TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

A Couple Of Things!

• I’m in one of those swamp months, where everything seems to take five times longer than it ever possibly could, and usually go dramatically wrong at three different points. This is why I was in the office until nine tonight, despite working on a section for the issue after the one whose deadline the others were crunching to. Also there was free junk food and liquor, by way of Ross’s efficient repurposing of the bribes we receive to incentivise and energise overtimers.
   
• The one thing that did go swiftly and without hitches was a short story I wrote to submit to the Machine Of Death collection, a set of short stories based around the concept put forth in this comic:
  

  I’m going to put it up here in a day or two, once I’ve tinkered with it a bit. It’s a little over six-thousand words, divided into five short chapters, and covering a lot more time and events than my 50,000 word novel was ever going to. I’m not trying anything of book-length again until I’ve done a few more of these – it’s gratifying and intoxicating to fly through something like this without sweating it. I’m not keen to go back to a vast mess of ideas without enough narrative string to tie them together, no matter how I re-squish them.

• Lastly, Heroes was excellent. I hope they don’t do too many of these single-story episodes or it could become Lost (there is not a scale by which I could measure how little I cared about anyone or anything in the last episode of that), but Glasses Guy is one of the few characters who can carry one with ease. The actor has always been superb, taking a very tough role to make interesting and managing to give him an uneasy mix of creepiness, likeability and mystique. All while wearing horn-rimmed glasses. He’s even better without them, though, and he’s convincing enough as both a loving father and a demon that even towards the end, you’re not 100% sure which side he’s going to come down on. And ultimately it’s the one you believed in slightly more, which is itself a feat. Not just to act each well, but to know exactly how well you’re doing it and stop short of perfection on the one your character’s heart wouldn’t quite be in. 24, Lost and Studio 60 are all losing it at the moment, I’m so pleased to see the most flawed show of the lot outshining them all.

This Is Taking Ages

I had to explain the internet to someone once, not in terms of how it worked, but in terms of what it does when you start your browser. Which is, of course, nothing. You can’t even really browse it – there’s no grand index, no logical categories and no overview. It’s a derranged oracle that refuses to answer some of your most basic questions and overwhelms you with depth and insight on the most trivial ones, and the only way to tell between the two types is- actually, I haven’t found it yet. I thought at the time that this person’s expectations of the net were funny – to just start it up and have it come to them – but in fact that’s almost exactly how it works now.

I tend to jump on bandwagons as soon as Google starts driving them – search never made much sense to me with Alta Vista, Hotmail was – still is – a mockery of real e-mail, chat feels clunky and irritating in a separate application, and it wasn’t until I tried Google Reader that it clicked, and I suddenly saw the point of RSS feeds. And every one of these is now poured down my brain-gullet (eyes, I guess?) when I start my browser: they’re all part of Gmail. Communication – both realtime and turn-based – takes place entirely on that single page, the things I want to read are delivered to my pigeonhole, and anything else I need can be typed into that little white box.

The feed-reader integration is actually a hack, but it’s one made by a Google engineer who works on Reader, so it’s a fair functional facsimile of something they evidently want to do soon. Soon too, I’m sure, there’ll be a box underneath Labels there that tells me what I’ve got going on today and tomorrow according to Google Calendar, my next most-used site. And the Compose link won’t be restricted to writing e-mails, I’ll be using the full in-browser word processor Google Docs already provides, with revision histories, collaboration options and exporting to other formats. In other words, the dense, juicy Google particles of the internet universe have given it just enough total mass to suck it all back together into one time-dilating Big Crunch, rather than expanding endlessly and hopelessly from its explosive beginning. For people like me, at least.

The other big change since I was asked that question is piracy going mainstream. When a popular movie/TV/game pirating site Iso Hunt went down for a few weeks recently, the diverted traffic to the other main sites – the ones that sprung up from Suprnova’s grave – pushed three of them into Alexa’s hallowed list of the 200 most-visited sites on the planet. Publishing companies were disastrously, fatally slow to grab hold of these new thicker cables and plug them into their content-factories, and now a handful of geeks have beaten them to it just out of boredom, just for fun, just because it’s that easy.

With piracy as popular as it is, it’s starting to sound naive to claim that publishers could have prevented this by selling their stuff digitally sooner. And it’s probably true that a big chunk of pirates will just keep on piratin’ long after the stuff they’re downloading is available through legitimate channels for a small fee. But the step up from getting something for free to paying for it is far, far harder to take than the next step along the expensive high-road you’re already on, even once you spot a free one below. Put more simply, morals are easier to stick to than develop. If legitimate channels had been available before illegal but free ones became well known, the critical mass of the consumer populace would have stuck with the safe, successful method they’d already had so many positive experiences through. Virtually no-one goes from working for a living to mugging people by choice, but if mugging was the only way anyone had ever acquired money, you’d have a hell of a time persuading anyone to work. What’s the term for this? An asymmetrically resistant semi-permeable social barrier? Okay, well, it should be.

The point, which I’m only just now discovering I had, is that the pirates have won so hard that this age in which every non-physical thing is free to anyone with broadband and weak moral fibre might be here for a long, long time to come. And the end to it might not come in the form of a poorly-engineered official equivalent that costs infinitely more.

We’ve been in the Information Age for thirty years now, and I’m starting to feel like it has more in common with the Iron Age than the Industrial one. We think we’ve intentionally developed a more advanced kind of machine, and we have, but the really significant thing is that through it, we’ve discovered a new raw material. What we do with that will determine what the next age gets called. Metals were originally used for weapons – killing things – then eventually we turned them into machines that produced stuff; industry. Data has so far been primarily used for communication – shouting louder to each other – but I’m sure we’re going to find something far less primitve, far more complex and far more powerful to do with it in my lifetime.

Best Interview Ever

This is a helmet-cam video of a guy falling from 12,000ft without a working parachute, and hitting the ground at eighty miles per hour.

Friend: Are you okay?
Skydiver: No.
Friend: Does it hurt anywhere?
Skydiver: Yes.

It is, obviously, an extraordinary video, and I have already linked it in my Del.icio.us panel on the right there, and am talking about it now to Graham, but somehow that exchange is the best bit.

Let Them Eat Facts

It’s that bi-annual tradition of looking through the top twenty search results that lead people here, noticing that they’re all wildly misleading, and in the spirit of giving people what they want, or at least what other people once wanted, trying to address those curiosities. In descending order of wantedness!

wii controller
Yeah. I was pretty wild about the idea, but I was dreaming of something more precise and reliable than this. Without those qualities this can’t replace the mouse in the way I wanted it to, but it’s still vastly more pleasurable to use than any other console controller. That’ll prove its main contribution to games: making individual actions pleasurable, rather than more sophisticated or artful, and there’s masses of unexplored territory there for games about smashing things up, hitting stuff and chucking it around. In other words, exactly the kind of off-the-wall concept-driven stuff Nintendo can do well.

ah that wonderful ability sylar script heroes
You refer, I imagine, to Sylar’s line to Eden in episode 11:

extra life omlette aliens
Okay, I lost you at ‘omlette aliens’. Extra Life is a section of our magazine that I contribute to, but if you’re looking for omelette aliens you may have meant ‘extra-terrestrial life’. You’re mis-spelling omelette, too, so I’m not going to try very hard to find out what you were looking for, find it or bring it to you.

711391
My unfaithful friend. This is the woman whose search-engine usage over the three months for which AOL decided to publish her and three-thousand other people’s personal data painted a picture of a sad, broken modern life, quite literally warts-and-all. She’s a loathesome, deceitful, callous woman, but reading those search queries gives you such a comprehensive understanding of her life, thoughts and motivations that it’s impossible not to understand her. And understanding, it turns out, really does lead to a strange kind of forgiveness, or perhaps just acceptance. If you knew with this level of certainty, this level of insight, why everyone did what they did, it’d be hard to ever truly hate again. She probably won’t go down as a victim of one of the most heinous breaches of privacy, but I think she warrants the title most complete, most merciless, most interesting.

“rhetorical bombast aside”
Okay, hands up who searched for this. I mentioned it as something I was particularly pleased to see written on this site, by commenter Jason L, and it looks from this search like there’s only one other site in Google’s brainbanks that’s ever used the phrase. I didn’t search for it, until just now. DID HE?
 
i donloaded a video file with bittorrent but it is a blank white page
Okay well your first mistake was to donload, rather than download, it. Your second was probably to open the .torrent file as it were the movie, or perhaps just open it with the wrong program. Your third was to confess to what was almost certainly a crime in a search string. Next time try “I hear movie pirates sometimes find that the video files they download with BitTorrent come up as blank white pages, and that there is a solution to this problem. I wonder what that solution is, so that I can undermine it, in order to scupper pirates, whom I hate.”

battlefield 2142 disc doesnt recognise
I know! It’s a complete dick. My Battlefield 2 disc was clasped so tightly in its case that it cracked before it would come out, and now my 2142 one goes completely unrecognised on about half the machines I’ve tried it on. I wouldn’t care if EA’s digital distribution system worked in any goddamn way whatsoever, but my legitimate copy on that has never once launched successfully, and their tech support guys have simply given up trying to help me. I was only trying them to see what they’d do – I’ve got access to a working disc that I can use to play anyway – and they failed utterly. I should expose them, if only that were the kind of thing anyone would care to read.

“zombie zombie zombie” virus virus flash
I can’t decide which is more intriguing, what this person was looking for or the fact that I must, once, have said “zombie zombie zombie”. Without that second ‘virus’ he could almost be searching for an infection his PC has suffered that involved printing the undead triplet somewhere, but as it is he seems to be penning a tribal chant for our times, to be sung around bonfires while stomping and bouncing in a slow-moving circle.

delicious pentadact
Aren’t I just, though?

getting windows to recognise a wiimote
I believe you need Glovepie. I have no idea what it is. Those are just words to me, and ones that need a space between them at the very least.

just cause where is the fighter jet
I actually can’t answer that one. I did find it, but I don’t recall where and our review code has now expired. Guides online are surprisingly rubbish, too. If it’s any consolation, the only time the jets are really fun are on the missions when you’re given them to begin with – the rest of the time there’s not much to chase. You could always get in a lot of trouble with the cops and grappling hook one.

primer movie wikipedia
 I’m going to assume you found what you were looking for, and not mock you for using Google to find something when you already knew where it was. I use Firefox’s Google-powered address bar to virtually describe where I want to go and assume that it’ll jump me straight to the right page. Addresses are so passé.

replacement nintendo sensor bar
I hear a candle works. I hear it’s actually a bit of a misnomer – the bar isn’t sensing anything, it’s putting out IR for the Wiimote to detect, and it’s the controller itself that works out where it’s pointing and sends that info to the console via the same Bluetooth link the accelerometer uses.

incurably ill dvd
Get a new one?

last episode of dexter
Pretty good, wasn’t it? I loved the confetti bit right at the end, it needed to go back to how fucked up he was.

morrowind sexy armor for females mod
I could help you, since my staggering knowledge of the later Elder Scrolls series extends even to things I would rather not know, but I get the impression you’re not the kind of person I want to help.

He’s Gone Too Far

That’s it, Intro Guy. You are now so bad that you entirely counter-act the greatness of the programme that follows your intolerable gloat. I actually regret watching this episode, the intro was that bad.

It’s not just that an intro is unnecessary, it’s this intro in particular. It’s an intro made by people who don’t just look down on their audience, they actually hate them. It’s the kind of intro I’d produce for I’m A Celebrity And The Suffocating Numbness Of My Life Has Driven Me To New Lows Get Me Out Of Here. It’s openly an advert for the very thing it is a part of. It doesn’t stop at explicitly summarising the themes and symbolism of the preceding season, it actually explains in bullet-point form what’s going to happen in the following episode, and shows clips of it. At first you think it’s going to insult your intelligence, but it quickly becomes clear that the disdain, the spite its authors hold for you far exceeds their restraint, and the insult is merely an appetiser for the flurry of gashing, wrenching, deep and bloody wounds they plan to inflict. And the salt in your mutiliations is a voice-over whose patronising sickly smarm is so drippingly viscious you could choke on it.

There’s no mistaking the venemous cynicism behind this – I spend most of my days feeling it – but attached to something as great as Heroes it becomes an even darker spectre. This is disdain for one of the few remaining wonderful things on television, and only the blackest of burnt, drowned, dead, dead souls could feel it with this level of vacant dispassion. I don’t know who writes these, but I can tell you that they have no irises – their obsidian pupils fill the entirety of their lidless and unblinking eyes.

Highlight Of 2006

I like Wired. Working for a magazine you believe in, and having some influence in it, makes you a terrible magazine critic – you tend to regard other publications with a mixture of distaste and pity at how sadly unlike your own they are. That would be my verdict in almost every review if I reviewed magazines: 30%, “Sadly unlike PC Gamer”. But I like Wired. It seems to know my stereotype well – I’m not sure myself what my broader interests are, but if there’s a piece on it in Wired, it tends to be one of them. Malaysia’s national obsession with record-breaking. The guy who runs for days at a time without sleep, orders takeaway pizza to cities he’s about to pass through to scarf it on the go, and crazy-glues over his burst blisters to keep moving.

Wow, that was barely relevant. I was just leading into the fact that this one was a party held by Wired and you got this whole thing about mag snobbery and blisters.

This one was the Wired party after the first day of E3, which is sort of a game-journo Triathelon. I’d already been hugged for something I’d written that day, fallen in love with an American PR girl on the basis of a single conversation, and seen around forty-five unreleased games including the gapingly exciting successor to one of my favourites of all time, System Shock 2. Is it geeky that that one’s up there with the other two? Wait, relevance. I also hadn’t eaten all day, but my taste for food, breaks or rest seems to evapourate when there isn’t time for them. I’m a lot like Jack Bauer, in that and virtually every other respect.

Ben Schroeder from Edge was there, and as we sipped something pink and free, he pointed out to me that one of the guys at the table over there with Will Wright was Robin Williams. Will Wright I knew would be there, since there was a Spore presentation later, and his celebrity factor was slightly diminished by the fact that I’d already interviewed him twice that day alone, but Mork himself made it kind of a tough table to go up to and say “Hi, is this seat taken?” Tougher still, all the seats were taken.

Happily I didn’t have to. I was able to accost him on his way to the bar (a few weeks after meeting me he was re-admitted to rehab for alcohol addiction, but I feel like I tried my best) and exercise the most basic human right of all: the right to talk to a celebrity without needing any pretext, association with them or even anything particularly to say. They’re public domain, we can use them as we please. I’m going to be sending a link to this post to pretty much everyone who bullied me in primary school, and it’s especially for their benefit that I’m about to recount what Robin Williams said to me when I introduced myself. “Hi, I’m Tom, I’m from PC Gamer,” I said.

“Oh, great!” he said.

See it? Because I can paste it again if necessary. It was “Oh, great!” I can use a bigger font if you like. I have that power.

It was just a little undermined by the fact that my next words were “Oh come on, don’t pretend you’ve heard of us.” He explained that really he was just glad to meet a fellow gamer, evidently considering me a more kindred spirit than the many generic tech guys, multi-platform journalists and CEOs around us. He’s a big Battlefield 2 fan, and plays as a sniper. Had he seen the then-unreleased sequel? He had, and thought it was great. What did he think of Spore? He thought it was the logical conclusion of the lineage of God games started with Populous, and extremely exciting for that.

For some reason I decided to steer the conversation toward the broader social impact of games, and possibly kids, because more or less the only thing I knew about Robin Williams was that the reason he started doing horror films after all that family comedy was because his kids were finally old enough to watch them, and he just wanted to make movies his kids could watch. This was a mistake. He started his answer with enthusiastic agreement to my hypothesis that Spore would make a great learning tool for kids, combining as it did science, silliness and a sense of wonderment at the universe, but then he wouldn’t shut up.

That sounds rude, but I don’t know if you’ve ever heard him free-associate: it’s a hard thread to follow. I tried to concentrate on what he was saying, but once he veered off topic he didn’t stick to his new topic long enough for me to work out what it was, he just kept on veering. At some point I found myself thinking “This is ridiculous, I’m interviewing Robin Williams and I’m honestly not listening to a word he’s saying.” The man is mad, and possibly quite drunk. Luckily he also doesn’t stop talking long enough to discover that you have nothing to say because you can’t remember anything he was talking about, so when he did wind down I think I just said “Excellent, well, thanks.” and left it at that.

I hit the booze pretty hard then, but the presentation started soon after. I’ve now seen it enough times now to feel a bit like a Will Wright groupie, comparing setlists from previous shows; that night we got the babyfication algorithm, but not as much on deep space travel. Then – and anyone who read gameblogs at the time will be have seen this plot point coming – Will said he wanted to demonstrate how easy the game’s editors are to use by getting a member of the audience to try them. He said that ideally he’d like someone with some experience playing an alien. My close personal friend Robin Williams bravely volunteered.

My favourite part of his mostly excellent adlibbed stuff was the Jewish hands of uncertainty. During the presentation Ben and I got talking to a Wired writer whose hair was two different colours, who was also hugely impressed to learn that I was from PC Gamer, although it was again undermined; this time by him being completely floored that Ben was from Edge, his favourite magazine in the world. I could have taught this guy a little something about mag snobbery. He was nevertheless an extremely nice guy, and it was via his T-shirt (whose design I do not recall) that we got talking to the girls in front, who were film-makers there on behalf of some kind of… political… local… thing? Paper? I remember imagining something like a more radical Village Voice for LA, but I was pretty drunk and I know very little, about anything really.

I interviewed Will Wright again after the presentation, pointlessly. After about ten or twenty questions, you just want to prod him and tell him to “Say more cool stuff!” He clearly has no shortage of it, and in his nasal stammering way, he’s remarkably articulate at getting it across. Usually you pitch questions to edify murky areas of your understanding of a game, but with Spore you quickly learn that the most exciting complexities of it come from things you thought you knew, but were wrong about. I thought most of the universe would be computer-generated when you first played the game, and only mentioned this as a prelude to a better question, but he corrected me to say that the editors will be released long before the game, as a demo, and the creatures, buildings and vehicles people design with them will discreetly build up in a central database so that there’s a huge backlog of user-made content at launch. It’s possible that his absurd cleverness and absurd wealth are somehow related.

Back at the party I ran into my other close personal friend Mark Wallace, an American journo who writes on occasion for the New Yorker and the New York Times, and, once, the best magazine of all: PC Gamer UK. I’d never met him before, and barely did here, but he was extremely nice, and had as it turned out been half-recognised me when I half-recognised him earlier. Mark got this blog a huge influx of readers when he linked it at the same time as scans of Murder Incorporated, my piece about the Eve Online assassins that also got me the hug that day.

I lost Ben at some point, and ended up talking to the film-makers long after the other people from my hotel had shared a lift back. They were sisters, it turns out – a writer/director and a producer – and I cannot for the life of me remember what they were working on. We – I, they and a group of friends who would later turn out to be Persuasive Games – eventually moved on to The Standard in a car far too small for that many of us, where they knew how to mix a goddamn Caucasian. I say that like that was the reason, it wasn’t. I’m not sure what the reason was, but I can tell you that the other LA Standard, on Sunset, keeps a live woman with a laptop in a class cage behind reception. She just gets on with e-mail and stuff.

I also met – and I honestly don’t remember this, I’m just reading it from an e-mail I wrote later that night – a girl who was about to launch the LA branch of a chain of restaurants owned by the ex-Atari CEO who founded Chuck-E-Cheese, in which the tables are touch-screens on which you can play PC games. My point, really, is that interviewing Robin Williams wasn’t the reason this was one of my highlights of the year. It was that this was profoundly my kind of party, and I honestly didn’t think I had a kind of party. Just the right mix of important people, interesting people, friends, comrades in game geekery and new people who have nothing to do with my specific interest, but are nevertheless invariably interesting. As with their articles, Wired seemed to have a knack for cherry-picking people I like without my knowing the kind of people I like, let alone my telling them. My own invitation actually came to me third-hand, but once they found out they seemed pleased I was coming – they knew me from, dammit, the same wretched article Mark linked and CCP hugged me for. I think it’s time I wrote something better than that.

Highlight Of 2006: Previewing Oblivion

I said I’d tell you what these were that week, by which I meant this month, of which there are now only three days left. So, going chronologically, here’s number one.

Reviewing it was of course the bigger deal, but the four-hour preview event that night in a London hotel was the first time I actually went there, so to speak, and that made it magical in a way that’s tough to communicate to non-gamers. When I say playing a new game is like going to a country you’ve never visited before, it sounds like I mean “almost as good as”, and that’s misleading. It’s much, much better than that. It’s better than going to a planet you’ve never visited before. When the game is good, and you know it, and you have a game-enabled brain, stepping out of your skin and into that screen is a sublime form of physical and psychological transportation to which drugs, love and space travel cannot compare.

And much of that culminated with me punching a rat in the face. Those who had no great pre-release interest in Oblivion found the opening dungeon pretty dull, and certainly it’s one of the weakest parts of the game, but it was designed for me and my kind. We’re the Morrowind obsessives, people who spent longer in this game’s predecessor than on any vacation, and who would delight in every little change as they were introduced to us one by one. And the sensation of cold-cocking a dog-sized rodent mid-air with a conclusive right-hook is something every human needs to feel at some point in their lives. Whunk!

For all the joys out in that enormous and spectacular world, it was how physical it all felt that would captivate me. Plenty of games have worlds as big, plenty of games are open-ended, there are even some now that look as good. But none feel so right, convince so totally, whunk with quite that fidelity.

Tomorrow: snow, heroism, lightning and abdominal pain!

Yeah, Me Too

I’m the one on the left – a slinky Draenei huntress. I have no idea if I enjoy World Of Warcraft or not, but I’m definitely physically dependent on it at the moment. I think the reason it eats so much of our time is that they’ve hit upon the gaming equivalent of TV: something comforting and unending that requires little effort from you. You’re always progressing through it, consuming New, but it’s dilute New, tastes a little like Old, and you’re drinking it slowly.

I’m Sobaseki on Steamwheedle Cartel, and I’m only level 7. I’m in it for the pets – Rhianna was telling me about a Scorpid she had called Mexican Pete, after the way he waved his claws nonchalantly as he scuttled, and at that point I knew I would have to be a Hunter. I wanted to be a Blood Elf – the Draenei are a bit of a non-concept as races go – but my colleagues are all Alliance filth and I faced exile if I stuck to my Horde inclinations. I don’t have a problem with pets, like all interesting stuff being held off till level ten, but I wish they had enough ideas to keep that feeling of progression going through the later decades. As they get exponentially further apart in the time-invested stakes, the interest and value of their perks simultaneously plummets, and it’s kind of a lethal combination for me.

It’s a much more pleasant game to play once you fiddle with the controls a bit, I now discover. If you enable Click-To-Move, you still don’t get rid of the endless error messages during combat, but your idiot does now fix most of them herself. She still says “It’s too far away!” when told to attack a distant target, but now she actually moves in range and does it. Ditto for usable items and talkable NPCs. It’s also handy for making long journeys with single clicks, without having to hold anything down or risking going too far if you, er, alt-tab away. Which I have a tendency to do a lot. In fact:

Update: Okay, the preceding paragraph is also an update, but this is why I’m really updating: tonight I…

Dressed up as a tree!

Seduced a crab!

Rode around on a big old elephant!

If they just took out the 80% of quests that are utter dross, it’d be a fantastic game. I still don’t have a proper pet yet, just a feeble cat I befriended, and christened Clawgasm. I’m torn between a better cat, a big ostrich, a small and rubbish crab, or holding out for something stranger. I’m leaning towards the small and rubbish crab.

24

I didn’t like 24 at first – it was exciting for a few episodes, but after three hours of excitement you start to lose interest a bit. There’s also something rather comic about the this guy having ordeals that last precisely 24 hours every few years, so I watched a bit of series five last time I was in the States to laugh at it. The show has a formula that’s easy to mock, because there are only a certain number of things that can happen within its parameters, and over one-hundred hours of programming they tend to happen quite a few times each. There’s a mole inside CTU! The boss of CTU is being a dick! Jack’s gone rogue! There’s a mole in the government! That terrorist plot was just a cover for a much larger one, involving nukes! The least interesting character’s been kidnapped! Oh no, a bomb!

But there’s a fairly smooth gradient from mocking something to enjoying its silliness without laughing, and from there to just enjoying it. And by that time, something truly extraordinary has usually happened. Every series of 24 has a handful of moments that make you take your tongue out of your cheek and just gape. They come from the fact that terrorist thrillers generally revolve around forcing the good guys to make impossible decisions, and in Jack Bauer they’ve lumped themselves with a good guy so unflinchingly logical and ruthlessly dedicated that such decisions are trivial. So to create the pivotal moments, the writers have to put him in absurdly difficult situations, in which he has to do everything short of shooting his own daughter for just the slimmest hope of stopping a terrorist plot that could kill thousands more.

Jack’s now so used to sacrificing himself or innocent lives for the greater good that he usually saves people the bother of asking him to do it by jumping in there and volunteering. At one point a terrorist leader calls an Amnesty lawyer to protect an accomplice CTU have in custody from the torturous methods they need to use to get the information they need from him in time to stop a warhead headed towards- I forget, probably Los Angeles. Jack’s solution is to release the prisoner, immediately resign, then break his fingers in the parking lot as a private citizen in order to protect CTU from liability. This has been read as advocacy of torture as an interrogation method in general, of course, but that’s over-simplifying. The reason not to legalise these methods is that you can never be certain that their use will save lives in any given circumstance. Jack is always certain, to an extent that doesn’t exist in the real world.

The truly horrible calls don’t come up too often, but that’s part of what makes them so much fun to watch. You’ve been watching Jack be almost effortlessly ruthless about so many tough decisions that seeing something make him hesitate – even if only for a few seconds – is incredibly powerful. There’s a moment at the very end of season three, which involves some of the nastiest thing’s Jack’s had to do (including one with a fire-axe and a close friend) when he’s sitting alone in his car, with no urgent mission for the first time in twenty-four hours, and just sobs.

This new series is off to a good start: he’s already had to do something that made him both throw up and cry, and- well, the thing that happens while he’s doing that, for those who’ve seen it. The aforementioned silliness of one man getting caught up in this many twenty-four-hour ordeals probably puts people off, but I’m hoping they’ll keep going for another five seasons. As it progresses it gets both darker and more absurd, making it more entertaining in diametrically opposing ways. Jack gets more interesting as he loses more of his humanity and his family feature less, and I have a feeling Kim’s going to cop it this series. The plots get more intricate as they try to avoid repetition and simultaneously up the stakes – though neither very hard; this is American primetime after all.

Season six also has one of my favourite actors: Siddig El Tahir El Fadil El Siddig Abderahman Mohammed Ahmed Abdel Karim El Mahdi – whom they somehow thought would be able to play a middle-Eastern character convincingly – normally speaks English with a perfect Received Pronounciation accent, so it’s always rather weird watching him pretend to wrestle with the language in his Arab roles. But he’s the main reason I like Star Trek – his Dr Bashir was the first truly likeable character I’d seen in any sci-fi, and the reason I gave it a chance. Here his role isn’t a terribly likeable one – he just has to look angry all the time – but I still find him endlessly watchable. If he turns out to be the series arch-villain I’ll be especially happy.

iPwn

I can honestly say that if I was going to spend SIX HUNDRED DOLLARS on a phone, I’d probably plump for this one.

All the quicktours there are worth watching, but my favourite thing rolled past in a still image that I can no longer find: ‘Slide to unlock’. A little place-marker on slider bar. I get the feeling this thing is going to seem a lot more futuristic and exciting once you get to use it.

If I didn’t know any better I’d be looking forward to what other people are going to do in response to this – how more affordable touch-screens or even just smarter interfaces will now take it upon themselves to also achieve such far-future concepts as scrolling to someone who’s name begins with m in under half an hour. But I have a feeling I won’t be able to enjoy such luxuries without snacking on the poison Apple – and paying SIX HUNDRED DOLLARS for the privelege – at any point in the next couple of years.

So I’d be happy enough if my 10MB phone was capable of storing more than FIVE KILOBYTES of text messages. I mean, proportionally that’s a considerable upgrade from the one kilobyte my last one had, but I’m not really feeling the ten thousand times more breathing room yet. I’d probably spring the SIX HUNDRED DOLLARS if I really thought Apple were design geniuses, but doesn’t it feel more like the only other people getting these things made are agonisingly, unspeakably dumb? I’m holding out for the day someone who isn’t evil gets a brain and a budget in the same lifetime, at least until the incompetent and malicious drop their prices a bit.

2006

Mine ended with a series of four quite different parties:

The Future Christmas Party, in the same vacant museum as last year, added dodgems and face-painting to the de-facto chocolate fountain for entertainment. The theme was apres ski, which most people quite reasonably refused to acknowledge. What I usually love about Future parties is just walking across the room and talking to everyone I know on the way, which typically takes around an hour. Socialising progressively shuts down the rational parts of my brain, so after about ten minutes of talking to any one person, my mind is completely empty and I a) say nothing at all if sober, or b) say something absolutely terrible if drunk. So drive-by conversations with lots of different people in a short space of time give me the pleasure of being friendly with people without becoming too much of an idiot.

I suffer chronic schizophrenia, pathological mendacity and anterior-grade memory loss when drunk, which almost cancel one another other out: I don’t recall what a blithering prick I was, and I don’t want to. Only tee-totallers, elephant-drunks and digital cameras put a spanner in the works.

Despite the lavish accoutrements, it was my least favourite Future party so far. If I’m not in the mood for these things I almost always am once I get there, but this time I just felt like curling up in a dark place with something that made sense. Parties, people and dodgems do not, to my mind, make any kind of sense.

Large fluffy penguins do, to be sure. This is Peng, given to my by Clare – ahem, a mystery Secret Santa benefactor – and he is an entirely logical creature. This was at a Christmas dinner party with The Other Circle Of Friends For Whom I Have No Convenient Name. Most people there were drunker than I have ever seen them, which in some cases is a very good thing and in others is not. In my case it isn’t, but luckily I didn’t pass my Threshold Beyond Which I Am Insufferable. I was residually drunk the next morning, though, and carrying my penguin home through town in that state was dreamlike and rather wonderful. One in every two people I passed commented, pointed, laughed or performed some combination of the three. My route home actually involved a leisurely stop at Caffe Nero for breakfast, leisurely enough to then stop at the Jazz Café for lunch with Craig and Graham, both on their way to a flight back to Mother Scotland.

Interesting coincidence: the other day I’d just emptied everything superfluous out of my wallet except my Caffe Nero loyalty card, which I hadn’t used in seven years but which has been modified to read, simply, NERD. Something to bear in mind the next time you empty everything superfluous out of your wallet including your Caffe Nero loyalty card, then the next day find yourself in Caffe Nero for the first time in seven years, and are tempted to say “Isn’t it always the way?” Sometimes it is the other way.

The family Christmas, involving easily as many silly hats per person as the Future party. In fact my parents now have a stock of them to distribute to anyone who wasn’t specifically given one. I was surprised and moderately saddened to find quite a few people were dreading their own family Christmasses – I’m lucky enough to have a family who spend more time laughing than arguing at any given gathering.

We played the 3D equivalent of the drawing game in plastecine, table football, an Indian puck-flicking game, and kazoos. I gave people mostly edible or non-corporeal presents: home-made bread, special foods from Bath’s many special-food shops, a mango orchard for Indian farmers. I got a huge number of diverse things, from smart clothes from the pictured grandmothers, juggling balls with a klutz’s guide, a DVD writer, a tabletop pool table, a power-drill and a present I’m easily geeky enough to need but not nearly geeky enough to buy: day-of-the-week-specific socks. I’ve always felt there must be a more civilised manner of determining which of the countless identical black socks have been worn since they were last washed than the crude olfactory method.

New Year’s, last night, here at my house. It was a dark and stormy night. That is a mini-fogger – a Christmas present – inside an extremely sensibly proportioned mug – also a Christmas present – adding ambience to my already pretty freaking ambient kitchen. Interesting coincidence: two days after I reflected that one of the few things not to go wrong with my house for some time was the bulbs, three bulbs broke in one afternoon. The consensus of party attendees is that the storm, or a surge in power usage on that night of the year, was causing this to happen a lot.

I came to the conclusion this morning that I should just stop talking altogether. I don’t think I said anything of worth in 2006, and if people really need to communicate with me there’s always e-mail. Everything I say aloud I regret, and quite often my brain just loses interest mid-sentence and I find entirely the wrong words inserted towards the end. I think last night I announced to the room that always have trouble keeping everyone “fed with water” when I host parties. I seemed to be trying not to say “drunk”, when in fact that was precisely what I was trying to say.

I’m told I should talk slower – someone who doesn’t know me very well apparently said that I appear to be trying and failing to keep up with my thought-speed, but to me it feels like I’m thinking too slowly. Whatever the temporal disconnect, it’s circumvented entirely in text, and I really like writing and even reading what I’ve written. Particularly after an evening of almost entirely failing to talk coherently. Interesting aside: in case you missed the link in my sidebar a while back, the creator of Dilbert has a fascinating speech disorder that means he can still speak in front of huge crowds, which is part of what he does these days, but is incapable of talking in normal conversation. More interesting still, he may have found a way to cure himself – something no-one with it has done before.

And So

The year! A great one, though much more erratic than previous ones. It had a long series of incredible highlights, each of which will I’ll recount in its own post this week, but an unwelcome temporary change in my job description meant I spent quite a lot of time with an unpleasant drowning sensation. It was to manage something I don’t like even when it’s done well, and doing it well calls for precisely the skills I don’t have. I’m told I did a good job, but it never felt like it. But yes, more than made up for by many completely wonderful events and happenstances. MORE ON THOSE PLEASE TOM.

My major achievement for the year was to finally settle a matter I’ve been dithering about for at least six years: lots of stubble and crazy hair, or short stubble and short hair? The first probably sounds better on paper, but after extensively studying documentary evidence from parties and photo-shoots, the latter is the clear winner. It will never be long again. I’ve also lost weight and girth and gained muscle and stamina, and since that accounts for thirty-two percent of all New Year’s Resolutions I will impart the secret: exercise more and eat less bad stuff. It’s the secret fitness plan they didn’t want you to know. Seriously, instead of not doing it, do it.

I don’t make New Year’s Resolutions specifically – I make around three resolutions every day, so technically I did make some on New Year’s Eve, but they weren’t special ones. Shutting up was a big one, I guess. Another is to find an application that will pop up an innocuous reminder every forty minutes or so to tell me to get up and walk around a bit. The experts who say you should do this if you use a computer a lot probably know more about RSI than I do, and I don’t have it yet, so I should do what they say I should do to prevent it. And instead of saying this and not doing it, I’m going to actually do it. I’m also going to buy a lot of clothes that I like. I now know for sure which of my clothes I like a lot, and discover that it’s not enough. I loathe clothes shopping, but I’m going to bite the bullet… this month, I’ve just decided.

Stuff Of The Year!

This is so easy.

Best Film Of 2006: The Prestige. A period drama about two rival magicians, Hugh Jackman a masterful showman, and Christian Bale a gruff but ingenious trickster. It has a series of major twists, each of which you’ll see coming to varying degrees. But it’s not a film that needs to rely on the element of surprise to captivate you: one twist in particular is so chilling, so hauntingly macabre that working it out ahead of time is as enthralling as the grand reveal itself. Aside from that much of the fun, and screentime, comes from the vicious sabotage they commit on each other’s acts, starting with humiliating pranks and scaling steadily up to mutiliation and attempted murder. Link is to the trailer, and down the sidebar of that page you’ll find a three-part interview with Jackman and Bale, of particular interest to the ladies and gays since they are both freakishly, freakishly pretty men.

Best Song Of 2006: Cat Power – Willie. By a country mile. The entire album is a bassy, brassy, bluesy joy, so completely unexpected from the meek, stage-terrified front-woman Chan. It’s also album of the year, perhaps only by an urban mile, but this song is just… I don’t need to tell you anything about the song because I’ve uploaded it and you can download it and listen to it immediately, so I’ll stick to my New Year’s Resolution and shut up.

Best TV Show Of 2006: Heroes. Studio 60 is better written by a factor of seventy-one, Dexter is cleverer and 24 is more fun, but I’m all about the peaks. There have been moments in Heroes – many – at which I’ve wanted to know what happens next more than I’ve ever wanted to know anything about a TV show. When it comes together it’s in a league of its own, and it fills me with a warm substance I can only assume is glee.

Best Game Of 2006: Oblivion! Oh, you think? You think the thing I named as the best game of all time in the PC Gamer Top 100 might also have been the best one this year? You think maybe the game I’ve written forty pages about in print magazines, and a few thousand words more online, might be my kind of thing? Did the 93% give it away? I’d love to be a little bit different to the dozens of lists agreeing with me right now and name Hitman or DEFCON, but no. By a country – and I may have used this term already in this post, but it’s warranted – by a country freaking mile, it is the majestic, sumptuous, liberating joy of Oblivion.

First Screenshots Of Introversion’s Next Game

Introversion have just blown the lid off their previously mysterious next project Subversion. From these shocking new shots and Chris’s revealing vision for the game, it’s clear that it will be a single and multiplayer office espionage sim in which you bring down a multinational corporation from the inside, using information warfare and optionally working together with your friends via the game’s rich social networking features. It will score 87 or 88 percent and be released at 9am GMT on the 5th of September, 2008.

Dexter: Series One

It’s over. Did sir care for it? Would sir grace us with his comments? Then might I direct sir to the spoilerific discussion following the original post? Very well.

 

Woo

I was shamefully unable to leverage my super-VIP insider access to get access to a Wii before last week, when Nintendo sent a free one to more or less every magazine in the office except us. I played the one they sent to our kids’ mags with one of their staffers, a non-gamer, and was beaten resoundingly. That alone seemed to vindicate the Nintendo agenda here: she won her first point against the AI in Wii Sports tennis, and it’s hard to think of a game on any other platform that a non-gamer could succeed at so immediately.

But that intuitiveness doesn’t quite last. When the novelty of waving something around rather than mashing buttons wore off, neither of us were clear on how our avatar’s movements related to our own. Frequently they’d do the exact opposite of the real-world motion. Having played on Tim’s a lot more now that it’s officially out in the UK, I still don’t think it entirely works.

Last night was just six people messing around, which is about as casual as gaming gets. But even in that environment at least half of us kept getting stuck in situations where the game thought we were doing the opposite of what we really were, and screwed up the shot. Personally my problem with these situations was that I didn’t know how to avoid them: it usually lost track of me when I was moving very quickly, but if I tried slowing down so it could keep up, it didn’t register what I was doing as movement at all. In the end I found myself creeping the controller slowly back to where my avatar was holding it, slowly enough that the game didn’t know I was doing it, then pulling it back to where I wanted it at a Wii-friendly speed. In other words, I spent more time thinking about the control mechanism than I would have with a mouse-driven golf sim.

We did have a fantastic doubles match of tennis, and for a while I really enjoyed golf, but in both cases it was when I treated it as an abstract game rather than the real sport that it started to make sense. I started doing really well in tennis when I finally accepted that the game couldn’t care less which way I swing the racket, only when I swing it. I have a feeling each mini-game has an abstraction like this that I need to learn before it starts behaving the way I expect it to – in fact perhaps they’re all about timing and speed rather than the actual nature of your movement.

It gets said a lot that you do better when you just play it like the sport and don’t think about the controls, but it never worked out that way for me. I’ve played a lot of golf, I still play a lot of tennis, and I know how balls behave. Most of the time Wii Sports is close enough to attribute the difference to lag or ineptness on my part, but for one in five shots it ignores your movement completely or does the exact opposite of you. And the only way I can avoid that happening is by forgetting about the real action and doing what I know the game will register.

That can be great fun, but it’s not what I thought the point was. And when we’re getting our parents or spouses into gaming, we shouldn’t ever have to start an explaination with “It’s really just about…” That’s what they already think games are, fancy graphics hiding simple timing challenges. I wish their introduction to our world could be with something artful, sophisticated or profound, something that shows games as worlds more than toys.

I think there are going to be some incredible games on the Wii, but now I think they’re not going to be very skill-based. Now I want to play games that relish in how satisfying the motions are – because they are – rather than demanding a level of performance from you that forces you to strip away the illusion and work out what the game’s really measuring: timing or speed alone rather than the direction and arc of your movements. Ironically I think I’m going to enjoy the single-player games more than the multiplayer ones, because multiplayer is always going to be about who can best grok the system. In fact the thing I keep thinking about is a Half-Life 2 port – sucking up and firing things out with the gravity gun would be five times more satisfying if it was done with a grabbing and a punching gesture than it is with two mouse-clicks.

Dexter Again

Yes!

Hopefully a facial expression can’t be considered a spoiler, but if you’re not keeping up with Dexter this ought to tell you enough to realise that you should be. If you are, you’ll recognise it as one of the best reaction shots in the history of man.