TOM FRANCIS
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Trivia: My Firefox Extensions

But actually, this basically turns Firefox into the Google Browser, a program in which your Google account is your master login for all others, and your personal information is now completely detached from your home PC, and is entirely online and accessible anywhere. I am naive, and much more easily excited than concerned.

Firefox’s Extension window is one of the slickest pieces of programming I’ve ever seen. When you open it, Update buttons appear next to anything that has a new version out, and you can click them all straight away and they’ll all update simultaneously, in seconds, without asking you anything or making you click okay or waiting for each other to finish first or looking things up or conflicting or breaking or failing to find things. Extensions are user-created content; it’s extraordinary to see the host program supporting them so dotingly. Even Steam is years off being this clever.

Half-Life 3: Episode 1

We didn’t make hats this time, but I booked the office as late as it goes (22.00), we got some Chinese food in and hung around for the release time, Craig, Graham and I. The worldwide simultaneous online launch is one of my favourite things about the Half-Life experience now, I absolutely love the feeling of a global unwrapping of this insanely exciting present. My office PC hadn’t preloaded it, absurdly, impossibly, maddeningly, so I had to scramble round to Tim’s and try not to look at Craig’s screen as he was first in. I repeatedly shouted “Shut up!” at every gasp and expletive it inspired, and tried to ignore Graham’s reaction as he got to the same bits. After scrambling wildly to install my mouse on Tim’s machine (I wasn’t about to settle for a freaking Microsoft one for something as important as this), I finally got in about fifteen minutes late, and played until Security kicked us out, which was oh-so-perfectly just as I reached the end.

Oh yes, the title – it does say Half-Life 2: Episode One on the title screen, but Gabe Newell consistently refers to this as Half-Life 3: Episode One, and indeed this episodic trilogy as the entirety of Half-Life 3. And I think its important to acknowledge the momentousness of the event – this isn’t a stopgap, this is it.

That beginning: holy shit. I don’t understand the technical bits of how the Source engine has changed, but that sequence so massively exceeds your expectations of how good Half-Life 2 can look that it suddenly feels like something properly new, not just Half-Life 2 deleted scenes. Valve have always been the only people who can make game characters touch each other properly, and the interaction between the Vortigaunts and Alyx at the start is one of the most extraordinary bits of animation I’ve ever seen in a game. All the other most extraordinary bits of animation I’ve ever seen in a game happen in the next five minutes, and most of them are on Dog.

One, of course, is being hugged. I am being hugged, by a game character. This is… nice. Perhaps slightly nicer than it has any right to be, given what it actually is. It’s not the last time the force of Alyx’s emotion surprises you – she is utterly flabergasted by your performance at one point, and is genuinely traumatised at another. All three times it jars you out of the mindset in which she is a friendly combatant, rather than a character. The rest of the advances in AI companionship are fixes rather than features – it took Herculean effort to prevent her from being annoying or a liability, but the result is by definition something you don’t notice.

Episode One’s two potential shortcomings cancel each other out: one, it’s short. Two, it’s still in City 17. Three and a half hours every six months works out to a little over one minute of game per day. I actually found its length satisfying – I did masses in that time, so it felt substantial. But it was helped a lot by the fact that I have spent a lot of freaking time in City 17. It’s the defining feature of the Half-Life games that every section is just slightly longer than the human mind can comfortably endure – you’re always a little exhausted after any given section, and it’s designed that way because that’s the threshold past which your brain registers an experience as signifcant. So every Half-Life player remembers Surface Tension intimately, whereas I couldn’t name you or describe a single level of Quake. As ever, it’s just right because it’s just wrong – it’s slightly longer than it was possible for me to enjoy a single setting, so exhaustion set in shortly before it ended, leaving me relieved to be leaving without having suffered for more than a minute or two. More than any other Half-Life location, leaving City 17 is profoundly cathartic. We’ve done, seen and felt so much there that – however wonderful it was – we never want to go back.

Can I Just Say

Before we go any further, that there is not a first time for everything. Some things never happen. That is kind of the point. There is a first time for everything that happens, but the irritating and sophistic catchphrase is generally used to argue against the notion that a given thing may never happen. Some things don’t. There is not a first time for these. They don’t happen. Just to be clear.

Top 100 Musings #1: Battlefield 2

Maths Cop 2: The Revengening

I don’t usually do the link-someone-else’s-entry thing, but this is from a blog you probably don’t read, relates to a previous James post, and is easily geeky enough to inspire a response post from me. Venusberg, amused by Grey’s Anatomy’s contrast with its namesake, suggests other possible science-themed series with a keen commercial instinct:

Hooke’s Law: John Hooke is a tough New York detective. To keep the peace, he’s not afraid to stretch the law. Sometimes the strain gets to him… but it’s always proportional to the stress of the job.

I suggest:

Turing’s Test: Alan ‘Jack Johnson’ Turing is a grizzled alcoholic PI in a near-future dystopia. Earth is being taken over by android replicants, but only Alan can tell them from humans. Now he must take his test straight to the top: the President of the United States. Of Robots.

Socrates’ Method: John ‘Jack’ Plato narrates the story of the greatest negotiator who ever lived: Jack ‘John’ Socrates. By a interminable series of increasingly irritating questions, John could talk any hostage-taker, roof-jumper or bomb-wearer out of their intended course of action, and into kicking him in the neck.

Heisenberg’s Principles: Werner ‘Ice’ Heisenberg is a master car thief specialising in locating and obtaining landspeed-record-breaking vehicles for eccentric millionaires. On his last job before retirement to the Bahamas, his best friend (Niels ‘Interesting’ Bohr) turns him in. The arresting officer (Detective ‘Determinist’ Einstein) is derisive of Werner’s maverick methods, but has no choice but to offer him a deal: a dangerous street gang have stolen the five fastest cars in the world, and only Werner can work out where they are. To within (Planck’s constant / 4Ï€) of the standard deviation.

I found Venusberg’s blog when one of my screenshots on Flickr suddenly started getting a lot of hits. I traced them back like some kind of cyber detective, to a Venusberg post questioning the virtue of ragdoll physics when it allows for travesties against man and god such as the one I had created. It was the start of a beautiful friendship.

Waa?

I don’t recall where I was when the first plane crashed into the World Trade Center, but I think I’ll always remember that I was sitting right here in the office when Nintendo renamed the Revolution.

Out Of Office Auto-Blog

I’m in America for a few more days, the end of a week-long press trip with three different companies, to see around fifteen games. Anyway, here are some photos.

Dan above the firey water feature in the LA hotel’s bar.

The X ride at Magic Mountain – the only thing in the world more extreme than a guy jumping out of a helicopter on a skateboard and the skateboard is on fire and the helicopter is exploding maybe.

I spilt my drink, and this guy pulled out that card. It was pretty surreal, but he gave us our own cards to use in the event of further accidents.

Dan and I had been to Santa Monica beach last year too, so we decided to tour it on reclining trikes this year.

A busker – or maybe just a girl playing guitar for fun – being appreciated. Drive-by photography; you don’t get the whole story.

Rollerblades are faster, but I am faster than some regular bikes on one of these. There are no gears, so you have to pedal pretty stupidly.

Mike makes movies of his trips for X-Box World’s coverdisc, but probably doesn’t use much of this footage.

Oblivion Review

The issue of PC Gamer that’s just gone on-sale in the UK is the one with my eight-page review of Oblivion in it, so I’d like to a) encourage you to look at it and go ‘woo!’, and b) explain why it’s structured the way it is, and how it came about. It was a huge honour to be the one to review it, and I’d actually been looking forward to writing it almost as much as getting to play the game itself. But it turned out to be one of the hardest things I’ve ever written, up there with an eight-thousand word philosophy thesis on the morality of killing replicants.

I spent a week in Eton playing the game all day every day, with one other journalist (Ryan from X360 magazine) in the demo room with me. I wrote scraps of the review on a laptop in my hotel room each night, but generally fell asleep before I got much done, or changed my mind about what I’d said within the first five minutes of playing the next day. By the end of the week, I’d written around half the review’s length, none of which made it into the final piece. Cumulative wordcount: 2,500.

Back at the PC Gamer office, I wrote the whole review quickly, but wasn’t sure if I’d talked about all the important things. Graham read it, and suggested that I may have become hung up on the details a little. I re-read it, and I appeared to have written a manual. A step-by-step guide to what Oblivion is and what happens in it is all info I’d find fascinating if I hadn’t played the game, but as a review it was fussy, dry and missed the point. Cumulative wordcount: 6,000.

I’d been wrestling with the decision of which aspects to talk about, resigned to the fact that you couldn’t cover all the important ones in a small book, let alone a magazine article. I’d also been writing up some of the best bits of my adventures as little stories, to go in separate boxes throughout, but it became clear that these were actually making the one essential point. Oblivion is hugely complex and entirely free-form, so you can’t give an impression of what it’s like to play by attempting to describe it. The only way to give a real feel for how rich with possibilities it is, and why that makes it great, is with examples. So they’ve become a chunk of the main text, punctuated by the normal business of reviewing. Cumulative wordcount: 10,500. Final article: 3,943.

Feedback so far has been really good, and much more importantly I’m now officially mentioned on Wikipedia. What I’m really looking forward to is the game finally coming out. Apart from wanting to get back to it, I want to hear what everyone else gets up to when they play.

If Things Go Right

Well, now there’s nothing in my room. This monitor is balancing on this PC, and this keyboard is on my lap as I slouch against the wall on the floor, wearing a suit for some reason. The room is shaking with the bass of Cat Power (still great), Sufjan Stevens (still amazing) and Sondre Lerche (new! Awesome!), reproduced with extraordinary fidelity and volume by my £25 surround sound system, which is in a heap on my bed, underneath a lamp. I have, officially, moved out of this place.

I’m not feeling too bad about the thunderous noise because Rich is out and the guys in the flat below are playing bland reggae loudly anyway. Rich has dubbed them Jonnie Potsmoker and Smokey McPot, and having watched Dude Where’s My Car on a whim the other day, I now get the reference. We’re not going to miss these guys. Although now I’ve tried this cinema-volume music thing, I may miss that. The better half of Predatory Wasp Of The Palisades Is Out To Get Us sound amazing like this.

I’m hearing a pretty muted or negative reaction to Graham Linehan’s (Father Ted, Black Books) new sitcom The IT Crowd from, like, the three people whose opinions I’ve heard. This is wrong! It’s fantastic. The second episode more than the first, perhaps – some of the actors seemed to ham it up a bit in the first, Chris Morris included, but I was still won over by it.

It’s not really a satire of an IT department, any more than Black Books was about a book shop or Father Ted was about being a priest. Like them, it’s an elaborately orchestrated farce of secrecy, politeness and bureaucracy with a twist of the surreal. What distinguishes it from inferior comedies like The Green Wing is its reluctance to write any of its characters off: none of them are dehumanised charicatures, all of them are at least somewhat likeable, and for me sympathy is essential for humour. I can’t laugh at people I entirely hate.

What made me use the word ‘fantastic’ instead of great, apart from a reluctance to resort to the absurdly over-used sentence “It’s great,” is that I keep suddenly thinking of a particular scene and cracking up – the only real litmus test for a sitcom. It’s the fire scene, but not specifically the:

Moss: (writing an e-mail in front of a fire) ‘Fire exclaimation mark. Fire exclaimation mark’

That they picked out for the preview clip – it’s the line before.

Moss: ‘Dear sir or madam. I am writing to inform you of a fire.’ (backspacing) No, no, that’s too formal.

I’m skirting the real subject of this post, mostly because I’m pretty sure I’m not allowed to talk about it. But it’s happening soon, it’s both figuaratively and literally a dream come true, and I’ll tell you all about it as soon as I’m no longer under contractual obligation to shut the hell up.

New Ritual

It’s been a good month. I’ve spent most of it chronically exhausted from nightmare-induced sleep deprivation, ill, or feeling like I’m drowning in a treacle comprised of my own meaningless words, but still somehow a good month. Despite feeling like I’m getting nowhere with anything, I’ve written twenty-six pages of articles for the next issue to hit the shelves, and two of them have been the result of investigative digital tampering to acquire information no-one else has, something you could almost call journalism if it was about something serious. It wasn’t; it was about robotic aliens and death Gods; but that just made it more fun.

Now I’m sitting in my newly tidied room listening to the bluesy new Cat Power with my window open and bare feet, freezing slightly but enjoying the night air too much to do anything about it, and idly researching a link between avian flu and a fictional virus dreamed up last millenium.

I used to have a ritual, once I’d finished the disc each month, of stopping at Shakeaway for a carrot cake milkshake on the way back from delivering the masters to the postroom. Since I’m no longer a disc editor, I’m enstating a new ritual for when my work on an issue is done, based on a throwaway line by Amy Gardner from the West Wing:

Amy: I fought you, I lost, I went home, took a shower, had a drink. You know what I do when I win? Two drinks.

This month: two drinks!

Favourites

Putting together the fireworks post reminded me how amazing Flickr is, and also led to an addition to my very elite, frequently pruned Favourites collection. Click through to get to the large versions:

World Of Lifecraft

Rich pointed me to a post putting forward the concept of Massively Multiplayer Productivity, and I haven’t been able to find anyone who’s actually come up with a formal system for how it would work. The concept is that, in order to give the menial tasks you do in real-life the same addictive quality as the menial tasks in World Of Warcraft, all you need to do is assign experience-point rewards to them. Your To-Do list becomes your Quest Log, and every few thousand points you level yourself up – you have become a superior human being by getting things done.

So all it needs is a fair system of assigning experience points to the different kinds of things life requires you to sort out, and some markers to indicate when you would level up. I suggest:

Level-ups are awarded for the following XP amounts:

And so on. (If you didn’t spot the pattern, you’re probably not geeky enough to need to turn your life into a MMOG in order to get anything done). Notice that you start at level 0, just to emphasise how worthless you are until you’ve done something.

Well, I’m level one already and I haven’t had breakfast, so I think a bacon sandwich is in order. Any suggestions for more quest types or rewards?

Elsewhere

None of my photos of fireworks came out, so here are some various strangers around the world took last night.

John, Leonardtown

Adam, Poland

Joel, New Mexico

Matt, Canada

Stephen, Melbourne

Serdar, Sydney

Some News, JC

Seven hours left of the year – another good one, actually. Last year I got a job at PC Gamer, this year I got the job I’d always wanted at PC Gamer. I also got a raise and a house. Did I tell you about the house yet? I’m not allowed to move in until the 12th, but I have a key now:

So I’m counting it as this year. It looks like this:

It was an old man’s house, and he died. It looks very much like an old man’s house inside right now, but we’re going to modernise it heavily. There are dozens of picture hooks which presumably held precious memories and images of loved ones – I’m going to put up framed prints of my favourite screenshots, which is basically the same thing.

The key was a Christmas present. I thought I’d lost my camera for a while, so when I discovered I hadn’t (I refused to look for it for about a month on the grounds that, so long as I hadn’t attempted to find it, I had not in any real sense lost it) I went mad taking photos of everything. It’s hard to get far enough away from normal scenes to make them look interesting (as they are from a plane, for example), so you’ll notice most of my photos are extremely close up instead. This, for example, is a beach at sunset:

Interesting thing I learnt about macro mode over a year ago, then completely forgot until recently: it’s much better if you zoom out, then just put the lens very close. My brain is rubbish.

Recommendations are stronger when you make fewer of them, so for my Stuff Of The Year awards I’m limiting myself to two choices per medium.

Games

1. Battlefield 2. Just before I first set eyes on this, I had to sit through a series of presentations about various console-only games. It was embarassing. I was scared someone from the outside world might peer in and think this was what games were like. When we finally sat down in a lecture theatre and Battlefield 2 popped up on the projector, it was a blissful homecoming to the amazing worlds where I spend my time. Vast, crisp, luscious and magnificently complicated. The social hierarchy of the voice comms system alone is an elegant work of genius. It’s one of those sequels that goes a little too far in improving on the original, and we end up wondering how we ever could have been satisfied with the crude toy that one of the most important games ever made now looks like. Even if you ignore the brilliant, endlessly emotional, ingeniously designed game – and for a long time we did – the fidelity of the world alone makes it extraordinary to be in. The ludicrously thrilling speed and solidity of the jets, the earth-shattering apocalypse of an artillery strike, the exquisite sense of place in every forest, street, mountain and desert. Magnificent.

2. Darwinia. The second-place stigma is misleading, this is the best strategy game ever created – I just have an enormous bias toward first-person games. Ignore if you can the sumptuous style and heart-melting story, what makes my brain explode with delight every time I play Darwinia is the satisfaction of doing almost everything myself. You hold your army together with both hands, controlling your most powerful troops manually while your unpredictable horde of Darwinians flow according to the fluid channels of command you hastily set up for them. It sounds overwhelming, but every task is a game rather than a chore, so everything you’re scrambling to do is fun in itself.

Films

1. Serenity. If you liked Revenge Of The Sith, you should definitely see Serenity. It’s not similar, and I’ve never heard of anyone liking both, but you will I hope break down in tears when you realise the error of your ways. It’s sci-fi your sci-fi-hating friends, girlfriend, mother and luddite cultists will like, because it takes an innovative extra step of actually being good, so it works whether space excites you or not. It excites me a lot. Apart from being witty, emotional, character-driven fiction, Serenity is wonderful epic sci-fi; full of horror, assassins and bureaucracy.

2. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. I so nearly didn’t go and see this, but quickly checked the Onion AV Club’s review, discovered it was a “a noir-inspired L.A. mystery that isn’t afraid to show some satirical teeth” and bolted for the door. It is exactly my kind of thing. It’s endlessly cool, incredibly funny, frequently dark, and genuinely thrilling.

Music

1. In Case We Die (Architecture In Helsinki). The most fun you can have with your ears.

2. Twin Cinema (The New Pornographers). Spoiled slightly for me by having the best tracks – Bleeding Heart Show, Sing Me Spanish Techno and Twin Cinema – released on various MP3 blogs before the album proper was available. Spoil it for yourself too and listen to those.

More random images of Christmas follow. Have fun tonight/last night.

This Is The Winter Of Our Disco Tent

You demand some awesome new music to listen to on a loop for the coming weeks and thereafter associate with Christmas forever! It is a reasonable demand, and I shall do my best.

I cannot stop listening to Upon This Tidal Wave Of Young Blood by Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, which even if you don’t particularly like me you have to admit can only be amazing from the title and band name. I can’t point to anything specifically Christmassy about it, but it still seemed seasonal even the first time I heard it. It is way better than This Home On Ice, which I think is a better-known song of theirs. The guy’s voice is so immediately unmelodious that you have to get over any problem you might have with it in the first few seconds, and after that, the way its loose, sharp, narcoleptically over-casual sound droops off the stiff, lush music creates a weirdly pleasing harmony. How about that.

Destroyer. You can’t go far wrong with Destroyer. The name is misleading, they’re not rubbish metal, although I’m not quite sure what they are. Craig would class them as “gay medieval music,” but that goes for more or less everything I listen to. Suffice to say they can make the line “Students carve hearts out of coal, and I just thought I’d let you know” catchy. That doesn’t really suffice at all, and I don’t have a link except to this rather unrepresentative song, but if you think you might like a band with verses like “It’s just Crystal Country showing us that everything must break to be beautiful, and honey, that’s what I meant when I called and said ‘This is fucked.'” – you’ll probably get along just fine.