TOM FRANCIS
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Futurama

It’s incredibly rare, even among these great programmes, for the main character to be my favourite, but Fry definitely is. He doesn’t fit easily into any established stereotype – he’s an idiot but not to the extent of Homer, he’s a loser but not everything goes wrong, he’s hopeless with women but dated Amy, and he’s inept at everything except computer games. To me, he’s a modern-day hero: vain and stupid whilst nerdy and unpopular.

He’s a pizza-delivery boy who falls into a cryo chamber on the turn of the millenium and is defrosted a thousand years later. He befriends a heartless alcoholic bending robot called Bender (it takes a few episodes to get used to the fact that one of the characters is called Bender) and a renegade career-implant officer, the one-eyed Leela. They find work as the illegally underpaid delivery company owned by Fry’s descendant, the senile mad scientist Professor Farnsworth. Also in the company are Zoidberg, an incompetent lobster-alien doctor; Amy, a rich and clueless intern the Professor keeps on because she has the same blood type as him; and Hermes, a Jamaican bureaucrat.

The other main component of Futurama’s appeal is that it’s set in the future – the world is richly imagined and exciting, which takes it to a completely different level to The Simpsons. Cleverly, the satire of The Simpsons isn’t lost in the transition to the year 3000 either – roughly half of everything in the future is a comment on something in the present – and the humour itself is somewhere further in the senseless and crazy directions than The Simpsons. In one shot of a storage cupboard, two folders on a shelf are labelled ‘P’ and ‘NP’ – implying that by 3000AD a mathematical conundrum over the computability of a certain class of algorithms has been resolved. Matt Groening is kind of a nerd himself, but here he’s teamed with David X Cohen, and the team nerdiness level is at such dangerous heights that one DVD commentary mentions they regularly play D&D in their lunchbreaks.

Lastly, the sideline characters that crop up in just a few episodes are among the greatest ever devised: most notably Clamps, Flexo, Morbo, the Robot Devil, the generic fat mechanic guy, Santa Claus, Horrible Gelatinous Blob, the Harlem Globetrotters, That Guy and Elzar. I think quotes do more good conveying the appeal of Futurama, and luckily I have thousands of them.

Series Notes: the first three series are interchangeably great, then the fourth starts with a run of mind-blowingly good episodes, the premiere being probably my favourite ever, and so epic and exciting that it leaves me feeling like I’ve seen Futurama: The Film. It doesn’t stay that good, though, and then series five has two, maybe even three episodes that are basically worthless. The others are as great as the old stuff, but those few anomalies don’t even have a single joke in them that makes me feel bad about writing them off like this.

Quotes:

Soldier: This is the worst part: the calm before the battle.
Fry: And then the battle isn’t so bad?
Soldier: Oh, right. I forgot about the battle.

(a crustacean confiscates Bender’s cigar)
Bender: Wait, I need that to smoke!

(Bender is caught having stolen the priceless atomic tiara)
Bender: Wait, I can explain! It’s very valuable!

Bender: (to a turtle) Maybe you’d feel better if I had a drink.

Bender: (to a turtle) At least we’ll die on our backs, helpless.

Al Gore: And next up we have Professor-
Professor Farnsworth: I demand the floor!
Al Gore: Well, yes, it’s your turn to speak.
Professor Farnsworth: Well nuts to me! I’m taking the stage.

Fry: Hey, you have no right to criticize the 20th century! We gave the world the light bulb, the steam boat and the cotton gin.
Leela: Those things are all from the 19th century.
Fry: Yeah, well, they probably just copied us.

Fry: It’s just like the story of the grasshopper and the octopus. All year long, the grasshopper kept burying acorns for the winter, while the octopus mooched off his girlfriend and watched TV. But then the winter came, and the grasshopper died, and the octopus ate all his acorns. And also he got a racecar. Is any of this getting through to you?

Leela: We’re going to deliver this crate like professionals.
Fry: Aw. Can’t we just dump it in the sewer and say we delivered it?
Bender: Too much work! I say we burn it, then say we dumped it in the sewer!

Leela: That’s Zapp Brannigan’s ship!
Fry: The Zapp Brannigan?
Fry: (confused) Who’s the Zapp Brannigan?

Leela: Stop it, Bender, we don’t need to beg.
Fry: So what do you suggest? A daring daylight robbery of Fort Knox on elephant-back? That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard.

Leela: Where’s Fry?
Bender: I didn’t kill him. Professor?
Professor Farnsworth: No, I’ve been busy.

(Fry has Bender dig up his brother’s grave to take back a lucky clover he stole)
Bender: Paydirt! I got the clover, and his wedding ring. Sorry ladies, I’m taken! Hey Fry, you want me to smack the corpse up a little?

Bender: (carrying pillows) These aren’t very heavy, but you don’t hear me not complaining.

Bender: (locking Leela in the laundry room as part of a mutiny) Don’t worry Leela, soon we’ll be able to look back on all this and laugh. Ahahahahahaa!

Bender: (the ship is going down with Leela, Bender and Fry still aboard) Leela, save me! And yourself I guess! And my banjo! … And Fry!

Zapp Brannigan: (explaining his military plan) If we can hit that bullseye the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards. Checkmate!

(Fry is styling his hair in the exhaust of the ship’s engines)
Leela: Fry, do you have any idea how long it takes to reconfigure those engines?
Fry: When you look this good, you don’t need to know anything.

(Leela is proposing staying at her artificially reduced age rather than returning to her normal one)
Professor Farnsworth: (horrified) But you’ll have no way to return to your normal age except growing up, as God intended!

(Leela and Bender confront the Professor)
Leela: We’ve got to talk to you about Fry.
Bender: Yeah! We want some money! Wait, what’s this about Fry?

(Fry is staying with Bender)
Fry: Where’s the bathroom?
Bender: Bathwhat?
Fry: Bathroom.
Bender: Whatroom?
Fry: Bathroom!
Bender: Whatwhat?

Bender: Of all the friends I’ve had, you’re the first.

(Fry is preparing to revive his fossilised dog)
Bender: A dog, eh? Interesting… no wait, what’s that other one? Tedious…

(Bender and the others are ascending the side of a hotel, Bender looking in on the guests)
Bender: Get a room, you two!
Man: We’re in a room.
Bender: Then lose some weight!

Clips: native.avi (12MB) rock.mpg (3MB)

FUDGE Review

The second story in the collection to take its title from a confectionary-related death that turns out to be irrelevant to the main characters. And like Flaming Marshmallow, that put me off it for a while.

Fudge is not quite a twist story, but the whole thing does lead up to a prediction, and the nature of the prediction is what gives it its punch. It doesn’t count as a twist because we don’t really find out what it means, only how it affects the protagonist. And then, Fudge ends.

That’s the other thing you can do with a short story – end on a note that is not so much “Oh my God what the fuck barbecue” as “Hmmm.” It’s good, and well-read by author Kit Yona in the podcast version, but personally I quite like to be all “Oh my God what the fuck barbecue.”

Machine of Death: a book that appears to be good so far. It’s now $18 whether you buy it from Amazon or Topatoco, and I think Topatoco have faster international shipping. The whole book is free in PDF form, and is trickling out steadily as an audiobook in podcast form. My story for it is online here.

From Gunpoint To Heat Signature: A Narrative Journey

Many of you have been asking how the story of Heat Signature follows on from Gunpoint. We can now explain.

Fresh Fox

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Found And Lost

It seems like only yesterday that some of my desk surface was visible, but it apparently wasn’t and I have been asked to excavate. Among my findings:

• Fifty-six copies of PC Gamer 148’s cover CDs.
• One wicker apple, without lid, empty save pistachio-shell crumbs.
• Doom 3 box, empty.
• UT2004 box, without lid, empty.
• One spoon, large.
• One paper box, contents unknown.
• The head of a plastic penguin with red hair and yellow eyebrows.
• One open packet of coffee grounds.
• One billion (approx) business cards (own).
• Three quarters of a billion (approx) business cards (others).
• One painted wireframe and tissue-mache effigy of me, 8″ tall.
• One purple, yellow and green feathered mardi gras mask.
• Nine pens.
• John Walker’s cafetiere.
• Three ultrillion sheafs of paper of text that no longer seems to mean anything.
• One cardboard cutout of me, articulated at joints with gold pins.
• Twenty issues of PC Gamer.
• Forty duplicate issues of PC Gamer.
• One copy of Stereolab’s Emperor Tomato Ketchip: score!
• One bigillion blank taxi receipts, for expense claim fraud.
• One Morrowind Ordinator lead figurine, 2″ tall.
• One City Of Villains scorpion dude plastic figurine 3″ tall.
• Twelve hundred E3 press discs.
• Nine hundred hundred unwanted DVDs.
• One inflatable chain-mace.
• One inflatable gray (green).
• One foam Darwinian.
• One FSP fridge magnet, ugly.
• One tennis shoe, belonging to Mark Sutherns of Creative Assembly.
• Seven point nine thousand hundred City Of Villains trial code stickers.
• Five USB storage devices of between 64MB and 1GB capacity.
• One Radeon X300 graphics card with a display output socket unrecognisable to the staff of either PC Gamer or PC Format, but which I swear used to plug straight into my regular monitor without fuss.

Flying

I’ve got to level 14 before, with another character, and since he was agility-oriented and I like to be different, I went for Super Jumping. It now turns out that’s widely considered the best all-round transport power – fast, obstacles are no obstacle, and great for escaping tricky situations. Screw those guys. I chose Super Jump because I thought it’d be cool, and it really, really was. But Flying is cooler.

I’ve no regrets – the transport power you pick is a hugely important decision, and it has to make sense for your character. Jump was perfect for The Defenestrator, the man who could dodge anything. For a while Brain Storm was going to have Teleport – she’d already gone for Recall Friend as a pre-requisite to it. But the only connection between storms and teleportation is that Teleport and Phasing come under the Lightning skill tree in Diablo 2, so I realised I wasn’t bound to that. And that I might never get to level 14 again, and Flying is kind of an essential experience for a superhero. Besides which, what could be more storm-related than hanging out in the clouds?

It’s unbelievable. I was standing with Ms Liberty when I got it, as I am when I get any skill, so the backdrop to my revelation was the extraordinary Atlas Plaza – dominated by a statue so huge it defines the sky of the place. I spied a blimp soaring as high as the skyscrapers, and instinctively took off.

There’s a reason we humans keep dreaming about this – it feels amazing. Flying is not a means to the end of feeling like a superhero – being a superhero is a means to the end of flying. That’s the real fantasy. Screw saving people, having power, making a difference or facing odds. Taking off is what it’s all about. That wonderful ambiguity of the action – is she being lifted by some invisible force? Does it pull on all her body equally? It doesn’t look as though there is a gravity-strength force acting on her, she looks serene. Is she simply lighter than air? How then would she be controlling it? Is it like swimming? She’s hardly moving, she just zooms. That she flies where she intends to is immediately apparent in her movements, but how the thought becomes action is utterly occluded. No bird can match this, there’s no mistaking Brain Storm for a plane. That is a person who is freaking flying.

I soared to the blimp. I soared past the blimp. I landed on a skyscraper – switching off my fliability just as I approached its surface, knowing without ever having done or seen it before that my upward momentum would continue to carry me those last thirty centimetres to land elegantly, at a gentle trot, on its tarmac surface. I looked down at the blimp – which ought to be branded ‘Cloud Nine’ by the way – then threw myself at it. I slipped, of course, on its rubbery dome, and plummeted unspeakably towards the city below. Again, the activation didn’t seem to involve a keypress – I wished to slow my fall, and it just happened. My downward velocity arced beautifully into a swoop, came up into a steady rise, which became a magnificent soar.

I still haven’t played City Of Villains – the beta is on, but I’m not in yet. It hardly seems relevant at this point. I guess I shouldn’t recommend CoH with the new game around the corner (which will include Flying too), but the new one’s an unknown and this one is definitely great. You can reach 14 in two weeks without trying too hard – sooner if you get lost in it over a weekend as I’m prone to do. I maintain that the game would have 50% more players if you got your transport power at 10. So many people stop short of fourteen, and none of them would stop if they could fly.

Floating Point Passes 70,000 Players

As of today, 70,163 people own Floating Point, the free game about grappling hooks I released last Friday. 31,700 of those got it on day 1, and the count is now growing steadily at around 3,000 new players a day.

This is pretty amazing. I didn’t contact any press about it, and the only promotion I did was the long and rambly videos I’ve been posting here, if you can call them that. Being free, unsurprisingly, makes a big difference. More interesting stats: Continued

Floating Point Is Out! And Free! On Steam! Watch A Trailer!

Floating Point is out on Steam now, for Windows, Mac and Linux, and it’s free!

It’s a peaceful game about swinging gracefully around randomly generated levels. It’s played entirely with the mouse, it’s easy to play, you can have fun with it in five minutes, and it has relaxing digital music by the excellent Form & Shape.

Here’s a trailer, and some info on why it’s free. Continued

Floating Point Is Coming To Steam – Tomorrow

Here is the news:

• Floating Point is coming to Steam!
• Tomorrow!
• On Windows, Mac and Linux simultaneously!
• And it’s free!

It’s a peaceful game about swinging gracefully around randomly generated levels. It’s played entirely with the mouse, it’s easy to play, you can have fun with it in five minutes, and it has relaxing digital music by the excellent Form & Shape. Continued

Floating Point Development Breakdown

(Screenshot by player QBAEY)

Floating Point is based on some grappling hook code I made for a game that I still plan to continue with some day. Since I was using version control for that, and hence for this, I have a log of every ‘commit’ I made during development: basically, all the times I felt my progress was worth backing up, and what that progress was.

With a bit of hackery, I’ve pulled out a list of those in chronological order to make a sort of diary of the game’s development, showing which days I worked on it and what I did. Obviously this contains some references to things only I’ll understand, but most of it’s in English, and it gives you an idea of how the game evolved and how long it took. I’ll highlight major developments or revelations, and add in when I tested and with how many people. Continued

FLAMING MARSHMALLOW Review

The book I’m reading just got putdownable, so I’ve finally dug into Machine of Death. I’d also been following the podcast, trying each entry to see if I like the reader’s voice, and saving it to read in the book if I don’t. What? That’s not weird. I’m overly fussy about reading voices.

My plan is to review every story in the book except my own. We’ve had lots of lovely reviews, but in a normal review you don’t analyse every story – most don’t even mention standouts. But short story collections are diverse, if they’re good, and for all I know ours is both. I don’t know any of the other authors personally, except for brief e-mail exchanges about the book, so it’s not hard to be objective. I will be more polite than I am in game reviews, though, since I can’t claim to be well-read or good at analysing literature.

I have to admit I avoided this story at first, because the title made me think “Sigh, comedy death.” It’s not a comedy, and that prediction has almost nothing to do with it.

Instead, it’s an incredibly focused picture of what feels like a very thoroughly imagined version of the Machine of Death world, set long after any initial shock or uncertainty about the use of the machine. Everyone’s so settled into it that schoolkids define their hang-out groups and social status by their predicted deaths; violent ones the coolest.

Something rings very true about the ease with which kids accept the morbidity of death predictions, and get more excited about the possibilities than bogged down by the fatalism. The story’s payload, to me at least, is a situation where a girl is desperately hoping for the stickiest possible end, while her father longs for something dull and distant.

She does get her prediction, but the only failing of Marshmallow is that it isn’t immediately clear what it means. That ambiguity’s a useful tool in other stories, but here I’m just not totally sure if the words are referring to something I’m not familiar with. The characters understand it, and we understand it through them, but the scene could have had more punch if it was something we could immediately grasp the implications of, to both parties.

This feels like one of the most convincing worlds, though, and the voice of the narrator is authentically young and fun.

Machine of Death: a thing that appears to be good so far. It’s now $18 whether you buy it from Amazon or Topatoco, and I think Topatoco have faster international shipping. The whole book is free in PDF form, and is trickling out steadily as an audiobook in podcast form. My story for it is online here.

Five Things I Learned About Game Criticism In Nine Years At PC Gamer

However bad at games writing I might be now, I was a lot worse when I started at PC Gamer nine years ago. When I first applied, my sample piece was so bad I didn’t even get an interview. I was hired as a coverdisc editor a few months later, and spent two years trying to worm my way into a writing job by volunteering for every piece I could get. Continued

Five Problems With Chess

Firstly, of course: many folks I like and respect love chess, and I’m happy for them and have no interest in persuading chess fans to like it less or want something different. But it’s not for everyone, and I’m one of the people for whom it’s not. So what I’m interested in is: what needs fixing to make it a game I enjoy? And if you did that, who else might enjoy it?

I am gonna call these problems problems, though, because it gets exhausting to say “possible areas where there’s scope to broaden or mutate its appeal to a different set of people, without wishing to detract from or disparage the great enjoyment many already draw from the game as it stands.” And because some of them, from my perspective, for players like me, with all the caveats above, seem incredibly fucking stupid. Continued

Five Hours With BioShock Infinite And Ken Levine

“It has the atmosphere of a cheerful village fete, but in a village that couldn’t exist. At one point, we seem to be in a cloud: a thick haze turns everyone in the street to silhouettes, picked out by spectacular rays of golden sunlight. Confetti floats through the air, and hummingbirds pause to probe flowers. Two children splash each other in a leaking fire hydrant.”

“Half an hour later, for reasons I won’t go into, I’m ramming a metal gear into a man’s eye socket until blood geysers all over my face. I’m drenched. Everyone’s screaming. Four more men are coming for me, and this blunt steel prong is all I have to kill them with.”

My preview and interview is up now.

First Time Using An iPhone

When the iPhone was announced, I laughed at the notion of spending SIX HUNDRED DOLLARS on a phone. You should imagine that laugh attenuating, bitterly, over six and a half years of me using the cheapest object Nokia can produce, until Gunpoint launched. Then I stopped, and thought, “Huh, I can actually afford to be one of the assholes who have these things now.” Continued