TOM FRANCIS
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Beautiful Piano Rendition Of The Portal Song

I haven’t talked about Portal much here yet – except to gasp that she says my words – and I will. But for now, here’s a soothing, brilliant and relatively spoiler-free fan performance of what has become its theme.

The criminal thing about embedding, of course, is that it robs the linkee – or ‘victim’ – of any interest generated. So do swing by Jeremy’s blog if you like the cut of his micro.

If you haven’t played Portal, don’t click through to the video’s page on YouTube – even the title is a spoiler of sorts, and the related videos doubly so. Also avoid this post by the writer of the song, Jonathan Coulton, blaming its brilliance on Valve.

I Played Through Episode Two Holding A Goddamn Gnome

Halfway through reviewing Half-Life 2: Episode Two for PC Gamer about a month ago, Valve PR Doug Lombardi asks me if I know about the gnome achievement.

“No?”
“Did you find the gnome near the start?”
“Yeah.”
“You have to put him in the rocket before it launches.”
“But isn’t that right near the end of the game?”
“Yeah.”
“Doesn’t that mean you have to-”
“Yeah.”
“Oh I’m so doing that.”

A month or so later, I have. Continued

Pushing Daisies Continues To Be Incredible

The Incredibles came out around the same time as Half-Life 2, and I remember feeling relieved – amongst much else – to see that there are people in other media cramming as much genius, expertise and love into every square inch of their work. If anything The Orange Box’s diversity makes its brilliance a more dazzling achievement than Half-Life 2, and Pushing Daisies is right here to give off that same reassuring glow: it’s okay, people outside of Valve can be this clever too.

The second episode really does cement it as a masterpiece of that order. I absorb high-bandwidth, info-dense, fast-talking stuff like The West Wing with relish, but the hurtling pace and sheer concentration of brilliant ideas, stylistic flourishes and exquisite jokes in Daisies leaves me reeling. It truly is just joyous, and insane, and sickly and dark all at once.

Ten Minutes To Go

We’re all in the office right now, having got up stupidly early, and there’s almost exactly ten minutes to go before the Orange Box attempts to unlock. I think I just about have time to make coffee.

The Best Three Things On TV

Dexter: The new season is excruciatingly tense. It’s partly the suspense over how he can continue to get away with it when everyone seems to be closing in on him, but for me it’s also the maddening worry that they’re going soft, trying to humanise and redeem Dexter. In the end it’s a better show for continually threatening to do that without ever making good. I’ve never been so relieved to see a knife sunk into a helpless human torso.

Pushing Daisies: A light-hearted supernatural murder mystery about a pie-maker who can resurrect the dead – for one minute. The premise is gloriously fiddly: his touch brings the dead to life, but he has to kill the resurrectee with a second touch within a minute, or a random bystander will die in their place. The obvious application is asking people who murdered them, but they’re not always much help. The dialogue is sparklingly lyrical, the pace is refreshingly swift and the stars winningly chipper and likeable. And it has narration that doesn’t suck.

Damages: Has somehow stayed miraculously on the rails after a seemingly unfollowable pilot. A legal drama with a symmetrical cast of characters on either side, but where the divide between good and evil is ignored by all – especially the writers. Ted Danson makes such a compellingly sympathetic villain, and Glenn Close such a frighteningly ornery hero, that you end up riveted by the duel but unable to root for either side. The web of bizarre, volatile relationships between characters has the plot spasming wildly, untenably with episode. It seems to become more impossible to resolve with every step the two timelines take towards each other, but never cops out or undoes its awful machinations.

Life Complete

In the TV ad for Valve’s Orange Box, the robo-voice from Portal – who you will eventually discover is called GLaDOS – uses journo quotes to summarise each game in the package. One of them is mine! To reiterate, the GLaDOS reads out my words. It will be on American telly. I’ve had a quote in foot-high letters on buses before, but now I can truly die happy. This basically makes me a writer at Valve.

Oh yeah, and I guess the issue with my three Orange Box reviews is on-sale now. It comes in a pretty awesome orange box, but the cover inside is even plus awesome.

For once I’m almost completely happy with my reviews, particularly the insane diagram in the Team Fortress 2 one. Tim deserves the credit for making sure that happened, and our Deputy Art Ed Amie Causton for turning my hilariously rubbish notepad scribble into what you see on the page. I also offer mad props to Valve’s super-artist Dhabih Eng, for painstakingly posing the beautiful lineup that opens the review. It makes me smile every time I look at it.

The Team Fortress 2 review is now online, sans diagram and awesome opening spread, and the other two reviews will go up when the Orange Box itself is live.

This Just In: The Scout Is A Dick

As a Spy, there’s a very tense moment after you’ve ‘sapped’ an enemy Engineer’s sentry, dispenser and teleporters. You retain your perfect disguise, but the Engineer knows there’s a Spy around. It’s not always possible to get far from the scene of the crime before the Engineer comes running, so sometimes you have to rely on a good choice of disguise and some subtle sidling to defer suspicion onto an innocent target.

Dressed as a Scout, I had the best possible chance of getting away with it – Spies rarely disguise as Scouts because they can’t move as fast as a real one, so it looks suspicious if you move around a lot. But I was staying perfectly still, facing the other way, waiting with impressive restraint for the sappers to finish their work, the sentry to kersplode and the crime to be complete.

Sometimes, your character utters a line appropriate to what he’s done. “You’ve got blood on my suit,” if you’ve just revealed yourself and backstabbed someone, for example. Other characters have special lines for if they manage to destroy an Engineer’s structures. The Spy doesn’t have these, of course, because it would of course blow his cover to talk like a Spy amongst enemies.

But Valve may have overlooked, or intentionally ignored, a quirk of the Spy’s deception – he will perfectly mimic his assumed class’s vocal responses. After a pregnant pause as my Sappers fizzled quietly away and the Engineer ran in front of me, glaring wildly for any signs of suspicion, his Sentry finally exploded. And my Spy, in a perfect impression of an asshole Scout, immediately shouted, “I broke your stupid crap, moron!”

Three things happened at once – I slapped my forehead, the Engineer blew me away with a point-blank blast, and the Scout became my favourite personality – narrowly beating the Kenny-esque Pyro.

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.

SO… MUCH… BLOOD…

Eight years and thirty-five minutes late, but I’ve never played a game where I spend more time laughing or less time checking the scoreboard.

Weirdly, You’ve Been Tanned – Suspicious For The Winter

This is mostly about the new Architecture in Helsinki, so I’ll get the other new albums out of the way quickly:

Rilo Kiley – Under The Blacklight: Okay, well this album has a statutory rape apologist song on it, so that’s hardly fair to the others in this round-up. It’s called 15, and you can pretty much take it from there. The trouble is, like all Rilo Kiley songs with slightly unpalettable lyrics, it’s incredibly good. It makes me worry about what Jenny Lewis could convince me of if she sang it well enough, because the “only, only, only fifteen” refrain here is so sweetly intoned that you find yourself thinking “Yeah, how could he have known?” Next up: The Manslaughter Blues.

There’s masses to love about Blacklight, and somehow its biggest appeal is that much of it doesn’t sound like Rilo Kiley. More like a Rilo Kiley inflection on a few of their favourite bands. I’m not well-listened enough to name any, but Give A Little Love sounds like nothing else on this or any other of their albums. And Silver Lining has a soulfulness that is at once theirs and also teasingly someone else’s.

The Go! Team – Proof of Youth: Now that I’ve given it a fighting chance, their second album has stopped irritating me and switched to just being slightly weak and noxious and flat, like week-old coke. The title’s unfortunate – they sound more tired and strained than on Thunder, and there’s just less life in the output. This album’s Bottle Rocket is clearly the jubilant Wrath of Marcie, and Universal Speech has the same electrified schoolyard chant feel of The Power Is On. But neither really recapture the velocity or glee of the first album for me. Grip Like A Vice and Flashlight Fight are just trash; dour self-aggrandising recited with no hint of irony or fun.

Architecture in Helsinki – Places Like This: I haven’t listened to an album on such a relentless repeat since Come On Feel The Illinoise. This has nothing to do with that, and it’s a terrible point of comparison, but I was attempting to illustrate the point that this is awesome. It’s what happens when the geeky indie kids try to be cool, when a huge band forget to bench anyone, and a group with more styles than songs forget to pick one. And like Lister’s triple fried-egg butty with chilli sauce and chutney, the wrongness of the ingredients is what makes it so right.

Like It Or Not explodes into what feels suspiciously like ska, Feather in a Baseball Cap’s descending synth-beep intro is almost seek, and Hold Music is outright sexy. These are (mostly) the same guys who did the chocolate-sweet What’s In Store and the kitten-soft Like A Call, but something’s happened to them. But if you’ve never subconsciously wanted the sweet-voiced girl from Architecture in Helsinki to do a song that calls for her to sing “Give it to me, baby give it to me,” a lot, you’re a better or less imaginative man than I.

The shift does feel like the logical combination of the opposite directions Frenchy I’m Faking and Do The Whirlwind hinted at, and in fact Heart It Races pulls a strand directly from the latter and writes a new song around it. That would be a problem if it wasn’t so much better: electric with force, bristling with hooks and almost offensively quirky. I’ve heard people say the exact opposite, and I just can’t work out what these people are doing with their ears. It doesn’t seem like this sound could possibly fail to tingle the brain if it gets there.

They can’t even manage every album’s Obligatory Three Boring Tracks, screwing it up each time by adding a ridiculous twist like the “Ay yah yah, woo woo!” chant toward the end of Lazy (Lazy), and livening it up irreparably.

Their demented frontman has always let his vocal affectations get the better of him at their songs’ most energetic twists, but here it’s easier to look at it the other way around: in Places’ quietest moments, he sometimes slips back into what could almost pass for a normal human voice. By the spastic climax of album highlight Debbie, the sounds he’s making seem like they wouldn’t fit through a mouth. It irritated me at first, but now I can’t see why I ever liked them without it. Getting carried away and sounding silly is what Architecture in Helsinki is.

Oh, scores? B, C, A; 8, 5, 9.

Structurally Superfluous

My editor, earlier tonight: “I really like that Valve can just do whatever the fuck they want.” And that was before this:

Or this:

And this:

I can’t believe these character movies are getting better. The facial animation reflects the voice and mentality in all of them so exquisitely, and never more so than in this one. It just makes me melt. And I love that he’s playing guitar with giant rubber gloves.

They’re planning to do all nine eventually, and retrofit them into the game as character bios in class selection. I’m sort of dreading the Sniper, because he’s my favourite class but a (knowing) travesty of an Australian. But I can’t wait for the Pyro. Everything he does is inherently funny, even burning people to death.

As for me, I like that the most professional company in the industry can be so wildly unprofessional when they feel like it, or just when it’s funny.

Top of GameTab: Wikipedia Edits From Sony IP

The most-clicked story in gaming right now is that someone from an IP address registered to Sony is editing Wikipedia to claim that Halo 3 will look no better than Halo 2. I love that these guys attribute everything everyone at a company ever does to one imaginary person named Sony, and take its every action as company policy. But they’re missing a much better story – check the IP’s edit history, this one‘s his finest hour:

Revision as of 14:26, 1 April 2007
*”[[Tomb Raider: Anniversary]]” – for PlayStation 2, PC and PSP. Not on the Xbox 360, IN YOUR FACE MIKE!