browsers can’t fully adapt to the way we’re using the net without a ground-up replumbing.

Whether and when I switch to it will depend on how customisable it gets. The point of Firefox to me is not tabs, stability or security, it’s the Extensions system. Life without Adblock isn’t worth living. I refuse point-blank to register for anything without InFormEnter to reduce the process to mouse-clicks. And I reach for ImageZoom like a myopic fumbles for their specs.

Impressions: it is blue and fast.

Here’s how fast:

It is fast enough that it loads pages with ads faster than Firefox loads them without ads, and I think that may be the point. And I have just spotted that its spellchecker considers “Firefox” to be an error. Yes, friends, this is the first James post written from Google’s browser. Update: its spellchecker also considers ‘Google’ and ‘spellchecker’ to be errors.

It’s possible it won’t ever be designed for extensions the way Firefox is, because something like Adblock becoming mainstream is probably the single biggest threat to Google’s business. I wouldn’t be surprised if Google would rather Firefox never overtook Internet Explorer.

Other things that may be The Point:

The most striking visual eccentricity of Chrome is that it has no title bar, it rejects Windows convention, monopolises your entire screen, and refuses to label itself as a mere application. Apparently the computers in the Googleplex lobby are running Chrome alone: no start bar or trace of an operating system beneath it.

They may have little or no interest in becoming the de facto browser. Firefox loyalists in the comments here – and Mozilla themselves – are smug in the knowledge that Firefox will eventually do anything Chrome can do that’s worth doing. Google have a huge vested interest in raising the general speed at which browsers can run applications: if Internet Explorer defends its user base by becoming fast enough to support a more powerful version of Google Docs, Google win yet again.

Something that is probably not The Point:

Every few minutes, Google Chrome grinds my PC to a halt for a few seconds, then lets it run for a few seconds, then grinds it to a halt again. Chrome Task Manager insists no part of it is using any CPU at all, but Windows Task Manager shows one Chrome process hogging 25-50% of my CPU during the chugging. Thing has a way to go.

What’s Happening In Kansas

For some reason your stupid country doesn’t let foreign superpowers like myself buy-in whoever we want to be State Representative in these ‘states’ of yours. But see if you can guess from their faces which one of these two candidates is evil.

Like everyone with a political agenda, I haven’t really looked into it and I know next to nothing about either candidate. But Sean Tevis’s XKCD homage makes a convincing case, and you don’t need to look into the other guy for long before you know he has to be stopped.

Tevis needs 3000 donations of $8.34 to out-finance the pink toad. No Kansas candidate has got more than 644 donors before, but he’s now on 2,894, so it’s not going to take much.

Update: He needed to get 3000 contributions in under two weeks – he got over 4,000 in two days. There’s now a short epilogue comic by way of thanks. Good job, the 1,107 Americans I apparently command.

Regarding Matt’s Location

This is one of those things I avoided writing about because I assumed everyone had seen it, but a quick poll reveals that very few of my friends have. It’s best watched without preconception or explanation, so first off, here it is (click the four arrows for full-screen):

It’s fascinating to read the comments on this, over at Digg or Vimeo. Those that respond most strongly to it often have no idea why – some find it hilarious but aren’t sure what the joke is, others cry and have no idea if it’s happy or sad. A few of us have been talking lately about how every time you travel, you come back slightly dismayed at how small and repetitive your normal life is. This is a sharp smack of that, but I consider it a good thing. If it makes us feel bad, it’s a bad feeling we need. It’s a spur for change, experimentation, or just a cool holiday.

It’s a particularly good thing for America, where supposedly 23% of the populace have a passport. Matt Harding doesn’t evangelise about it much, he just says “it’s important to know what the world looks like.”

That’s in a series of talks he did about the 2006 video (the one embedded is his third). Listening to a lecture given by a man whose claim to fame is dancing badly in a multitude of countries sounds unappealing, but I did it anyway and was riveted. It’s a travel diary, mostly – turns out five seconds of bad dancing isn’t the whole story of his visits to each of these countries. And the notion of getting paid – as he was the last two times – to tour the world and jig like a six year-old is magnficent.

Matt was a game designer. He wanted to make a game about animals in balls that smack into each other, but Microsoft shifted their focus to games about killing people. He said they could make a game where you’re aliens trying to wipe out the human race. His publishers said “Yes!” He said “I was kidding.” His publishers green-lit the game. Matt left a while after. That game is Destroy All Humans; it came out in 2005 and got 9/10 in Stuff magazine.

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.

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.”

It’s A Democratic Gaming Landscape, Bitches

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

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

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

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

Non-Problems Of The Obscenely Over-Privileged

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Watching Rob play, a few things struck me:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This Just In: Frogs Aren’t Morons

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

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

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