TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

Something I Didn’t Understand But Still Feels Right

It’s September the eleventh. Not only the day that Alec Meer left PC Format, but apparently something exploded in some distant oligarchy. It’s funny that the attacks of that day are always referred to by the day, and not the attacks. Are there other historic events that are just called a date, no adjective or even location? It’s like we don’t really know what happened. Didn’t Iraq invade or something? I have dates like that – Friday Before Last, I call one of them. I don’t know what happened, but when I woke up my bike was broken and upside down with the handlebars twisted 360 in my garden. I’m still picking up the pieces after FBL. I intend to construct four enormous towers to show my drunk self that I’m not afraid of it.

There’s a suggestion the amnesia is willful. Somewhere I have a 100MB zip disk with the only copy of an elderly New Yorker’s photos of the collapse, first-hand and close up. She gave them to me, a near-stranger, when I met her because she never wanted to see them again.

Today is a bad, not to mention clichéd, day to remember this. Ze Frank, whose fast-talking scary-eyed vodcast I’ve only been subscribed to for a few weeks, but on which I’ve already come to rely, got his in early. Last Thursday his show wasn’t funny. Instead, he just gave a simple yet extraordinary account of what he did on that day, the haze of physical pain, drugs and rubble smoke through which he tried to see what had happened. He didn’t.

James 1.0

I was meaning to shoe-horn the old version of James into this new template one day, but it has long been clear that I never will. Instead, I’m just uploading it and linking it. I think most of the post titles are bookmarks, so individual bits of its are theoretically linkable, but we’ll see.

For those who know only this new, shiny James, the original version was all one page, rather gloomy-looking, and at 70,000 words the longest document I’ve ever written. It starts shortly after I moved into my last flat, a few months before I started working for PC Gamer, and ends at the time Mark Sutherns left the mag. I may reappropriate some of its content to flesh out the Games section here, which has never really made a lot of sense.

Don’t Blog While Stupid

I was just about to write an attack on browser programmers for not making the space bar scroll down one page when tapped, then discovered that it already does exactly that.

Should I Hit The Weak Spot For Massive Damage Now?

Well, there drains my enthusiasm for the Wii. The footage of the actual games for it is deflating. Okay, those games were not handpicked to be ones I might like, but what kills me is that Red Whatever is clearly the sword-fighting game hinted at by that first Revolution teaser. And it looks simplistic, abstracted, toothless, phoned-in. I’d hoped the elegance of the controller would allow for more elegant games, but I think I missed Nintendo’s point. It’s just about making it intuitive, not about making it more precise or adding a dimension. In fact, the various reticules the motion sensor controls in those games lurch around just like a thumbstick. One was blasty and repetitive, one was basic and limited, and one looked like Virtua freaking Cop.

Still, I’m optimistic about the vegetable-chopping game.

25th Hour

I inflicted both Die Hard 2 and Legends Of The Fall on myself this weekend, both abysmal wastes of time. I would like to suggest that Die Hard 2 is to Die Hard what The Phantom Menace is to The Empire Strikes Back. I would further put it to you that most of the relentless misfortunes of the imbecilic characters in Legends Of The Fall might have been averted if there had been more than one woman in the film’s universe. I was forced to watch both because I was too tired to move once they had started, and the remote was way over there.

But! Bank holiday weekend films can end on a high note! 25th Hour, 10pm, on BBC Two. Profoundly worth watching, primarily for the hilarious DEA agent duo. But also because of Ed Norton, Philip Seymour Hoffman and The Other Guy as horrifically mismatched friends. It’s mildly well-known for Ed Norton’s character’s reflection’s racist rant about New Yorkers, which is riveting in the same way as a car accident.

I have to stop writing now, or the film will actually start before I post this, and the one person who would otherwise have seen this between now and it being too late would not in fact see it at all, and it would be too late.

Edit: That DEA Agent search in full:

AGENT BRZOWSKI
This sofa is not very comfortable.

AGENT CUNNINGHAM
Maybe it’s your posture. Posture’s very important.

AGENT BRZOWSKI
No, it’s this Castro convertible. It’s very uncomfortable. It’s kinda… kinda lumpy.

MONTY
Get it over with.

AGENT BRZOWSKI
I just don’t understand. It looks like such a nice sofa. How much did you pay for this sofa, Ms Riviera?
…
Maybe it’s the padding.

AGENT CUNNINGHAM
Ho yeah, could be the padding.

AGENT BRZOWSKI
Probably the padding. Yeah, there’s something lumpy in here, Mr. Brogan.
…
Sheeeeeeeit.
You know, it’s a good thing I found this? It’ll make your sofa much more comfortable to sit on.

Porn Shoes

What I love about Porn Shoes by The French is that almost nothing happens in it. It’s about a date, but describes only the moment at which the girl arrives. It’s completely unromantic – they’re not entirely into each other, and the guy’s feelings are neither idealised nor entirely boorish. It’s about small, normal emotions instead of soul-consuming love or crushing loss. The lyrics are plain, so it poeticises the affair solely with music, letting the electric blips and synth ebb suggest the mood and significance.

She wore gold shoes with Diamante
Like Kylie wore on TV
They kept her feeling sexy
They were what she always wanted
But he thought they looked like porn shoes
Like the porn stars wear in porn films

“I tried to place as many brand names in there as possible,” Hayman notes, “in the hope that it might get me advertising work.”

A Woman’s Life In Search Queries

Somewhere between the recording someone made of AOL refusing to let them cancel their service and the story about the woman whose father AOL insisted on billing for nine months after his death – once telling his daughter to “shut up” when she protested – I missed the part where AOL released all thirty-six million search queries that five hundred thousand of their users made over the course of three months. Continued

Paris Laptop Consciousness Drip

John didn’t come on this trip because it was a day, a little more in fact, for a page, which is presumably less than he could otherwise earn. This trip is to Paris, to see the World Of Warcraft expansion The Burning Crusade. The choice is easier for me: Paris, or office with terrible vending machine, the pay is the same (though not as much as for a page of freelance work, I might add). I suggested that he should come, because it was Paris, but couldn’t come up with a more articulate reason than that, and also the exact arrangements weren’t worked out.

The exact arrangements turned out to be great. The Eurostar’s at 7.30am tomorrow, so I as a Bathican am being put up in a hotel in London for the night. I failed pretty miserably to get to London in time to do anything really, and even my lame plan of going yuppie and blogging from a Starbucks on Belvedere street were foiled by closing times. Instead I’m typing this offline (the Rock Extreme laptop I’m reviewing is picking up the Thames Online wireless network, but not well enough to get net) on a bench next to a hairy old black guy playing very lonely saxophone. I call this yuppohemian.

The hotel is the County Hall Marriott, which is on the Thames, next to the London Eye and Big Ben, and is pretty difficult to believe. I actually kind of laughed when I walked into my room. Hang on, the tour guide lecturing the old Americans on the bench behind me has just told them no-one in England is named Mary because a famous one burnt so many consonants. I think he’s remembering his history and quite a lot else wrong. Okay, now the busker has wondered off sadly, quietly missing out on whatever I was half-planning to give him on my way back to the hotel. Should I pay in advance the next time I pick a bench based on the jazz? No.

I have just cracked my knuckles for the last time, perhaps ever. I will likely crack them again within the minute. I am trying to avoid it, though, on discovering just how many people it annoys and to what extent. It seems a strange thing to be annoyed by – I think it’s perceived as a conscious action, but in fact it’s as involuntary as yawning and far harder to resist. I can’t say I know what the negative side-effects of stopping woudld be, though, so I’m launching an investiagtion. I’m going cold turkey on knuckle crack. God damn it I nearly did it right then. I need a cigarette.

The whole thing – the hotel, this is – is some kind of cylinder built into an enormous courtyard within the same building as the London Eye ticket office. I’m getting the cylinder shape from the corridors – once you get onto your floor, they arc round in a huge circle. My room is vast, the bed has ten pillows, and the window is aimed at the sunset over the Thames with willful precision, igniting the whole thing in orange as soon as I opened the curtains. I am so thirsty. I’ve just discovered the tree I’m sitting under is full of blue lightbulbs. Is this the sort of thing I habitually don’t notice?

Breakfast at 6.30 tomorrow. I feel like I should have something fried to take advantage of it being free, but I also feel like I should never eat anything again. As flattering as the lowlight of the hotel bathroom is, it doesn’t disguise that my new bad habit of eating lunch every day has now begun to counteract my good habit of cycling up a formidable hill on the way home from work. I think the dude who just walked past saying “There are worse places to watch porn” was talking about me.

There are worse places to write. It’s properly night now, and windy with it, but so warm that even my T-shirt feels superfluous. I’m next to a streetlamp engulfed in a swaying tree whose leaves glow as they wave at the light, and the effect is something you wouldn’t see in Oblivion on this laptop, because you pretty much have to disable Canopy Shadows if you want a decent framerate at this things insane native resolution. Ooh, so nearly got through this trip without a Real World Graphics joke. It’s become a tradition now. Dammit! I have cracked. It feels… bad, not doing it. A vague and nameless badness. If I had to give it a name I would probably called it Arthritating, but I would also probably think about it a bit longer so it’s hard to say for sure that that’s what I’d go for, or even if it would be on the shortlist.

I sometimes miss the start of conversations. I sometimes ask people what they’re talking about, as politely as possible, but if I can I just join in not knowing what we’re talking about. The other journalist on this press trip was talking about someone’s gaming habits, specifically exploring game worlds like Far Cry, and I love mountain climbing in the places you’re not supposed to be able to get to in Far Cry. She was saying that he, who’s name might be Dan from what little I overheard of the start, likes to take the hang glider as far as possible, and use it to soar to strange places. Me too! “Who’s this?” “My dad.” Ah, Terry Pratchett then. This is the next day now. I charged my laptop on the Eurostar on the way back, and have enough juice for a few words on the night train to Bath. I’ll have to cycle with this ponderous bastard up Watery Lane, the sharp ascent back to my house, a lofty realm of such good digital reception that one nearby estate is called Freeview Road.

It turns out I’ve met Rhianna Pratchett three times, but didn’t recognise her the second time (hair colour change?), and I think I thought she was a voice actress from the way she was talking about a game’s dialogue. This time, I totally recognised her from the last time, but since I didn’t know who she was last time that wasn’t an awful lot of help. Incredibly, I managed to surmise that this person had, too, worked for Nevrax on Saga Of Ryzom and wrote for PC Zone without connecting her identity with the other very similar-looking person of whom both these things were true. They kind of cottoned on to one another in my head a while later, far too late for me to admit my confusion without embarrassment. Luckily, one of my super-powers is the ability to go from a position of astounding ignorance to perfect understanding without any external reaction at all. The cure for cancer could dawn on me without elevating an eyebrow.

Have you ever seen an orc bored? That’s not a joke set-up. Actually it could be: it’s enThralling. Anyway, that’s what I saw today. The guy wandered mopily between the chambers of the cellar at this event and couldn’t muster a snarl when photographed. I prescribe emancipation.

This Next Test Is Impossible

I’d like to pretend I’m all nonchalant about Portal, because we’ve all played its predecessor Narbacular Drop to death, and knew a Source version was coming. Or that the trailer was old hat, since Graham procured it from Valve a few days before release. Instead, I’m still watching this thing an average of five times a day. The bit I love, apart from every line of the gorgeously wonky synthetic voice-over, is the trick the player pulls in the fast montage of whacked-out nutsoness, just before the plummet through the infinite loop before the end. And it took me a long time to work out what he was doing.

Here’s the setup. The player needs to get to the X, a lower platform that’s too far for him to jump. I think he takes a rather unnecessarily complicated route, but we’ll assume some hidden rules prevent him from doing it the obvious way. He’s about to cast two portals, the first at 1 and the second at 2.

He casts 1 first, close to the platform he wants to reach, then throws himself off and casts 2 beneath him as he falls. The reason for casting 2 after jumping, as near as I can tell, is that it’s easier to know where you’re going to land once you’re in the air. Also it looks more rock.

He plummets through 2, shooting him up through 1 with all the velocity his fall has given him.

At the apex of his climb, he turns to face the place he came from – 0 – and opens a new portal there – 3. Since he’s using right mouse rather than left, this new portal replaces 2, rather than the 1 he’s just come out of.

Here we’re looking at the ground – he’s falling back toward the portal he just shot up out of, 1, and through it he can see the same view as from his starting point 0, but upside-down – note the X is now on the ceiling.

His downward velocity is translated into lateral velocity because the portals are perpendicular, and he’s flung all the way across the chasm – automatically spinning in mid-air to realign himself with gravity…

…to land on his feet at the destination. Bravo, test subject!

“At the enrichment centre, we believe a highly motivated test subject can carry out rather complex tasks while enduring the most intense pain.”

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.

Team Fortress 2, Episode Two And Portal

The team must have been working on this for a long time, they’ve kept it very secret, and they must have been nervous as hell about whether people would go for a cartoon look to a class-based tactical shooter. They must now be beaming, because virtually everyone seems to love it. The only whispers of dissent I’ve heard are people who love it saying “I don’t know why anyone has a problem with it, TF1 was never realistic.” I was a sceptic before they released this shot, but I see now that it is wonderful. I love their slim chunkiness, their sharp curves, even shading, their characterful but not charicatured expressions. And how cool the Spy:

I still don’t quite understand why they’re giving it to us free with Episode Two, along with Portal – a fantastic-sounding Source-engine successor to indie gem Narbacular Drop (the best game name since Grim Fandango). My best theory so far is that it’s just to generate good will toward episodic gaming and Steam, and partially to ensure a large user-base for TF2. Maybe they were hedging their bets against the cartoon look putting people off, and ensuring that people would end up owning it whether they liked it or not. Of course, they did a similar thing with Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike Source. We’ll never know exactly how well that did, because they won’t release Steam sales figures, but I have to assume it exceeded what they would have expected for Half-Life 2 alone. Otherwise they wouldn’t be repeating the formula with TF2 and Episode 2.

Forgetting analysis, the ripe bunch of gaming fruit that your slim twenty-dollar bill is going to bag you now looks utterly irresistable. A hefty and exotic chunk of the most finely crafted single-player game ever created; a bold reimagining of one of the all-time greatest multiplayer games using a graphical style never seen in a game before; and a completely fresh and mind-fryingly inventive experimental game, put through the mighty Valve polishing machine. Maybe that’s the point – just to put together something wonderful and profoundly worth the money to everyone. Sometimes if I feel I’ve done something well, I spend an extra half an hour to make it extraordinary, just to see how someone reacts. To hear CEO Gabe Newell talk, the faceless collective grin of an impressed gaming public – expressed through poorly spelt forum posts – is what he lives and breathes for.

Not Lasting

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

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

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

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

Pandora’s Checkbox

Pandora, the brave internet radio system that tries to play new music you’ll like based on tonal qualities it shares with your favourite stuff, needs another button. At the moment you can tell it you love the song or hate it. You can also skip it without specifically expressing a dislike, which is handy when a song is your sort of thing but not quite what you feel like listening to at the moment. But increasingly I find I need one that says “Never, ever play anything like this ever again. But God damn this is good.”

Because it ignores all social stigma and other people’s opinions, because it’s quite often right, and because I’m playing it on my speakers in the office, it’s choices are sometimes a little embarrassing. It’s like someone suddenly pointing at you and saying “Somewhere, deep down, you’d quite like the fucking Cranberries.” No matter how fast you skip it, everyone knows who that was, and that it was picked for a reason.

I fear Pandora’s ambitious experiment may be doomed by fickle human whims, though. I loathed the first song it played to me when I rediscovered it recently, and when I went to give it a thumbs down, discovered that I’d already given it a thumbs up the last time it came on. Mind you, it’s just started playing Duran Duran, and it does have the appropriate button for that.

Episode Three Conjecture

Suffering from blogger’s paralysis, wanting to talk about five different things but having no preference as to which, I’ll just stick with the theme. This is a bit silly, of course, Episode Two being six months off, but Dabs mentioned something I’d forgotten, and I looked it up, and he’s right. Raising The Bar, the superb coffee-table book about Half-Life 2’s development, mentions that at one point a large section of the game was set in an arctic base, called Weather Control. Examining a scan of a map sketch, it even mentions a ‘Judith at Weather Control’ scene.

I don’t think we’re going there in Episode Two – it’s a whole new country and Episode Two is already introducing a very large and very different environment, but we’ve been shown it now, and I really buy the idea that they’d finish the trilogy in a very different kind of place. Also of note are two aspects of Valve’s design philosophy: a) that the player should see where he’s going to end up long before he gets there (mentioned in Raising The Bar), and b) that you don’t show the player something cool then deny him it (mentioned in Gamespot’s The Final Hours Of Half-Life 2, I think). Wherever the climax of Half-Life 2: Episodes, we’ll glimpse it well in advance, and whenever it happens, we will go to Weather Control.

My final, third piece of evidence is one of the most universal tenets of videogame cliché: all expansion packs, however they’re delivered, must take you to a snowy environment.

I’m not sure how far they got with the section when it was going to be a part of Half-Life 2 – the name makes it sound like it served a Combine function like the Air Exchange, which had a lot built around it before it was cut – but there’s a short story by Marc Laidlaw in there written as inspirational material for the section. Sort of like textual concept art. It describes an intense climactic battle between Combine reinforcements who’ve tracked down the main rebel force, a last stand by the latter. Snowstorms and ice explosions. Enticing.

Episode Two Conjecture

So. This is kind of exciting. We don’t get cliffhangers in games usually, certainly not the kind the world can discuss the way we do Lost. I have some theories:

Alyx isn’t dead, obviously – Confirmed!
It’s not that I don’t believe Valve would kill her – I think they will – but they wouldn’t give it away in a trailer. She’s hurt, and I’d guess out of action for pretty much the duration, so no more faux-co-op for a while.

There will be pheropods
I think you’ll have to go into the antlion tunnels seen in the trailer (there are grubs on the walls and ground) in order to defeat a queen antlion, and take her pheropod in order to send all antlions against the Combine, including Guards. So many people loved commanding antlions in Nova Prospekt, and the pheropod’s the only weapon that doesn’t feature in Episode One. Alyx’s presence throughout E1 was a response to the positive feedback about her, and I think they’ll use each episode to go to town on something people loved about Half-Life 2.

There’ll be a vehicle, probably a new one – Confirmed!
Your train is clearly crashing only a short way out of City 17, and the place is blowing up. You’ve got to get out of there fast, and we know from the trailer that you reach Eli and the others at their hideout, well out of the blast radius. No way are you walking. The obvious choice would be the jeep again, but it was a customised one-off vehicle, and there’s no reason it would be around (no-one knew you’d crash there). I’d love to think air, since they’ve done land and sea, but it’s more likely going to be a different wheeled vehicle. My gut says no to the Combine APC – too clunky and too familiar. I also can’t imagine it’ll be a civvie car – not interesting enough. But something…

Odessa Cubbage will return, and betray the rebellion – New entry!
Raising The Bar mentions that Cubbage originally played a bigger role in Half-Life 2, and turned out to be a nasty piece of work. He was also Alyx’s father, which is referenced in a little joke Alyx makes in Episode One. That’s one of three times Cubbage is mentioned in Episode One, which I think is to refresh our memories of that character’s existence in preparation for a reappearence. He’s also an outdoorsy type, and Episode Two is going to be mostly outdoors. That’s science.

And some questions:

Where are the Advisor Pods going?
Not up, seemingly.

What information did the Combine send back to their home world?
We get no clues that I can see as to what that data packet contains, but I would guess it’s something Alyx and co don’t already know – i.e. more than just info on what the rebels are up to.

Where is Judith and what’s she doing there?
She mentions ‘what’s left of the project’ and something about information the Combine might have gathered about it. The fact that she’s in what looks to be a snowy climate implies, to me, that the Vortigaunt’s teleportation is the slow kind, like the one that skipped a week during HL2. This time you were ported a shorter distance and the time skipped was probably only six hours or so.

Will we ever meet the Hydra?
It was a City 17 thing, the only time we glimpsed it, and now City 17’s gawn.

Who’s in charge here?
Half-Life 2 made it look like a Combine Advisor was the big boss of the Combine, somewhere far off on an alien world. Episode One makes it look like there are dozens of them, all in the Citadel. It also shows us they have a weird psionic attack – it didn’t do any damage in the Citadel, but perhaps it has another effect. The Advisor pods don’t fly up to space when they eject from the Citadel at the end, they snake off above the ground. The commentary suggests that we’ll be fighting them.