TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

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.

On Screwing Around

Just Cause 2 is now a real thing people are playing. And, more gratifyingly for me, a much yakked-about Big Deal in the way the first never was. This is the sequel to a unique and majestic game that I haven’t stopped playing in the four years since it came out, but one so many people were maddeningly dismissive of. However deliriously excited I got for the sequel, I was never confident it could vault the bizarre wall of apathy some people erect around phenomenal works that come from unrecognised sources.

It’s gone down so well that – and you couldn’t say this of the first game – there may actually be people in the world who like it more than me. Not by a lot. It’s the ultimate screw-around game, and I love screwing around; I spend 80% of my gaming life doing it. I have answered the question “What are you doing?” with “Stabbing this explosive barrel to see if that makes it blow up.”

Just Cause 2 makes me realise that, in a lot of those cases, I wasn’t screwing around in a sandbox. I was blundering drunkenly onto a movie set, punching the love interest and setting off the pyrotechics. Here, though, I’m screwing around with things that were pretty much put there to be screwed with. Avalanche had a feeling I might tie a tank to a passenger jet at take-off, so they made sure I could.

It’s an amazing feeling, and no game has ever really catered to it like this. Played at its best, Just Cause 2 is raw science: curiosity, experiment, volatile result. But it is catered to. These elements were put here for me to mess up, and for that reason none of them are important. I am a destructive child whose attentive parents have given him things they can afford to lose. Toys.

I can tie a tank to a passenger jet, but it’s a tank and a passenger jet. The game has more, and they’ll spawn in seconds. I’m interested in the physical result of my tinkering, but I already know the real result: nothing. Nothing can ever happen. They can’t give me anything significant, because they know I’d tie it to a ski lift until it split in two. Missions can make a helicopter the objective, but that doesn’t make it important – it just bolts on an arbitrary failure state. Missions provide a sort of ‘serving suggestion’ for the mayhem, but they don’t spice it up.

So I’m in the playpen. On the up side: woo! Playing! On the down: I kinda want to fuck with the grown up stuff after a while. Because I’m not just a child, a scientist, and a brat. I’m a tempest of genuine malice, a power-thirsty psychopath with a crowbar of dysfunction. I want to tinker, but not just with the Mechano set. I want to break the car.

I’m not saying I need more power in Just Cause 2: I’m already a demon, and the mods make me a God. I want things to have power over. The Colonels are a start: named, unique, significant, killable. But I don’t want to “lower military morale”. Some of the stuff I’ve done in this game would scare nations. I want that popup text to read “Holy fuck. What have you done. Everything is dead.” I want to conquer whole regions when this stuff happens: not easily, not through superpowers, and not right away. But I want whatever ridiculous stuff I screw around with to have an effect I can point to.

These aren’t reasons I don’t like the game. I’ve played it seventy hours, it surpasses one of my all-time favourites in nearly every way, and it’s the most astonishing piece of technology my machine has ever crunched. This is just to paint a picture of where I’d like to see stuff like this go next. Avalanche have conquered the screw-around game to an extent it would have taken backward cinephiles like Rockstar a decade to catch up with. Now I’m interested in the fuck-it-up game: something where I’m allowed to break what they can’t easily replace, and throw a spanner in a machine so large it does something more violent and terrible than explode and respawn.

On Rock

Okay, you know – perhaps you don’t – how I hate all console games and don’t even really play Guitar Hero unless someone makes me? And how I’m more resistent to SingStar than anyone who isn’t Scottish? I am now officially excited about Rock Band. From Wikipedia’s soundtrack list:

The New Pornographers – The Electric Version
Jet – Are You Gonna Be My Girl

So Electric Version is kind of a weird choice since it’s probably the worst song they’ve ever done, but that’s still better than pretty much everything else the human race will ever achieve. The New freaking Pornographers are in a mainstream game! I think this is the first time I’ve ever been able to check both the “Games” and “Music” categories in my WordPress dashboard.

The Jet song is just hott, and it takes a lot to make me spell that with two t’s. If it had Maxi Geil’s Makin’ Love In The Sunshine I would buy the goddamn console for it. And a TV.

On PC Gamer Lately

The PC Gamer site moves pretty fast these days, so I might occasionally recap what I’ve done there recently. Here’s some of my stuff from the last month:
 

Finally finished my Minecraft diary about playing in hardcore mode. Response to its end was amazing, for a story about a man trying to eat a cake while falling to his death on fire. Definitely looking to do another in a different game.

Relapsed on both the previous games lately – the differences are extraordinary. Mass Effect is by far the most compelling main story of any BioWare game I’ve played, it’s so weird that Mass Effect 2 is narratively bankrupt when it improves so much else. This list is how I want to see the best bits combined.

I put up a collection of awesome art/games mashup images by artist Drew Northcott. We used them in our mag a few years back, but few seemed to get the references. Wanted to see them get a bigger exposure.
 

It’s brutal, and should be illegal on a gamepad.

One of the most sublime announcements I can remember, a game whose very name is both setup and punchline, and an indulgently batshit trailer. Starting to really like the Magicka guys.

Got to talk to the Minecraft guys about why their next game is a turn-based strategy based on collectible card games.
 

Loved it. Relic are now the best RPG developer never to have made an RPG.

Old but still astonishing, even next to Crysis 2.

Realised the restrictive tropes that frustrate me about modern games are probably my fault. Bulletstorm’s creative director responds to explain why his game is made that way, which starts an interesting discussion.
 

Megaton hypernews of the millennium. So goddamn excited. Also, a little on why the days of XBLA as the ‘big time’ for indies may be over.

Not all me this time, since Bad Company split office opinion somewhat and we wanted to get a good selection of views. My main one is for a return to the emergent camaraderie of leading a squad of strangers in Battlefield 2.

I go back to the cold metal corridors of the Von Braun, and remember how personal stories kept me going in this place.

No revelations, just my overview of what we know so far and which bits are exciting.

On Bringing It

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Old! Defibrillate This

I’m going to start pulling a few things out of the old James that seem to belong here. They’re a bit tucked away in that giganto-document: for those who never saw it, I manually wrote every post of my last site one after the other in a vast HTML file using a text editor, in a sort of misguided show of geek bravado. This one’s about Battlefield 2, and the little kill reports that tell you who killed who with what.

Locutus [SVD] mrbuzzard

Fuck. They’re swarming us. This beachhead strategic point looked safe, but they’re pouring in now and that guy just got it in the face. I sprint over to him and whip out the defibrillators. I’m a medic, you see.

“Clear!” Tzz.

He gets back up and I chuck him a medikit for good measure. “You’re gonna be okay buddy,” my character automatically says. “Thanks man, I owe you one,” his automatically replies. The tank we’re standing next to explodes.

mrbuzzard is no more.

Fuck! The concussion from the blast is so strong I can barely see, but as a medic you See Dead People regardless. I stagger over to his body and-

“Clear!” Tzz.

-shock some life into it. I don’t have time to patch him up before the ground explodes again and the troops pour in.

^^andy^^05 [AK-101] BlueBall
^^andy^^05 [AK-101] $uper_Gang$ta
hammi [T-90] tOMMy

Jesus Christ. I make a beeline for the bodies and an enemy troop rounds the sandbags ahead of me. I hit the deck and spray him with M4 fire, and he goes down before he can hit me.

Pentadact [M4] pHk

I get BlueBall-

“Clear!” Tzz.

-and tOMMy-

“Clear!” Tzz.

-fixed up, but $uper_Gang$ta fades away before I can get to him. God damn it, I hate it when I lose one. “You’ll be fine, get back to the fight.” I wish I could believe or stop myself saying that.

nofear [T-90] Squire
nofear [T-90] tOMMy

Shit! The tanks have rolled in, and I’m-

Mr0 [Artillery] mrbuzzard
Mr0 [Artillery] easydog
Mr0 [Artillery] Sigmax

Everything explodes. You hear it before you see it, but not by much. Then you can’t see anything at all, and pretty soon you can’t hear anything either. The dust-clouds a blast like that kicks up would blind you even if you weren’t in shock, and your ears just hum a monotonous song instead of reporting the outside world. When my senses return it’s to a beige world of loud noises. Through the smoke I can still make out the gleaming white trails of more artillery shells slamming down into us. I know with a grim certainty that almost everyone will die before I can get to them, and before I even make it to the first one I’m shot three times and hit the deck. I have no idea where the shots came from, or even if there’s any cover nearby – all I can see is the corpse bar on my singularly selfless HUD. Biting the dust seems to have saved me, and I’m on the mend all the time my medikit is out, but I’m not any closer to the bodies and I’m not going to hold this post on my own. I get up and immediately come face to face with the guy who shot me. I throw myself backwards over some sandbags and frantically hammer the number keys. My Beretta 9mm comes up and I shoot him three times in the face.

Pentadact [Beretta] ^^andy^^05

In retrospect he was probably more surprised to see me than I was him – it was a fair bet I was dead. More fire rains in, either a Support troop or a tank judging by the sheer fire rate. Shots thwack into the sand all around, and a final artillery explosion kills-

Mr0 [Artillery] BlueBall
Mr0 [Artillery] wpmike

-two more and-

Mr0 [Teamkills] th0ry

-ha! One of their own. I’m hit again but I’m not ducking this time. I pelt straight for the very patient body of my patient, dive through the smoke over an ammo box and land prone on top of him, immediately-

“Clear!” Tzz.

-defibrillating. He gets up and-

neurax [AK74U] easydog

God damn it! I shock him back to life. He’s learnt his lesson and stays down with me, but by this time I’ve lost everyone else for good. I chuck him a medikit and we scramble to the bunker by the flag.

easydog [M16A2] Bleak
easydog [M16A2] neurax
Pentadact [M4] Parliuus
easydog [M16A2] Monterto

He might be stupid but he’s a good shot. But there’s still the APC, and when its not scattering heavy fire at our little window on the world, it’s smashing up our empty vehicles with guided rockets. Worse, an enemy chopper I thought was just flying by has come around for another pass.

But something’s not right about it. I don’t know anything about anything, really, but consciously or otherwise most of the Western world now knows a Black Hawk when they see it. Black Hawks are ours. I focus on it and sure enough, friendly nametags pop up – green ones, in fact: my squad. Then, inevitably yet surprisingly, gloriously and loudly-

D4rkM4ster [Black Hawk] nofear
D4rkM4ster [Black Hawk] hammi
D4rkM4ster [Black Hawk] DanMM
D4rkM4ster [Black Hawk] Jage

It’s their turn to explode. The much-killed idiot and I sprint out to meet them. There’s still a body out here I can res, which I promptly-

“Clear!” Tzz.

-do. Half my squaddies throw themselves out of the chopper and parachute down to meet us, while the pilot takes it to a safer landing just outside the base.

It’s a fantastic sight, but I don’t have time to admire it – I’m seeing more Dead People. Scampering around the wreckage of the base rubbing my shock-pads together gleefully at the prospect of more life-saving fun, I suddenly discover where these fresh corpses are coming from. An enemy Spec Ops commando an inch from my face, silenced pistol raised to my neck. I don’t have time to think.

“Clear!” Tzz.

Pentadact [Shock Pads] FaR2SiNiSTeR

YES.

Old Year Resolutions

Christmas is over, I’m home, and I have a bit of time before I go back to work. My resolution last year was to be more prolific – take on lots of different stuff, do it all, stop whining. In that spirit, I’m going to try to get a bunch of stuff done. I doubt I’ll manage it all, but here’s the plan.

Work on Gunpoint for two days straight
Making Scanno Domini in 48 hours was exciting and eye opening. The deadline not only sped progress, but forced brutal and useful decisions about the design. I want to do the same for my longer-term game Gunpoint, aiming to get it to the point where you can meaningfully complete a level using the game’s central mechanic by the end of the year.

Every hour of work you put in before that point might be a complete waste of time, so you have to get there as rapidly as possible. I’ll probably work on it on the 29th and 30th.

Redesign Pentadact.com
The intentionally misleading title of this place is starting to cause actual harm in world increasingly reliant on search ranking. I have to call it by my own name. I also want to make the design slightly cleaner and less busy, and implement infinite-scroll rather than those archaic ‘Older posts’ links. Might tweak the colours and add an archive if I have time.

Start ‘Notebook’
A new category or subsite on here for what I used to call philosophy, but which has evolved into increasingly practical advice given by myself to myself. I need to write the shit I figure out down so I don’t forget what little I’ve learned, and doing it publicly helps get it straight in your head.

Post: What Makes Games Good
One I’ve been tinkering with for too long. It’s about giving names to the different metrics on which great games succeed – the ones that really matter. Because they’re not ‘graphics’, ‘gameplay’ and ‘multiplayer’.

Post: What Games Are Bad At
Less of a priority, but I’ve often wanted to do a series on the things I think the industry is repeatedly fucking up. Most of my obsessions about games relate to what they normally get wrong, so explaining why and how might turn that into useful advice for making them better.

Tweak Scanno Domini
So much I could do to this from here, but to avoid letting it distract me from more important stuff, I’ll stick to the quality-of-life essentials. Snow and single-barreled weapons fire both need to be darker – they’re invisibly bright on some people’s screens. Bots still sometimes get stuck camping you, forcing a restart. I really should let you use the keyboard for movement if you want to. And I might either make the game a little easier, add an easy mode, or do something clever with the difficulty so that it ramps up more smoothly. Watching my dad play it was informative.

Oh My God What The Fuck Barbecue

Everyone’s playing the Pyro class in Team Fortress 2 at the moment, because Valve just added loads of Pyro-specific Achievements and new weapons that are unlocked when you earn enough of them. Some of these are things we’ve probably already done, but there’s one that no-one had: OMGWTFBBQ: Kill an enemy with a taunt.

In a rare act of trust, Valve told Craig and I back in February that they’d be lethalising the Pyro’s Street Fighter ‘Hadouken!’ taunt. We were asked to keep shtum, so that players would have to work it out for themselves when they saw there was an achievement for it. And in a rare act of journalistic nondickishness, we did.

But once the cat was out of the bag, I had to have it. The moment the new Pyro content went live, I arranged to meet up with my friend Al for a Hadouken duel – may the winner let the loser fireball him next time. But in the blazing madness of Pyro Night, where 10 of our 12-man teams were playing as the gasmasked deviant, all plans were forgotten. And in the course of joining in with that mayhem, I kept finding myself in situations where it might just legitimately work. Where I could actually Hadouken an enemy.

I failed. Again and again and again. But I’d got the bug now: I had to get this legitimately. No willing victims, no bots, no achievement-clinic maps or grinding servers: real, life-or-death play on maximum-population servers.

My first proper attempt was instinct, when I rounded a corner and found myself face to face with a Heavy and Medic. I had a Medic friend healing me, and I happened to know a horde of my team-mates were right behind, so I jabbed the taunt button hoping that he’d be swamped by them long enough for my fireball to connect. When a Pyro friend did round the corner, he ran to my side and joined me in the taunt. I don’t know whether he was after the achievement or just thought this was a game, but the pair of us were shredded like so many kittens in a woodchipper.

The difficulty, obviously, is that the taunt takes some seconds to perform – during which, you’re rooted to the spot, unable to defend yourself or even cancel the action, and all but the slowest of wits can calmly stroll out of your way or murder you.

Later that round – on Gold Rush – I started doing pretty well. A Medic friend latched on to me, possibly Arq, and we had a good enough run that he earnt his Ubercharge healing the damage I took – and chose to use it on me. He timed it well, as we rounded a nest of Sentries and strong enemy presence on the final checkpoint of the second map, but when I bumped into an Engineer just standing there, I couldn’t resist. It was too perfect. I taunted.

Four, maybe six times. Every time the incoming fire bashed me back too far to hit anything with the resulting fireball, interrupting the animation, and every time I became more convinced I could get him this time. Before that faith was vindicated, our uber flickered off and my poor undeserving Medic and I were blown into the stratosphere. Sorry Medic.

Anyone will tell you the OMGWTFBBQ achievement is easy. It’s the first one they got. Right away they ran into an unwitting Sniper, and he just stood there and let them do it. I know. I’ve been in those situations as every class and their granma, up against people who don’t move or realise I’m there even after two seconds of being beaten about the head. It’s just that since this Pyro update, those people seem to be joining different servers to me. For days, I don’t think I met a stupid player.

The next time I played, I had a masterstroke. I was defending Gold Rush this time, and the attackers had progressed far enough that they’d set up teleporters to take them from their spawn-room to the front line. I’d made it all the way there with relatively little trouble, and now found myself camped outside their home base staring at the telepad they’d each jump on every time they spawned.

I tucked myself into a dark corner on a route no-one takes – even if they’re not going to take the teleporter – and waited. Soon, a Medic trundled out of the iron gates and set himself on the telepad. I charged, hit the taunt button once I was in range, and he stood staring dumbly forwards – right up until he vanished in a constellation of teleporter sparkles. My flaming fists passed uselessly through where he’d been.

If I lurked any closer or approached any sooner they’d see me, so I’d always be too late. But when the next person – a Soldier, a rougher customer – stepped up to the pad before it had recharged. I pounced again, and hit taunt long before the pad was ready to displace him. And gloriously, the whole animation played out in full. To no effect. The flames licked ineffectually at his sleeves, centimeters out of range, and the noise caused him to spin round, spot me with a flinch of astonishment, and fire a single, wildly inaccurate rocket of surprise before he was zapped halfway across the map by the teleporter. God freaking damn it.

It happened on Badlands: I’d just sneakily won the game by camping their final capture point. As their defeated team scurried from our super-critting weapons, I taunted vaguely at a group of them, and my fireball connected with a Medic. He drifted feathery and aflame across the room, and slumped against the wall. No achievement – it doesn’t count in the post-victory humiliation phase. And to add insult to injury, my victim messaged me: “Did you get the achievement? :)” He’d let me do it. My feat was doubly worthless.

It’s been four days now, and I’ve come to expect failure. I waited at the enemy gates, timed a taunt perfectly to flourish just as they opened, and their entire team made an executive decision to pause for exactly a second before charging past my immobilised, useless form and setting fire to me with critical flame from the unlockable Backburner I will probably never earn.

I found the perfect Sniper – utterly oblivious, utterly stationary, utterly alone. And I made sure I was virtually touching him before I started, and he didn’t flinch throughout the whole process. I, however, was blown to bits by a critical Demoman grenade to the back of the head just as my hands would have hit him. Without looking up from his scope, he continued to snipe from a room full of my blood.

Tonight I found an enemy Heavy blasting our team from a high window. I was coming up behind him, from inside the building, with no enemies around to intercept me or friends to steal the kill. Surely, I thought. Heavies are reknown for their lack of situational awareness when firing – it’s like a trance. I ran directly for him, and parked myself indecently close. Surely, I thought. I taunted. He kept firing. SURELY, I thought. His face broke into a manic cackle as his spinning gun tore through my team below – then fell, as a magical Street Fighter 2 reference hit him in the small of his back, set him on fire and ended his life. His bloated, burning, bent-backwards body flew spectacularly through the window, sailed over the battle below, and crunched into a fat-sizzling heap in the ditch below.

[PCG] Pentadact has earned the achievement: OMGWTFBBQ. At fucking, stupid last, it might have added.

The sense of triumph is ridiculous – even more so than the last utterly moronic thing Valve made me do by calling it an ‘achievement’. Perhaps because this victory was unique, and over a real person, and I really, really suck.

Of course, not halfway through writing this – and long before I got the achievement – Chris beat me to it with a post about exactly the same thing. Also, he got the achievement legitimately long before me, and he has 22 others, and all the unlockable weapons. Have I mentioned I’m never linking him or his stupid fat Frohman face ever again?

Offlyin’

Okay, it’s been 48 hours, I’m calling it: I’m back online. I’ve been off for six weeks, during which I started eating breakfast, and showering every day. Most of that was because Be (my new ISP) were telling me it must be a problem with my phone line, and British Telecom were telling me that it wasn’t, and if I wanted them to send out an engineer to check if it was, he’d charge me a minimum of £110 and refuse to fix it.

I solved it by lying: I just told Be that BT had checked my phone line and found that it was fine. Satisfied that I had performed the requisite dance, they just flicked the big switch they evidently have labeled “Work”, and now it does.

I had another card to play if that didn’t pan out: I can accurately call myself a technology journalist, we genuinely are considering an article on the abysmal state of internet sevice providers in this incompetent country, and as an absolute last resort, when companies are being utter fucking pricks about something, I’m not above role-playing a self-important twat to get it resolved.

But this story has a cathartic ending: on the day I get reconnected, I hear the BBC’s iPlayer, which lets you download a good quality copy of anything from the last week’s telly, is causing ISPs such chronic bandwidth problems that they’re trying to force the BBC to pay for overhead. “According to figures from regulator Ofcom it will cost ISPs in the region of £830m to pay for the extra capacity needed to allow for services like the iPlayer.”

At this, I laugh; bitterly and at length.

I guess you could summarise my position as in your fat, sweat-wet fucking faces, you unctuous fucking stoats. ISPs have survived thus far by lying exuberantly to their customers, selling them transfer rates they cannot possibly hope to provide, and relying on the vast majority of their customers wasting money by paying for a level of connectivity they never fully use. Now they’re fully using it. Now grandma has found BitTorrent, assholes, and she’s going to destroy you with it.

Oblivion Review

The issue of PC Gamer that’s just gone on-sale in the UK is the one with my eight-page review of Oblivion in it, so I’d like to a) encourage you to look at it and go ‘woo!’, and b) explain why it’s structured the way it is, and how it came about. It was a huge honour to be the one to review it, and I’d actually been looking forward to writing it almost as much as getting to play the game itself. But it turned out to be one of the hardest things I’ve ever written, up there with an eight-thousand word philosophy thesis on the morality of killing replicants.

I spent a week in Eton playing the game all day every day, with one other journalist (Ryan from X360 magazine) in the demo room with me. I wrote scraps of the review on a laptop in my hotel room each night, but generally fell asleep before I got much done, or changed my mind about what I’d said within the first five minutes of playing the next day. By the end of the week, I’d written around half the review’s length, none of which made it into the final piece. Cumulative wordcount: 2,500.

Back at the PC Gamer office, I wrote the whole review quickly, but wasn’t sure if I’d talked about all the important things. Graham read it, and suggested that I may have become hung up on the details a little. I re-read it, and I appeared to have written a manual. A step-by-step guide to what Oblivion is and what happens in it is all info I’d find fascinating if I hadn’t played the game, but as a review it was fussy, dry and missed the point. Cumulative wordcount: 6,000.

I’d been wrestling with the decision of which aspects to talk about, resigned to the fact that you couldn’t cover all the important ones in a small book, let alone a magazine article. I’d also been writing up some of the best bits of my adventures as little stories, to go in separate boxes throughout, but it became clear that these were actually making the one essential point. Oblivion is hugely complex and entirely free-form, so you can’t give an impression of what it’s like to play by attempting to describe it. The only way to give a real feel for how rich with possibilities it is, and why that makes it great, is with examples. So they’ve become a chunk of the main text, punctuated by the normal business of reviewing. Cumulative wordcount: 10,500. Final article: 3,943.

Feedback so far has been really good, and much more importantly I’m now officially mentioned on Wikipedia. What I’m really looking forward to is the game finally coming out. Apart from wanting to get back to it, I want to hear what everyone else gets up to when they play.

Notes On The Arguments About Facebook Acquiring Oculus

I don’t have an opinion about Facebook acquiring Oculus for $2 billion, because I don’t know enough to be confident of how it’ll play out, and that’s usually when I stop having opinions about things. But I do have some thoughts about some of the arguments being used on either side. Continued

Not The Finale Post

I have so many season finales to watch now, it’s like the end of the world. The only one I’ve seen so far is Heroes, which I will refrain from commenting on here until I’ve thought of a better way to deal with the spoilers problem.

This is why this is not the post about season finales. Instead, it is about these things:

Pirates of the Caribbean 3: Dead Man’s World Of End-Sparrow. In one of those things that didn’t really happen to me much when I worked in a warehouse building skateboards, I was taken to a preview screening of this on Wednesday in a stretch limo with free champagne, which I did my level best to pour on the editor of Disney Girl magazine. It is, I thought, ‘okay’. I would stretch to ‘quite good’ if this was the first one, but it lacks so much of the fun of the second that I find it hard to recommend. Particularly since everyone hated the second.

The first one was the zombie pirates one, and was good because it was breezier and funnier than you expected. The second was the fish pirates one and was great for its absurdly long, wildly overdone, bloody-minded physics-driven set pieces on gorgeous tropical islands. The third is about a big book of rules and some crabs that look like rocks.

None of them make a whole lot of sense, and I don’t recall what actually happened, plot-wise, in any of them (at the start of 3, everyone is alive and roaming around, so I assume nothing of import happened in the last two). But the third one doesn’t use its license to be absurd to do anything very fun. All the spectacular bits are just ship battles, which we’ve seen in some depth before.

I actually love ship battles, but they can’t hold my attention for long in dumb films. The reason they’re exciting is that they’re so physical – you can see the cannonballs, you can see which bits of the ships they smash, the damage is all evident and so the outcome is believable. In dumb films, such as this one, captains are idiots and the hero’s ship wins because it’s made of magic.

At one point a billion-strong armada retreat from two enemy ships, because they destroyed the flagship (because, for no reason, the captain couldn’t decide whether to fire or not). John, who loved it, argues that this is normal film logic, but the whole setup for the scene is “They can take this guy, but what do they do about the billion ships?” It’s hard to enjoy a dumb film about naval combat, politics and trickery if you’ve ever seen Hornblower, which was eight non-dumb films about naval combat, politics and trickery, with characters it is possible – nay, easy – to like.

Aside: Geoffrey Rush is still such a watchable pirate. While Depp’s drunken eyebrow-work on Sparrow gets tiresome, Rush can still just say “Arr” or a sentence of the form “X be Y”, and I am immediately happy.

Score: okay.

The reaction to my Galactic Civilizations 2 War Diary: which has been surreal. This is a ten-thousand word account of a single match of an expansion pack to a little-known turn-based strategy game with poor graphics, and no-one seems to mind. It’s not the hits or links that it got, surprising as they were, but the extraordinary comments. I just read someone saying- well, I’ll quote: “My brother and I would read the blog, then get together to discuss what he was doing right, what he was doing wrong, and what he needed to do to win.” This makes me feel amazing.

I like very much that I work on a magazine where I’m allowed to give stupid ideas like this a try. I did most of it at home or after work, but only because I love writing this kind of stuff so much. I had some New Years Objectives this year, one of which was to write something that got the same kind of reaction as my report on the Eve Online assassins – which has always frustrated me by being better-received than almost everything I’ve written since. This got a different kind of reaction altogether.

Comments at PC Gamer
Comments at Joystiq
Comments at the GalCiv site
Comments at Kotaku

Facebook: it’s like social networking, except that I like it. I’m on everything – MySpace, LiveJournal, Blogger, Twitter, WordPress, Technorati, Tumblr, Flickr, Last.fm – but Facebook is the only one that seems really smartly designed in terms of how it connects you to people. It’s good at knowing what you’ll find interesting about what your friends are up to (almost anything), so the main news feed you get from it is incredibly fast-flowing and rich in interesting goings-on.

Now I have to watch TV.

Not Lasting

“Last.fm is a service that records what you listen to, and then presents you with an array of interesting things based upon your tastes — artists you might like, users with similar taste, personalised radio streams, charts, and much more.”

I guess my only problems with it, at the moment, is that it doesn’t record what I listen to or present me with an array of interesting things based on my tastes – artists I might like, users with similar taste, personalised radio streams, charts, or anything else.

It’s installed two plugins – one for Winamp which Winamp doesn’t recognise and which doesn’t work, and one for Media Player which Media Player recognises but which doesn’t work. The only time it understands that I’m listening to anything at all is when I use their dedicated player, which doesn’t know what to play me because it doesn’t know what I like. When it finally did play something I liked, I discovered there’s no way to tell it I like a track once it’s finished playing. It knows I heard it, but all it seems able to do with this information is display that fact on my profile page.

What on earth is this thing? What does it actually do? I keep hearing it compared to Pandora, but the way Pandora works is that I tell it what I like, it plays me things it thinks I might like, and I tell it whether or not I do. So far every stage of that process appears to be impossible with Last.fm.

Not Everything You Find On Flickr Makes A Lot Of Sense Right Away

The Everyone’s Photos page is the best place on the internet.

Not Being An Asshole In An Argument

I don’t argue on the internet anymore. The short version is: it usually gets hostile, and that drives everyone further away from changing their minds.

But I spend a lot of time thinking about whether there’s a way to contribute to a discussion without derailing it. Whether there’s some way of knowing, in advance, that what you’re about to say will make you look like an asshole, start a fight, or be outright wrong.

I think there is. Continued