TOM FRANCIS
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Blizzard Announce That Tom Francis Is Right

I look forward to the people who said we were kidding ourselves calling this announcement ‘inevitable’ and then ‘obvious’. I say ‘we’, but actually even the most zealous posters at Diablofans.com were crying into their forums on Thursday – Blizzard were called both ‘cockfags’ and ‘fucktards’ for so obviously gearing up to announce Lich King beta signups instead of Diablo 3. One Diablo fan pronounced that they would ‘not survive’, by which I’d love to – but cannot quite – believe he only meant their company would go bust.

The Evil Penguin and the Lost numbers were both kind of funny red herrings, but to be fair to the huge number of people who got it utterly wrong, Blizzard’s teasing of this announcement turned out to be pure nonsense. Those eyes meant nothing – they just changed them on the final day, then replaced them with something completely different. The Diablo face in the game’s logo doesn’t look anything like the illustration of Diablo on the official logo for the event, and it doesn’t even look like the eyes we saw on Thursday. They kept most people guessing by simply lying to them.

Luckily, since I am Sherlock freaking Holmes, I was able to piece together the fact that they bought Diablo3.com, advertised for people who like Diablo 1 and 2 to work on an unannounced project, arranged their annual event for the day that the last two Diablo games were released, then put a huge picture of Diablo towering over the other characters in their logo for the event, then let slip that they’d be announcing a new game, and by an arcane leap of logic come to the conclusion that they would announce Diablo 3 there.

Oh, right, the game. I was distracted for a moment by how right I was. Now I can move on to being seriously excited. There’s a full-res movie of the whole presentation they showed at the event on their site, but it insists you use the astonishingly shitty Blizzard downloader to get it, so try Softpedia.

I initially had mixed feelings, watching the live stream of this: it really doesn’t lend itself to blurry, laggy, rubbish footage narrated by an insufferable twat and repeatedly disconnected by an unspeakably crap bespoke streaming protocol called Octoshape. That’s why it’s so essential you watch the high-res version: the insufferable twat* is still on there, but everything else is immeasurably improved.

* I think it might be Diablo 3 lead designer Jay Wilson, who before that was Dawn of War lead designer Jay Wilson, and before that worked at Monolith on Blood, where he had to suffer regular e-mail exchanges with me about stuff they should do in Blood 2 (and look how that worked out). If this is the case, then he’s an insufferable genius twat.

You need to see it high-res because Diablo is all about crisp, satisfying interactions. The combat actually looks superb when you see it properly: not only are the blows connecting in hot spurts of blood, the camera rocks subtly to ram home the impact of the most forceful strikes. It also pans too far when the Barbarian uses his Charge ability, and has to nip back to center on him when its done: a classic cinematic trick to give the impression of extreme speed that turns out to work beautifully in an isometric game.

I also couldn’t make out the new interface properly in the shit-stream, as I shall now call it – get over any WoWificiationophobia, it looks ace. You have a four-slot hotbar to instantly activate skills with the number keys, plus slots on 5 and 6 that look to be dedicated to scrolls (of Town Portal and, presumably Identify). Then next to that, as with Diablo, you can put whatever skills you like on your left and mouse buttons. There’s another, smaller slot next to those two, which I think corresponds to your middle button. Best, you scroll through your right-mouse skills with the mouse-wheel, so you don’t need to touch the keyboard to use everything at your disposal quickly.

My main concern, and this will sound silly, is the noise when hitting a few of the enemy types. To be clear, the noises when you hit stuff in Diablo is the defining feature of the game: loot and skills pale in comparison to the importance of feeling like every blow really fucking smacked that thing. Against the fat things that blow up into Lampreys, and the ghost things that sap your whatever, the Barbarian’s axe makes a pathetically wimpy noise. Seeing a big burly man swing a huge axe with all his might to no audible effect is just disastrous for game feel, I hope they realise that before they’re done.

The Witch Doctor excites and saddens me in almost equal measure: on the one hand, his abilities are fantastic, on the other, they clearly demonstrate that he’s intended to replace the Necromancer, my favourite class not just in Diablo, but in gaming. The Witch Doctor can do scary stuff, sure, but he doesn’t look scary: he’s a quivering little heap of fancy dress. My Necromancer was a walking nightmare, a vision in bone that ten-foot demons ran scampering from as he spread poison and blood raging across the room. Maybe I can sort that out with armour. I certainly want to strip people of their flesh, make zombie-fences and blow up my own pets.

Oh yes, nerdy but really kind of cool news: gender choice! I actually think Diablo 2 was pretty good at avoiding the more offensive RPG gender conventions – it rejected the notion that healing is woman’s work – but a lot of players, particularly girls, don’t like to gender-bend, and that restricts the classes they can like. Personally, I only like to gender-bend, so it’s good for me too.

Once they get outdoors in that video, the art is magnificent. They’ve got for a subtle smoothing of the scenery that makes it look like watercolour concept art, and makes the characters stand out strikingly. I’m also appreciative of the fact that they’ve gone for exquisitely detailed, high poly-count monsters: WoW‘s artists worked wonders with that game’s simple, pointy models, but Diablo demands smooth curves and complex shapes.

My friends and I had a LAN party when Diablo 2 came out just to play it. Ross sounds quite excited about it, and Tim’s a big Blizzard fanboy, so we may be able to do the same thing in the office with this one. That’s the main reason to be excited, I think: just that there’s a new and shiny game of this type coming out. Of Blizzard’s three big series, Diablo was always my primary vice, the Greater Evil. It was by comparison to that game that WoW fell short of obsessing me.

So it’ll be nice to have it back.

BioShock Review Review

The issue of PC Gamer with my BioShock review in is now on-sale in England. I wrote it mostly with lunatic fans like myself in mind, so I don’t spend a lot of time saying what really should be the first thing you say about BioShock: holy shit! Someone made a game about a subaquatic capitalist utopia for the intellectual elite! And it’s going to sell? This is a game in which you have to know some of the history of Versailles to understand one of the villain’s insults to you.

There are ways in which BioShock does more with its subject matter than any other game I can name, but mostly it’s just amazing to have something to sink your brain’s figurative teeth into. It has ideas. There are themes. I think I even saw a paradigm.

I’ve started capitalising the ‘S’, you’ll be riveted to hear, because a) it’s correct, and I’m a fan of correct, but also b) it’s very System Shock 2. You can even draw a line from each of Rapture’s districts to each of Shock 2’s decks. They might not be able to say so legally, but there is a Shock series of games and this is one of them. The best, in fact.

I was slightly bemused when I first heard that they wanted to make a game set somewhere “more interesting than a spaceship”, because Shock 2 did such an extraordinary job of making that ship a vast and exciting place to explore. But yeah, I get it now. This is an order of magnitude more artistically exciting.

I’m not talking about the bits where you kill children, because they’re not very good and they don’t need to be. Everyone will fixate on them forever and ever and it will be boring and terrible and that’s a shame. They’re not important, either emotionally or mechanically, and the game has so much more going on that is provocative and brave and weird and brilliant.

The lunatic fans seem to be satisfied, by the way – although they frantically crave documentation of every microsecond of the infanticide. And one called me a ‘filthy worm’ for giving it a score as low as 95%. While I was away in France last week, the first copies were delivered to subscribers, and one guy on the official forums got to be a mini-celebrity for a few days by being the only person who’d read the first ever review of their holy game. People grilled him for info and implored him to type in the first few sentences. I love being a part of something that inspires that level of excitement, even if I’m just riding Irrational’s coat tails.

There’s a line in my review that starts “So kindly avoid any…” I would just like to say, for the record, that this line originally read slightly differently, and you will probably be able to guess precisely how once you’ve completed the game. It was a very obvious and weak in-joke that hinges on something enormously spoilerific but invisible to the uneducated eye. I couldn’t ask Tony to make sure he kept it intact when he was sub-editing my review because it would have entirely ruined the game for him, so I’m just going to have to ask you to come back here in a month, sneer slightly at my failed attempt at a bad joke, then switch your neural interface back over to whatever Zero-G Hyper Sports event the future will presumably be full of.

Bill Hicks: Another Dead Hero

Clicking around Wikipedia, noticed Bill Hicks died fourteen years ago today. As much a great philosopher as comedian, and mocked himself as viciously as anyone. From this clip: “I’m Bill Hicks, and I’m dead now. I didn’t die from smoking, a bunch of non-smokers kicked the shit out of me. I tried to run, they had more energy than I. I tried to hide but they heard me wheezing. A lot of them smelled me.”

Better Spelling In Magicka

Magicka is great. You’re a wizard who casts spells by summoning any combination of eight different magical elements into your staff, then releasing them either as a quick blast, a charged shot, an area of effect around you, an enchantment for your weapon, or directly onto yourself. Accordingly, there’s a crazy level of player freedom, very few limits to your power, and a great, great many ways to instantly kill yourself by applying the wrong powers to the wrong thing.

Because you need to combine those eight elements so frequently, they’re on the WASD keys where movement controls would normally be. More specifically, they’re assigned like this:

Remembering what’s what is crucial and takes some time to pick up. So I can’t help thinking that, for the English version of the game at least, it might have made more sense to assign them like this:

Q and D aren’t perfect, but there’s enough consonance to make the association memorable, I think. You can reassign all of these manually, but because the game still displays them in the old order on-screen at all times, you’d have to relearn it while trying to ignore ever-present misinformation of their relative positions, so it isn’t worth it.

The fun thing about Magicka is, ironically, that there’s no concept of magicka or mana in it – however mighty a spell you cook up, you can cast it as quickly and as often as you can press the right buttons. It changes the concept of magic from what it is in most RPGs – fantasy guns, with fantasy ammo. Here it’s just palette of abilities, with curious but reliable rules about how they interact and combine. It feels like what magic should be.

I mentioned there’s lots of ways to kill yourself – using lightning when you’re wet, firing an arcane beam at a shield, forgetting to heal before you use fire to dry yourself. In multiplayer, they’re increased exponentially. Even trying to heal one of your friends when they’re using the wrong spell can cause them to explode. There’s merciless friendly fire, so area of effect stuff frequently shreds everyone on your team, boulders smash them out of the level, and lightning leaps from enemies to friends indifferently.

But the good stuff also gets more interesting: the most satisfying spells involve the Arcane element, which gives the attack the form of a beam that ultimately explodes whatever it kills. In co-op, you can intentionally cross these beams so that they combine into a more powerful one, shooting off in a direction that’s democratically controlled by where each of you are trying to point it. It’s like a weaponised version of moving your hands on a Ouija board. Again: magic like it ought to be.

The bit I most enjoy about playing a new game is after I’ve discovered enough possibilities to be excited, but before I’ve discovered them all. Magicka seems to exist entirely in that period – you grasp what’s cool about it in seconds, but days later I’m still not sure of the best way to execute my most common attack.

Right now I summon water, summon fire to turn it to steam, combine steam with arcane to turn it into a burning beam, then electrify that beam so that as the superheated steam soaks my target, the lightning does double damage as it electrocutes them.

But now I hear you can summon a rock, douse it in water, and use that as a super-soaker to get all your enemies wet. And once they are, an arcane beam that’s imbued with both lightning and cold does even more damage – freezing a wet target triples the damage it takes while electrocution also doubles it, and has the added bonus of slowing them to a crawl.

This is giving me new ideas for my defense spells: right now I use an area-effect shield to create a bubble around myself, then stand at the edge of it and mix water and shields to create an arc of rainclouds just outside the bubble. Once the enemies are wet, I mix lightning and shields to create stormclouds that electrocute them all. But perhaps I could be creating a frost arc with that same method, hurting them more and slowing the rate they break down my shield?

Everything you can concoct in Magicka can be cast in five different ways – a quick blast, a charged blast, an area effect around you, directly onto yourself (often a bad idea), or into your weapon, making its next hit deliver the magical damage the spell normally would. Casting a shield on your sword causes it to shoot out a long barrier, dividing groups of enemies in two. It’s that mix of logic and nonsense that makes experimenting with this system exciting.

Unfortunately, right now, getting it working is as dark and erratic an art as playing it. Hilariously, some machines crash whenever beams are crossed in multiplayer. Others behave as if they have an ancient videocard, multiplayer is hard to get into. The single player is also hurt by some really stupid use of checkpoints over proper savegames. But it is only £8, and the devs are keeping to their promise of daily patches.

Beta Testing Steam Workshop And Gunpoint’s New Engine

Update: whether you join the beta or not, you may get a Gunpoint update that wants to install some standard installery stuff: a particular vintage of DirectX, VC++, OpenAL. The new engine needs to make sure these are all there, and they can only be turned on globally, so everyone gets ’em. Won’t interfere with anything, but it will fix the no-music issue some might have had with the new beta.

Short version

We’re nearly ready to release an update for Gunpoint that’ll add Steam Workshop support to let you share your custom levels, and hopefully fix any remaining technical issues people are having with the old build. Continued

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.

Being Someone Else In Metal Gear Solid V

This post is part of a series. I mention abilities and tools but no story spoilers.

If you have keen eyesight, you might have noticed that the person in my screenshots is not straggly-bearded horned male Venom Boss Big Punished Ahab Snake. She’s Amber Fox, a low level support officer I think I extracted on an early mission [update: Andy tells me you get her by importing your Ground Zeroes save], along with another Fox with the same tattoo who might be her brother. She’s not a story character, just one of hundreds of recruits I have milling around my base.

Once you unlock the ‘combat’ bit of your base, you can choose to play as anyone you station there instead of Big Venom Punished Ahab. This is bizarre for many reasons. Continued

Beheading Gmail’s New Look

Gmail’s new look is optional – FOR NOW – in the same way that Twitter’s was – FOR A WHILE THERE. And like Twitter’s, it’s sort of vaguely pretty but twice as awkward to use for all of my most common tasks.

I just found a script that lops off most of the wasted headspace that scrunches all the e-mails down, even in Compact mode, and it’s made a huge difference for me.

Works natively in Chrome, needs Greasemonkey in Firefox.

It’s weird how all the extra spacing made the default view look claustrophobic. To a certain mindset, white space isn’t open air, it’s the walls closing in.

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.

Battlefield 2 Stats

I’ve now killed a thousand people. I’ve died fifteen hundred times doing it, but I’ve saved three hundred and fifty lives along the way. It’s taken me forty-six hours. I’ve won a hundred and one games, and lost ninety-one. That makes me a positive influence. If you see me on the enemy team, you should think “Uh oh, they’ve got Tom. That makes them more likely to win (than they would be otherwise).” I’ve killed twenty-four people with the knife in seven minutes of using it. My single worst-performing map – the one on which my win-to-lose ratio is lowest – is the one that comes up most often in the rotations on the servers I play on. I am cursed.

Battlefield 2 stats are interesting. More interesting is the game itself, my love for which was rekindled tonight when trying out Special Forces. Virtually nothing that’s new in SF had a bearing on the match, so it was basically just a revival. I hadn’t played online for months because Craig, Steve and I had discovered how much fun it was to try aerial stunts on a private LAN server – jumping from one helicopter to another in mid-air, for example. It’s completely different to the normal game, but somehow replaced it in my affections, leading to total neglect even after we stopped really doing the stunts thing too.

Tonight I played Medic, as I always do. I’ve spent less than fifteen percent of my time as classes other than the Medic. Sorry, it’s hard to shake the stats thing. It was a spectacular, incredibly tense and fiercely competitive game tonight – me, an excellent player on my team, and the star player of the enemy team all jostling for the top spot, all pretty sure we’d get a medal (Bronze, Silver or Gold) but all extremely ‘interested’ in which one it would be. I began swearing a lot, even though I was ahead. But somehow my complete jerkishness when playing Battlefield 2 never detracts from what I’m actually doing to get this score up – killing bad guys and saving lives. That remains an utterly pure, deeply instinctive and almost medatative act. When I see a black bar – a dead ally – the defibrillators come out seemingly without me moving my fingers, and he’s resurrected and his foes killed in almost the same motion. Even as I ask the enemy if they like that, cocksuckers, ha, didn’t think so, I care profoundly about the friend I’ve just saved, drop him a medkit in case he gets hurt again, respond to his manly “Thanks man,” with a stoic “You got it.”

I am a pure force, tipping the balance in our team’s favour in both ways – giving to one, takething away from the other. And I score one and a half points per minute.

Battlefield 2

The Basics
You’re a soldier of a class of your choosing, on a vast battlefield with dozens of comrades and enemies, operating as part of a tightly knit squad which is in turn directed by your team’s commander.

The Appeal
Camaraderie. So many mods and multiplayer games claim to be designed to encourage teamplay, but the only way they can think to do it is discourage solo play – making you rubbish on your own. All that does is make the game rubbish. Battlefield 2 assumes everyone’s a selfish idiot, and it’s exactly right. We’re only going to work together if it’s immediately obvious that it will benefit us personally, hugely and right away. I get as many points for bringing a friend back to life as I do for killing an enemy. I want to be in a squad because it gives me a new spawn point, always close to the action – I know I’ll have more fun if I join my squad leader. My helicopter is virtually useless unless I wait for someone else to get in to gun for me, and likewise my best chance at getting a lot of chopper kills is to let someone else have the flying fun so they can lead me to the bads while I concentrate on the killing. Everything that’s good for the team is good for me in exactly the right proportion.

Vacuous theory, all. The reality of Battlefield is about immediate friendship with strangers. It’s about a flood of affection for a name on the screen as he kills your enemy, brings you back from the dead, stops his car to pick you up, fixes your tank, chucks you a medikit. It’s following your squad leader to hell and back because he’s consistently shown dedication to the mission, concern for your safety and good judgement in both. It’s about trusting another man with your life, and immediately feeling his confident expertise guide you both to glorious, spectacular victory in an airbourne vehicle you know from experience it’s extremely hard not to crash. It is deeply homoerotic.

The Essential Experience
Throwing yourself off a dizzyingly high water-tower to parachute down to the body of your squad leader, who’s just slipped off after taking a sniper bullet to the face, so that you can restart his heart with your defibrillators. “Dammit, sir.”

Badminton

Badminton is the best sport – and I’ve tried easily six of them. Here’s what’s good about it:

• Sound effects: hitting a shuttlecock (they call them birdies here) doesn’t just make a great sound, it makes a whole range of them. You’ve got your gentle pongs, your lively thwaps, all the way up to the fearsome splack of a good overhand smash. I’d say the only sport that can claim more satisfying noises is archery, and in badminton no-one has to die.
• It involves a lot less walking around and picking things up: this is the main thing it has over tennis – even a ridiculously overpowered shot never goes more than a couple feet from the court, and in tennis even the gentlest shot can bounce to a neighbouring country if you’re not there to stop it. This is because of a secret feature of badminton:
• It has Bullet Time built in: a shuttlecock is a weird little contradiction – streamlined in silhouette but engineered to slur through the air like it’s treacle. The harder you hit it, the faster it slows – meaning, basically, go ham. You pretty quickly learn to lunge for shots you think you’ve already missed, because the proportionate slowdown is so extreme that you sometimes get them anyway. It almost feels like you’ve gone slightly back in time to get another chance.
• Extreme dynamic range: these hard shots – aim them up and they absolutely soar, giving your opponent plenty of time to get in position, but also plenty of time to overthink it and whiff at the last minute. Aim them down and it’s the opposite: an absolute bullet to the ground, brutally difficult to defend, but when they do come back it’s such a sudden reversal that all you can do is flinch in self-defense. And those are just the hard shots – at the other end of the spectrum, there’s a whole artform in barely touching the birdie so that it lazily bellyflops over the net and dribbles down the other side in a fatal fall that leaves them hurling themselves across the court to reach it and attempt an equally pathetic shot back.
• Comedy: that’s very, very funny. Even more so as a return to a much more dramatic shot. And even more so if you’re busy celebrating your genius when the fucking thing comes back with exactly the same smug lethargy. And these are just the shots that work – badminton is a masterclass in the taste of victory turning to ashes in your mouth. Pride, cleverness, and an ostentatious wind-up come before a public self-own every three shots. Sometimes a long-awaited serve just drops to the floor without even touching a racket. Sometimes your sneaky side shot goes so far out it’s a valid shot in the next court. Sometimes they set you up for the perfect unstoppable smash and you just beast it directly into the net. Sometimes you beast it under the net. Sometimes you just beast it directly into the ground, and look around at everyone like, well I don’t know what that was supposed to be.
• It’s exercise but I enjoy it? This is sort of self-referential and redundant – I like badminton because I like badminton? – but the last point was too long-winded to feel like a conclusion so here we are.

Badlands

Playing Team Fortress 2 at the moment is starting to feel like being part of something. We play it in the office at lunch. Chris Livingston’s making a comic in it. We settle our grudges against the US edition of PC Gamer with it. Yahtzee’s making bad Garry’s Mod machinima in it. The other day a level designer at Ubisoft Montreal mailed me an incredible map of a film set he’d made for it. And when the update adding Badlands, the first proper new map, was due to go live, everyone hung out at the Steam forums making tenuous “X sappin’ mah Y” jokes until it was released.

Badlands is good. I can’t help thinking it would have made more sense to go with this instead of Granary for the initial release, given how similar Granary and Well are. Granary’s become problematic on public servers because so few people are willing to play defense, and the straightforward layout makes it incredibly easy to win quickly once the middle capture point is yours. Badlands staves off rush-wins like this by making the second-to-last cap a) time-consuming to get to and b) easy to defend.

Which is good. So far it’s lead to a lot more back-and-forth than either Granary or Well had, and those are my favourite matches. Even if we win, I hate a trouncing. But like all symmetrical control-point maps, the final point is so wide-open and absurdly fast to capture that it might as well not exist.

I assume that if you make the final point tactically biased towards defenders, you get a lot of stalemates. But I don’t see why you can’t make it slow to capture shortly after the second-to-last point falls, then become gradually less resistant to capture the longer the pushing team manage to hold the defenders back to their last point. Stalemates would be just as unlikely, but rush-wins would become much trickier.

I think the reason this type of map gets a lot of flak on the forums, while Dustbowl and Gravelpit seem generally well-liked, is that defeat has long felt inevitable by the time it comes. On Dustbowl, you always feel like you can hold it for that much longer. You always feel like you can cap it in the time you have left. Victory is as close to your grasp as defeat.

On symmetrical capture-point maps, I’m always in a “Oh fuck it, we’ve lost this” mindset long before we actually do. Comebacks aren’t impossible, but they’re both daunting and improbable. When defeat is close, victory is way, way over there. If we’ve sucked this hard so far, what chance to we have of making it now?

The good news is that Goldrush, the map that’ll introduce the new Payload game mode soon, falls firmly in the former category. In fact, it makes that knife-edge between a win and a loss all the more tangible, because you can see how close that damn cart is to the objective. That’s one less level of abstraction than looking at a coloured icon or countdown clock.

And more importantly, the gradual roll-out of unlockable items for every class is going to make the game even more like being part of something. The simultaneous worldwide release of exciting stuff is one of the great pleasures of Steam, a shared moment that fuses the community together. And here’s a way for them to be doing that regularly, for years.

I apologise, but only a little, for talking about Team Fortress 2 so much. If you’re a gamer, I can only say that it’s like when Deus Ex had just come out. If you’re not, it’s like being a film buff at the time of The Godfather. But it’s not really like either, and that’s kind of the point.

Bad News

For some reason the gaming news media have attempted to evolve from scratch, rather than taking any cues from the way actual news is reported. Stranger, the natural-selection process for which sites become popular seems to be horribly, horribly broken. Thanks partly to RSS and partly to free-and-easy link-without-reading incest, the headline has become the only important thing about a story. There’s a huge chunk of readers, myself included, who click links to news stories without knowing which site they’re going to until they get there. For that reason, the site’s reputation and integrity is irrelevant – all you know before clicking is the name of the story, and the more outlandish and unlikely it is the more you want to see how they justify saying something so patently untrue.

It’s getting pretty ridiculous. Right now, the most-clicked news story in the most-read game news aggregator, which pulls together the content of 186 news sites, is called “Rumor: WiiD Coming Next Year?” It’s a piece on Kotaku decrying this image as fake, since it clearly looks like a DVD player and Nintendo have announced the Wii won’t have one:

“The lesson here,” chides Brian Crecente, “is to check your rumors before you start creating fake images to pass around.”

Is it… is it a DVD player that straps to your face, Brian? Do you push the DVDs into your eyes to watch them? Is Wii-D a phononym for DVD that just misses out a letter or two? Because that thing, fake as it is, is quite openly a 3D stereoscopic headset. It would be bizarre enough if you were just picking headlines in order to state that they weren’t true in the body copy, but even the fake image you’ve posted isn’t suggesting the claim in your headline. You’ve just made something up, then insulted it, then reported it as a rumour, and backed it up with a forged image that you haven’t even looked at. A rumour is called a ‘false rumour’ if you know it isn’t true, and if you yourself made it up, the word for that is ‘lying’. That could be a useful new prefix for a lot of your stories, actually. And it probably wouldn’t stop people clicking on them.

I’m sure there was a time when Kotaku was the only offender. At time of writing the latest story on Joystiq is “Ridiculous “black 360″ with ridiculously cute cat”:

It’s the reporter’s cat. Could this be the best story since they broke the news that if one number is bigger than the other, then the smaller number is smaller than the larger one, all else being equal? The story here, again, is that their own headline is inaccurate, this is not a black X-Box 360 retail unit.

“This “black 360″ crap is really getting silly. That’s a test kit that my cute-ass cat is pwning. Nothing more.” Great. What am I doing here again?

At least Joystiq have the decency to be exasperated by their own mendacity, I suppose. To be fair, they do link another photo of the same type of unit posted on cousin-site Engadget, ruthlessly exposing the truth behind the lie! Except that the Engadget post they’re talking about, which they don’t link (but do hotlink the image from), is also one explaining that the image is really of a test kit.

“Can we move on now?” the writer sighs. Let’s see: you first posted this story on June the 11th, 2005. The outlook isn’t good.

That’s the other mind-numbing thing about gaming news: the zeitgeist is amnesiac. A major story becomes a major story again three months later, when everyone forgets that it ever happened. Again just using today as an example, and I apologise to Tom because this is not his fault, Eurogamer have the news that there will be X-Box 360 exclusive episodes for GTA IV. At least this story is true. I know because I was at the Microsoft pre-E3 conference when they announced it in May. I also know because I read it on Eurogamer the next day.

Back!

Since last we spoke, I have been:

To Seattle!

In America, I am treated like a king. People keep telling me how good I look, how great I am, starting conversations with me in the street, or actually giving me stuff. That last one was because they worked at the company who’d invited me there, but even they gave me more than I’ve ever heard of them giving anyone, including something they’ve never given anyone before, and informed me that this was because I was their favourite. I don’t know what it is, a lot of these things happen before they’ve even heard my spectacularly quaint English accent.

Shavin’ Like A Man!

No room for my clippers in my luggage and no time to shave before leaving, and haunted by this strange curse that seems to mean I spend all press trips absurdly dishevelled and hairy-looking (and without notepad – another curse I managed to break this time), I bought the cheapest way to shave I could: a razor. I’d been meaning to try this, but a few things have always put me off it a bit. Bear in mind that my only experience of razor-shaving is what I see on screens, and there are only two types of scene involving them:

Scene A – a sparkling blue-tiled bathroom, morning. A beautiful woman is visible in the bedroom beyond.
A magnificently buff, bare-chested middle-aged man shaves manlily, then winces and touches his cheek.
Man: Ow, it burns!
VO: You need: Nivea For Girlymen Soft Kitten Gel For Ultra-Sensitive Weak Babyskin!

Scene B – a dingy motel bathroom, morning. A beautiful hooker is visible in the bedroom beyond.
A magnificently buff, bare-chested middle-aged man shaves very, very, carefuly, and slices his whole fucking cheek open. The cut, or bloodstain resulting from the cut, will be misinterpreted later in the film.

In other words, it seems to be excruciatingly painful and almost guaranteed to result in mutilation. Nevertheless, I bought an extremely cheap razor and no after-shave soothing product, inwardly asking how bad it could really be, despite the result of all previous internal “How X can it be?” questions having ultimately been answered by reality with “Fucking, fucking”. *

* I’m partly stealing this line from Boss Nonnu, because he stole my game.

Turned out it was fine. In fact, much easier and more pleasant than electrical shavers, as far as I recall actually using one to try to remove stubble. In general I’m not the kind of adult male who’s still trying to eradicate any evidence that he’s ever grown a facial hair in his life, and therefore must be under the age of fourteen and have his whole life ahead of him. So I’m not scraping the bejesus out of my skin, but still.

Getting A New Bike!

This one, but with slicks, which I’m informed are tyres that go fast on roads. I can now verify that they do.

I stuck it to the bike thieves of Bath by leaving my old one unlocked in town until it vanished. Ha! How’d you like that one, velo-vultures? Not much fun to ride, is it? No salvagable parts, are there? Probably fell off, didn’t you? Yeah, that’s because it’s broken. I mock the socio-economic circumstances that have driven you to unlawfully take possession of my reject! Hm. Now I feel kind of bad. But I’m still pretty sure you’re not the good guy here.

The bicycle is the best vehicle mankind has invented so far. Lots of others can do things it can’t, but those need irreplacable fuels to noisily drink and messily belch out, and the whole energy equation with them is just short-sighted and ugly. A bike is just a dramatically more efficient form of human movement, an outright improvement on the most fundamental thing our bodies do. It uses nothing, requires nothing and emits nothing. It’s also a little like flying on land, which is pleasant.

At A Stag Party!

This one is not what those in the truth business call ‘true’. Al, the groom, is, like me, not the type for stag nights. So he came to my place for fancy burgers and homemade chips, then to town with others for moderate drunkenness, then the next day for a Thai meal at the only one of Bath’s seven Thai restaurants whose location I’d forgotten, then to the park for close-quarters frisbee. EXTREME.

It was good. We ship out to his wedding soon, but I have a metric Christload of work to do before then, so I’m trying not to think too far ahead.

Losing My Internet Connection!

This router has never worked very reliably for me, so I borrowed a new one from Jonty to try. I couldn’t get my PC – or three others – to see it, so I went back to the old one. That no longer worked at all.

Fixing My Internet Connection!

Which is why and how I am talking to you now and not sooner, unless you are one of the people to whom I have spoken to sooner, in which case that happened.