TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

Not Being A Spy

Some people seem to really enjoy playing Team Fortress 2 as a Heavy, or a Medic. Me, I just like not being a Spy. Pretty much anyone but the Spy. It’s nothing personal, he’s just not for me. Not my kind of class, you know? I’m a straightforward type. A straightforward, red-blooded, red team type. Love that red team.

For example, I really like just sitting here, next to your turret. I’ve got it. You can go off and build teleporters or something. Oh, my name? Yeah, that’s just a coincidence. I guess you and I think alike – after all, we’re both straightforward types, on the red team, the best team of them all.

I also really like being healed. So that I can better kill all the blues. That’s why their bullets don’t look like they’re hurting me, by the way – because of your excellent healing. Thanks, red team medic. You and I are on the same side; the red team. Just regular joes, fighting the good fight against the blue team, who are the enemy of us both.

No, I’m not going to fire just yet. Why don’t you go ahead? Maybe you can lure them with your Syringe Gun. I’ll mop them up just as soon as you walk ahead of me. Go, red team!

Boy, it’s good being a Sniper too. Just us two Snipers, up here on the battlements. It’s a great view. I particularly like how we shoot at things, like blue guys, who we hate, because of the way in which we’re on the red team. I shoot at things all the time. Not right now, but usually.

I also turned off my laser sight. I didn’t like it. You know what I find helps? If you stand just a little way away from the wall, your aim improves loads. The wall really cramps your style sometimes. I don’t know if it’s an elbow thing or what, but just taking a few steps forwards does the trick. And staying scoped. Always stay scoped.

Sometimes things go wrong. Like this one time, all my turrets and dispensers fell apart one after the other for no reason. There were no enemies around, except this one dead guy who looked like a good ol’ red Engineer, but he had my name so I guess he must have been a Spy. Spies, eurgh. Who’d have them?

It’s the same when I dress up as and really am the Medic, on the red team, as always. For some reason my medigun never really works properly, and pretty soon my Heavy falls over. I’m kind of new at this, but I enjoy it all the same. It’s kind of fun, despite the tragic loss to the red team; the best team, and the one that I’m genuinely on.

Whatever class I play, the maps have some spots I love to hang out. Under bridges and stuff. There’s a few backrooms in Well that are just cool to stand around in, then wander back out into the fight like nothing happened, which it of course didn’t. Yay red!

The only thing I’m not wild about in Team Fortress 2 is when my own team – the reds, my favourite team – shoot me. It doesn’t hurt, because I’m on their team, the red team, and there’s no friendly fire. But it hurts inside. Just the idea that my friends think I’m a Spy. A Spy! I hate those jerks.

In fact, here come the Blue team right now. I might just show them what I think of them by going over there. I think I can break into their Resupply room and get some health, which I don’t need. I found a powerup that lets me do that. BRB.

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.

Noble Jedis

No-One Drove In New York, There Was Too Much Traffic

This one goes out to anyone who ‘cannot wait’. I will help you wait.

Everything that bothers me in GTA IV is a case of the game trying to guess what a I want to do, and failing bizarrely in some really easy cases.

Please look in the direction I am travelling. For a game about cars, you’d think this would have come up. But no, every time I turn a corner, reverse, or stop reversing and drive forwards, I’m left barreling forth blindfold into heavy, cop-ridden traffic. Is it hard to detect which direction I’m travelling? Is it hard to move the camera? Is it unimportant to see what you’re about to drive into? Are cornering, stopping and changing directions quirky edge-cases you hadn’t considered? What is unusual about the way I’m playing that makes this a problem for me?

Please get in the car I am closest to and facing when I press the ‘get in car’ button. This is my cause of death around sixty percent of the time. I’m knocked from my vehicle, I run back to it under a hail of gunfire, and standing in front the door, physically touching the car and facing the drivers seat into which I wish to get, pressing the ‘get in car’ button causes Niko Bellic to turn around 180 degrees, run ten meters across a busy highway, open the door of an ice-cream van, punch the refreshment vendor inside, drag him from his lofty perch and then fall on top of him as the thirtieth bullet he’s taken during this procedure strikes his last functioning organ.

Please target the enemy I am looking directly at when I press the ‘target enemy’ button. Here’s how you can tell which one I mean: if I fired without targeting, which would require me to hold a trigger in some kind of elusive quantum state between off and on, my bullets would hit this guy. That guy. That is the guy that I mean, the guy I am facing and pointing my gun at. And who, by the way, is pointing a gun at me and about to fire, so let’s hustle a little here.

But just to be absolutely clear, I’ll detail some examples of who I do not mean. I do not mean the civilian driving a van in the opposite direction three lanes over. I don’t mean the other gunman fifty feet away and forty degrees to my left, who is completely invisible to me as he has fully concealed himself behind a concrete pillar. I definitely don’t mean the cop, who currently only wants me for a mild traffic misdemeanour and has no intention of firing at me or calling for backup unless I do something utterly, inexcusably, surreally moronic like turn around and shoot him six times in the pancreas instead of defending myself against the armed drug dealer who’s about to murder me.

Please leave cover when I press the ‘leave cover’ button, the ‘jump’ button or attempt to run, as fast as I can, away from cover. This is where I’m stuck right now. A mission where I get to walk freely around a venue before choosing my moment to attack three people within it. Once attacked, they flee.

The first time I got that far, I’d taken cover behind a wall, and urgently needed to abandon my hole-up-and-let-them-come approach for a run-after-them-and-kill-them ploy. My instinct was to move in the direction I wanted to run away from this wall, hammering the sprint button. This caused me to tango stylishly up and down the wall with my back to it, three times.

Thinking remarkably logically for the circumstances, I tried pressing the ‘take cover’ button, which I hoped might have become a ‘leave cover’ button. Niko span round to face a locked door on an adjacent wall and hurled himself at it, rolling impressively and then gluing himself to it with the same adhesive I was already wrestling with.

By this stage three different men were firing on me not two metres away, but I couldn’t fire back because every attempt to leave cover reset my aim to be parallel to the wall I was stuck to. Clearly the Machiavellian club owner had taken the precaution of coating his walls with a sort of fly paper for gangsters; once touched, forever ensared.

After trying the imagined ‘leave cover’ button two more times, thrashing Niko wildly around in his sticky prison, I resorted to the ‘jump’ button. He left cover, faced the wall, and took a giant leap directly into it, sliding nonsensically down its surface and taking a full second to recover to normal stature. I should say ‘at least a full second’, since at that point, yet again, the last healthy centimeter of me was shot off.

Seriously, I’m asking: is there a button to leave cover? Everything I try works when I’ve glued myself to a plain wall in a sleepy street, but in a tight backroom full of gangsters, every button initiates equally unhelpful, time-consuming actions that leave me facing the wrong way or adhered to the wrong thing. Until I find one that doesn’t, I’m never touching the cover system again.

There are other failures, the usual GTA stuff: your moron friend ran out into enemy gunfire and died, mission failed. The cutscene ended with you standing dumbly in the open with four armed drug dealers firing at you, mission failed. You fell slightly behind a fleeing criminal on a straight road with no exits, mission failed. You failed the mission, mission failed and you have to return to your contact, then come back here, then do the three other stages of the mission you’ve already completed successfully three times, then when you complete this part of it using the foreknowledge you gained last time, we’ll suddenly introduce a new arbitrary failure state you couldn’t have prepared for and you’ll have to start again.

But that stuff I can forgive – it’s all about the missions, each of which is finite and most of which are optional. And all could be fixed with a simple ‘skip mission’ option after two failures (or even a cheat – are there any?). The improvements GTA IV makes to the formula more than compensate for the series’ traditional failings, it’s only the infinitely recurring control problems that can’t be ignored. Talking about those improvements would probably help dispel the impression that I loathe the game, but unfortunately I’m out of terrible out-of-focus photos of a low-res screen to punctuate this text, so that’ll have to be another post.

Niece Vs iPhone

You can set an iPhone to show and photograph what’s facing the screen, like a mirror. The two things my niece finds fascinating are this, and my face. Continued

New-Album Deathmatch

Masses of new stuff by great people out now, so much that one might feasibly need them to be listed and detailed in ascending order of greatness. Now with links to pretty much everything! And prettier!

Ted Leo – Living With The Living

This one isn’t actually great, it’s mildly okay. The reggae-style track I linked a while back (I can’t do so again, it’s been taken down) is so sumptuously mad that everything else on the album sound frustratingly structureless and unremarkable. A couple have wonderful moments – the chorus refrain in Army Bound, the tightly rhyming lyrics of Colleen, the steady sunny riff of Costa Brava, and the anthemic outtro of the okay-pretty-good Lost Brigade – but none hold together as a full and perfect pop song the way Me And Mia, Walking To Do and Where Have All The Rude Boys Gone did. I find myself listening to Unwanted Things more often than every other song combined. :(

Score: (

Low – Drums And Guns (streaming MP3 and video, ‘Breaker’)

This is great, but coming after the dazzlingly great The Great Destroyer, seems profoundly less great than it ought to. The main reason for that is that it’s about the war, and therefore unspeakably bleak, slow and grim. The other main reason for it is utterly bizarre: all the vocals come entirely from the right-hand channel. This makes it completely horrible to listen to on headphones, and I’d assume there was something wrong with my copy if I hadn’t also listened to someone else’s. It’s feels like you’ve got Swimming Ear, which certainly adds to the atmosphere of unease, but hardly captures the full impact of being shot to death on a baking hot oil field. And it’s really just annoying.

I have plenty of room in my heart for bleak, and Low do it every bit as well as Godspeed, You Black Emperor! (oem), but Low do every mood as well as its undisputed masters. And when they do pop-put-through-the-meat-grinder, as they did on Destroyer, they’re like nothing else on Earth.

Score: \

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah – Some Loud Thunder (mp3s here and here)

Most people find the CYHSY guy’s voice annoying, including a lot of their biggest fans. I think I do, in fact. It’s just incredibly addictive, even when it’s annoying you, like tapping a pen against the desk. It seems to scratch some phantom itch that can never quite be sated, so you never quite get your fill of it. It’s hoarse, scraping, often tuneless, but I think I would need to take up smoking if I had to stop listening to it.

The new album’s nuts. I love it. I find Yankee Go Home annoying in a non-addictive way (slightly cloying), but elsewhere the honking, rattling, sing-song mess of Satan Said Dance, the conversational rhythm of Mother Won’t You Keep The Castles In The Air And Burning? (oqm, and a great title), and the Fridmannesque crackling booms of Emily Jean Stock all do something to my brain that I find most agreeable. In fact, those fuzzy booming kick-drums sounded so Fridmannesque that I looked it up, and sure enough, the album was produced by Dave Fridmann. Ha! He’s the guy who made the Flaming Lips’ Soft Bulletin sound so good, but deserves far more of your respect for making The Delgados’ career highlight The Great Eastern what it was.

Score: Fridmannesque

Modest Mouse – We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank (video, ‘Dashboard’)

I sense that a lot of Mouse fans were nervous that their uncharacteristically optimistic single Float On had become such a hit, because it’s the angst and bile we love them for. I wasn’t, I loved Float On, I love it when grouchy people find something they can’t help but smile at, but even I’m kind of glad that Dead has plenty of spite to go around. The opening of March Into The Sea is every bit as spittle-flickingly violent as the angriest moments of Cowboy Dan, and the “Ah-ha-ha”s are just barely controlled. Elsewhere vocalist Brock sounds like he’s about to lose control even on the “Shake-shake-shake-shake-shake” of the otherwise upbeat Missed The Boat, and that’s the vital thing. It’s that ill-concealed energy that makes Modest Mouse so cathartic to listen to, whether it’s exultant or vitriolic, and Dead simmers with it throughout.

Feist – The Reminder

I’m repeatedly appalled at how many people don’t know Feist. I came by her via an unconventional channel – I think it was the only time ace tech blog Waxy.org took a break from talking about social web stuff or his son to mention music, and link the video for the extraordinary Mushaboom. You’ll probably be told at some point in your life that she’s from Broken Social Scene, which is offputting (they’re okay) and misleading. She shares nothing musically with them, she’s somewhere between Cat Power and Beth Orton.

The rest of her first album wasn’t anything like as juicy as that wild nonsense, but the new one is triumphant throughout. Even some of the tracks that seem understated on first listen – Limit To Your Love; Past In Present; My Moon, My Man (video) – turn out to be full of fantastic moments you didn’t notice (how did I ever miss the “Whoa-wha-who!”s in the former?). And when she wears it on her sleeve, as she does on the fleeting-but-ecstatic One Two Three Four (video), it’s impossible not to succumb to the virulently infectious joy.

It might not be the revelation that The Greatest was for Cat Power, but it shows the same sudden confidence, and it’s just as satisfying for it. Quite apart from actually shouting “Ha!” in the middle of the lovably fearless I Feel It All, she takes on the old Nina Simone song See-Line Woman, wryly retitles it to Sea-Lion Woman (video), then proceeds to do such a staggering reworking of it that you’re left wondering what the hell the point of the original was. I couldn’t tell you with regular words what happens when she stops singing for the second time in this song, but something like ‘climactoplectic’ would be in the ballpark.

Only a couple of songs are too ponderous for their own good – Intuition and So Sorry don’t give you much reason to go back to them – but more often she finds a way to make the sparse remarkable. The soulful Brandy Alexander is soothing where it ought to be boring, Honey Honey gets indecent mileage out of a simple vocal filter elegantly used, and even The Park’s 16-bit mono atmosphere sounds inexplicably sunny. The only other criticism I could possibly level is that, when I noticed the album playing in a Seattle Starbucks, acknowledging it to the barrista failed to get me into the kind of brilliant conversation I’ve become accustomed to having with beautiful strangers in America. Her friend had put it on. She had thought it was Bjork at first. And much as I love Bjork, I could no longer feign interest.

Score: Best

 

Blonde Redhead – 23: like it.

Sondre Lerche – Phantom Punch: don’t like it.

The Bird And The Bee – The Bird And The Bee: fuck!

 

Arcade Fire – Neon Bible
Bloc Party – Weekend In The City
They’re both fine, if you like stuff that’s fine, rather than, say, awesome. They’re good news for people who like okay music.

 

Peter, Bjorn And John – Writer’s Block
These guys are hugely exciting, and I have no excuse for not having noticed them for the first five or six years of their existence. They did come up occasionally on Joy’s podcast, but there was usually something more immediately shiny like The Sounds or PAS/CAL to distract me. They’re exciting because the many fantastic tracks on this album are all fantastic in completely different ways. That icy whistle of Young Folks (video) is pulling Groove Armada’s trick of hanging a whole song on a single, carefree hook, and still managing to make it sound vital and fresh. The muffled cathedral echo of the vocals on Chills is as serene as Readymade at their best. And Up Against The Wall’s steadily mounting drone sounds like a homage to American Analogue Set.

I guess what I’ve ended up saying here is that they’re exciting because they sound like everybody else, but that’s obviously not it. The sleepy vocals (all three of them) set them apart, as the one consistent thread throughout, and it’s hearing them against such fresh backdrops each time that make it work.

 

Maxi Geil And Playcolt – Making Love In The Sunshine
Hottest song ever. It might be too sharply written to be truly romantic – “This kind of love is like the Red Brigade / What was so scary once is now a little bit quaint” – but even the call-and-response bit just sounds like violent, wild sex. It helps that it’s about violent, wild sex, but it’s more a case of the music being expertly crafted around the subject matter than any kind of inference on the part of the listener. The crescendo itself actually makes things happen to me that aren’t supposed to happen from just listening to something.

Wild Beasts – Brave Bulging Bouyant Clairvoyants
I’ve talked about this here before, so I won’t again, but in case anyone missed it: imagine if Scooby Doo could sing, and sing so beautifully that a little piece of you died each time you heard it. That is the Wild Beasts.

Siobhan Donaghy – So You Say (mp3)
The chorus in this blares, like they switched a whole other set of speakers on. It seems to come from somewhere else entirely, without stopping coming from the regular place, by which I mean to say that it is loud and great and all over the place. I was listening to it on my MP3 player on the way back from Al’s wedding, in the car, admittedly still slightly drunk from the previous night, and found myself almost unable to believe that no-one else in the car was hearing it full-volume when it hit the “Don’t say a thing about me” line.

All three of these found on Fluxblog, the best thing to happen to music since John Peel.

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.

New TF2 Maps And Medic Change In Two Months

I’ve been lobbying Robin Walker with increasingly bizarre suggestions for sprucing up the Medic, and he’s had some annoyingly good reasons why they wouldn’t work. Can’t wait to see what will.

http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/50709

New Ritual

It’s been a good month. I’ve spent most of it chronically exhausted from nightmare-induced sleep deprivation, ill, or feeling like I’m drowning in a treacle comprised of my own meaningless words, but still somehow a good month. Despite feeling like I’m getting nowhere with anything, I’ve written twenty-six pages of articles for the next issue to hit the shelves, and two of them have been the result of investigative digital tampering to acquire information no-one else has, something you could almost call journalism if it was about something serious. It wasn’t; it was about robotic aliens and death Gods; but that just made it more fun.

Now I’m sitting in my newly tidied room listening to the bluesy new Cat Power with my window open and bare feet, freezing slightly but enjoying the night air too much to do anything about it, and idly researching a link between avian flu and a fictional virus dreamed up last millenium.

I used to have a ritual, once I’d finished the disc each month, of stopping at Shakeaway for a carrot cake milkshake on the way back from delivering the masters to the postroom. Since I’m no longer a disc editor, I’m enstating a new ritual for when my work on an issue is done, based on a throwaway line by Amy Gardner from the West Wing:

Amy: I fought you, I lost, I went home, took a shower, had a drink. You know what I do when I win? Two drinks.

This month: two drinks!

New PC Gamer Podcast: Eau De Toilette Radioactifs

This month, Ross Atherton, John Walker, Craig Pearson and myself discuss what Ross will do for a drink, how much John hates Fallout 3, and what’s wrong with my radar. Find out what the lead designer of Deus Ex 3 said to make me equate the original to the Mona Lisa, why a fifteen year-old reader is having a mid-life crisis, and WHAT GOES INTO A MAGAZINE.

Sign up here, download here, or listen here:

This, by the way, is the Zombuster creation to which I refer towards the end:

New Heat Signature Video: Galaxies, Suction And Wrench-Throwing

As always, follow it on Twitter or sign up to be told when it’s out, or ready for testing, here.

I also made a short montage of all the ways I fucked this video up in previous takes: Continued

New Heat Signature Trailer Shows Art, Music, Wrenches And Guns

New Gunpoint Test Build Soon, Sign Up Here

Update: build sent out 15/02/12, thanks to everyone who signed up. You can still sign up to put yourself down for future test builds.

I’m almost ready to send out a new test version of Gunpoint to anyone who’s around and able to give me some brief feedback. There’s no selection process, just sign up on the mailing list here and you’ll get it in the next day or two:

Also, Gunpoint was just previewed on BoingBoing! Brian Easton played an early build and seemed to really dig it!

Link.

Needle Exchange

Skulch.

Schlunk.

Whunk.

Thunk.

Sklunch.

Ptow.

Nom.

Fwoosh.

Snick.

I appear to have been punctured.

Much as I suck with it, I’m still liking The Huntsman.

Natural Numbers In Game Design

In maths, ‘natural numbers’ are the ones you might use to count observable, whole things: eg. there are six people here. Anything that doesn’t work in place of ‘six’ there, like 3.4 or -2, is not natural. They’re kind of ‘numbers you can see’.

I’d like to use the term in game design to mean specifically that: numbers you can see. Things that are represented so simply and wholly and countably that you don’t need to display an actual numeric figure to tell the player how much they’re seeing. They can just see. Continued