TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

This Week

Woke up confused on Thursday morning, after a night spent talking to a dog with a human head, dodging feathers thrown by a woman on a rocking horse in the rafters, avoiding a man with a fox snout moulded onto his mouth, exchanging glances with a badger couple, and applauding a woman who set her nipples on fire with a candle lit by an electrified cucumber – the Future Christmas party. The text from Craig that woke me up said the new Team Fortress 2 update namechecked me. !?

The office is nuts at the moment because we’re just finishing the shortest issue cycle of the year, so we were already exhausted when we headed up to Reading for Play with PC Gamer Live: our big free LAN party. Met a lot of names I knew from comments here, as well as Twitter and the PCG blog.

The event was partly to launch our PC Gamer Top 100 site. We’ve done our Top 100 article in the new issue, now we’re gathering votes for a gigantic public one. In the mag, Deus Ex has won for the first time ever – it’d be awesome to see it win the public vote as well. Vote!

One of the main games we played there was Team Fortress 2, so Craig got in touch with Valve beforehand to see if they could lend us some cheaty weapons to hurt our readers with during the event. To their enormous credit, despite being days away from launching a major update, they did. We were able to turn ourselves into slow but nigh-invincible Medics with eternally critting bonesaws, Scout-speed Heavies with deadly boxing gloves, and Soldiers with rapid-fire rocket launchers that do one hundred times the normal damage and heal us with every hit.

The next day the update was out, and I was determined to play fair. But then Robin, who sorted these ultra-weapons out for us, showed up in one of my matches and challenged me to a ridiculous weapon duel. I’d already seen him use the rocket launcher he loaned us, so I was picturing a jousting match with that when I agreed. I hadn’t considered what Valve’s personal versions of the new Demoman weapons might be.

He’s invincible, on fire and able to kill anything in one hit – even me. I’m the Blue Soldier here, the video is taken by a Red Soldier named Traxantic, who by rights should have destroyed me many times over.

Powerful and on fire I can deal with, but invincible makes things tricky. It meant the match was primarily about stopping him from getting to me, which meant buffeting him with streams of rockets as he charged. Inevitably he’d get too close, and I’d have to rocket-jump away and spray a salvo down on the map as I flew.

I apologise to the many, many people killed in the crossfire, and also the people I just shot. Not everyone in the game knew who Robin worked for or guessed that my weapons were probably his doing, so some names were slung. Sorry dudes!

For those that asked, I’m afraid I don’t have my ‘special’ pickaxe to show you yet – looks like there are still some teething problems with this update that ought to be ironed out first. I think it’ll be a regular pickaxe with a subtle sparkle to it and eventually a custom name, rather than a cheat-o-matic megapick. I still plan to use it to the exclusion of all else.

The rest of the week was consumed by stuff you don’t care about, but it’s been awesome and exhausting in equal measure. I think we might finally be approaching the relaxing part of Christmas, so today I do nothing that doesn’t have ‘Fortress’, ‘Commander’ or ‘Trek’ in the title.

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.”

This Month In Terrible, Part 2: London Olympics Logo

It’s depressing to think that in my life, I will never write anything as funny as this logo. What the hell is it? The first thing I thought when I saw it, once I’d dried my eyes, was “What does the R stand for?” If the oblique angles that make up 95% of this image are supposed to represent the digits of 2012, what’s this:

It’s so typically British to have the only bit we could be proud of – that it’s in England – written in all-lower case seventies sci-fi script on the underside of something that might once have been a two.

Also hilariously dismal and quintessentially British is the ad they made to capture the spirit of these Olympic Games. It shows shining examples of the heights of excellence that the British spirit can achieve: a woman who’s managed to slim down to a mere fourteen stone, a disabled boy who can now ride horse without falling off more than three times, and a mother who, when she really tries, can cycle almost as fast as an OAP-buggy. It ends by speculating that she might one day be good enough to hand a bottle of water to a real cyclist. To sleep, perchance to dream.

This Month In Terrible, Part 1: Anti-DRM T-Shirts

To fight the good fight against the evil legions of Digital Rights Management that are currently making it impossible for anyone on the planet to enjoy music, people who like to steal things have banded together to come up with a T-shirt design that will shame all multinationals into simply cancelling their copy protection plans and releasing all of their music for free, ceasing to exist in the process. Some highlights:

Ohh, now I get it!

 

Quite a reasonable point.

 

I- no hang on, what?

 

Ahh. Right. Well, I think this is clear enough. DRM must be stopped to save the king of puppet-berets from pointing to the trolley of film reels.

The only thing I’m still not sure of is what would actually happen if you did cut the string in this diagram.

 

Whatever they’re paying the guy who came up with this, it’s not enough.

 

The gentleman’s protest.

 

When those suits see this, it’s gonna blow their minds. “That’s- that’s what we were! All along!”

 

I don’t get this one. Is the dove music, and he’s been locked up but can still fly somehow, or has the dove stolen the padlock of DRM from the olive tree of music and is now taking it to the trash out back?

 

Intellectual property regulation? Sir, I refer you to my cock.

 

As a satirical acrostic backronym, this only really fails by one letter.

 

This may actually be the best diagram ever drawn. I hadn’t realised before how many games and documents from space were simply bouncing off our atmosphere because of the Anti-DRM padlock. We should get rid of that thing. I don’t know why the Australians even built it.

 

Yeah! Let DRM out of the cage that is music! Music is killing DRM!

 

I hadn’t really thought about it before, but preventing me from copying music is a little like raping me.

 

I think we can all agree with whatever the hell this means.

 

See, because it’s like, DRM is the three-legged green-eyed Giraffe of Dismay, and the RIAA is the elderly man riding it, and that makes people with fans dance like John Travolta.

 

Yes. This is just like that.

 

And we all know how rubbish disabled people are.

 

Isn’t that just kind of annoying?

This Month In Awesome

1st: New PC Gamer Out

My contribution to this one was the Long Play on Darwinia, in which I essentially beg people to buy it. The weird thing is, it seems to be working. I still play Darwinia regularly and it remains my favourite strategy game of all time, and it genuinely hurt to find out hardly anyone bought it. I’m happy to discover that plenty of them just needed a bit of friendly cajoling from someone with strong feelings on the matter. It also feels surreal and wonderful to have an effect – it’s not good to get used to the idea of having your words in print, and realising that people actually read them and pay attention jars you out of that nicely.

I’ve had a chance to play the new Darwinia demo they’re working on – a level not seen in the game – and it’s incredible stuff. Doesn’t just blow the last demo out of the water, it’s actually one of my favourite levels ever. I’ll link it as soon as it’s finished and up properly.

3rd: Tim’s Birthday

This one’s in the past now, and it was great. I discovered Chicken Tikka Taka Tak, sang Dandy Warhols in some kind of demonic kareoke console game (I believe the game scathingly classified me as a ‘hopeful’. Jon Hicks, however, said only my “Woo ooh ooh”s needed work – my baritone lounge crooning was fine. Damn straight) , dehatted a Nintendog and swung another around the room on the end of a rope. It seems there may have been other people present too.

The Present

8th: The OC

Yeah, everyone is straight out of an advert for one thing or another, but Seth is wittier than some of the best Whedon characters, and the constant sunshine is oddly addictive. It’s melodrama, it’s trash, but it’s frequently very funny and prominently features astoundingly good music. I am genuinely looking forward to its return.

9th: Discs Finished

Sweet, sweet release. The monthly deadline gives this job a kind of rhythm that builds to a kind of wild panic right up until the envelope containing the masters leaves my hands. Then I suddenly lose thirty kilograms and go and have a Carrot Cake Milkshake. I’m actually going to miss that when I stop being a Disc Editor. The pains of being wholly responsible for a big, important thing do pay off when it’s finally over.

12th: City Of Villains Beta

Some months back now, I accumulated so much experience debt from repeatedly dying on my way through a high-level area between me and my mission that I realised it would be quicker to start a new character than continue with this one. Experience debt is a huge, hideous, gaping wound in the otherwise unbroken awesomeness of City Of Heroes, and I felt pretty okay about giving it up until someone told me they’ve halved it now. Issue Five just went live, and now I’m longing to get back in and see what else has changed. Unfortunately my account has expired, so I’m not sure if I should re-register so soon before getting to play what is in effect the sequel.

Anyway, the point is, I’m pretty excited about City Of Villains now. I’m not expecting it to be massively different to CoH, I’m just expecting it to work.

Sometime: Fahrenheit

I can’t imagine I’m going to like this as much as its reviewers have so far, but there’s no doubting its perfectly pitched atmosphere and tactile control tricks. I intend to enjoy it as pulp – a sort of scienceless CSI.

21st: Lost

Will we find out a damn thing about anything? Craig says he heard we will, but it seems almost too much to ask. My main hope from the new series is that The Others will regain the sinisterness they had when all we knew of them was the super-human, super-unsettling Ethan. The last glimpse we had of them was too ordinary – we need to find out something namelessly horrifying about them to make them scary again.

I’m also hoping for more on the response to Boone’s call for help just before he tumbled off that cliff. If you haven’t listened to it carefully yet, do so now. It is interesting stuff.

23rd: Winter Assault

Dawn Of War was great. This will have new stuff. It will be great. END PREVIEW.

23rd: Fable

People keep telling me I’ll find this interesting, so I will play it. The voice-acting seriously risks ruining it for me, though – I found it unbearable in Black And White, and from what I’ve heard it’s the same mockingly insincere stuff here. In other respects, too, it looks a bit like a child’s drawing of an RPG rather than one made by RPG lovers. I don’t mind some streamlining, but it looks like it’s lost all the character of an RPG, leaving everything generic and placeholderish. I haven’t played it for even a second, so this is just scepticism.

Various Times: Other Birthdays

Mark, Ross and Beast all have birthdays (apparently on the same day) this month, as do at least two friends from outside of work and my gran. Literally fifty percent of everyone I know was born in September.

28th: My Birthday

I might like to go up in a balloon. Seems like a birthdayish thing to do. I also like the idea of silent flight. Engine noises ruin travel for me.

30th: Kieron‘s Birthday

I am quietly hoping to just do whatever other people are doing for this, instead of doing something sociable with lovely Gamer people for my birthday (short of working with them, if I go to work). You’re kind of responsible for people’s enjoyment if they’re out because of you, and that’s the kind of pressure for which mere Disc Editing cannot prepare you. I’d feel better if I wasn’t the main event, more of a niche side-show.

30th: Serenity

The spectacular finalé to what is sure to be the best September ever. If you haven’t seen Firefly, see this. If you have, you’re already going to see this. If you’ve already seen it through ‘connections’, I hate your face.

This Just In: The Scout Is A Dick

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

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

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

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

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

This Just In: Frogs Aren’t Morons

I forgot to tell the entire world about this when I discovered it a while ago. If you put a frog in tepid water and then, very slowly, heat it up – the frog gets the fuck out. If he could talk, he’d be like, “What the fuck, asshole? I was hanging out there! Why the fuck have you got to be such a goddamn dick all the time? Jesus.” Then he’d hop off to hang out with someone who wasn’t an asshole.

Dear people trying to make a point about things changing slowly: I don’t doubt the humans you’re talking to are morons. I don’t doubt you could boil them. But don’t bring frogs into it, you need a lid to cook those motherfuckers.

PS: It is true that Cane Toads ate Australia. They’re sorry about that, but it’s kind of our fault for flying them out there and Australia’s fault for being so delicious.

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.

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.

This Is My Winter Morning Ritual

This Is All I Can Think During StarCraft 2’s Cut Scenes

Things Round Here Have Changed

Actually They Haven’t

But I’m tinkering with a redesign for this site that will likely go live in the next week. I like what I’ve got so far, but every time I look at it I half-glimpse something much, much better, and I’m trying to work out what to change to make it into that. In the meantime, and in the spirit of preparing for a New Year’s reboot, I’m posting things I’ve been meaning to post for ages. From the TV show Carpoolers:

I’m actually not wild about it as a sitcom, but there’s something brilliantly infectious about the radio singalong scenes. See also the ad.

Things I Forgot To Talk About Round-Up

“Ahh, paradox resolved. Someone get a mop.”

Futurama: Bender’s Big Score: if you’ve seen Score and felt that it’s a little heavy on the fan-service – hi. I’m one of those fans it was servicing, and it did it very well. I didn’t need that much Leeloo, and the songs were needless and clumsy, but other than that it was joyous.

I’m the sort of fan who gets an enormous kick out of the new theme tune, the triumph of bureaucracy, the explanation for how Gore lost the election, the obsessive retconning of the pilot episode’s pivotal moment, the cyclic timeline mathematics and the titular payoff at the very end. Speaking of the theme tune, have you heard the 1967 original? It’s surprisingly awesome.

 

“Are you free?”
“You have no idea.”

Dexter Season Finale: the only thing wrong with this season of Dexter (apart from the unaccountable soap-opera interlude that was Rita’s mother) is a certain character lapsing into a hideous crazy-stalker stereotype. But the finale got so much mileage out of the mess this created that I can almost forgive it. The scene with three people and a large black bag was almost unbearable to watch. More spoilerific discussion should probably go in the original comments thread.

But yes, fantastic. The leadup to this over the last handful of episodes is the best Dexter has ever been, and Dexter is itself near-perfect television.

 

“Let’s see if the best bed in Kaer Morhen can hold us!”

The Witcher: broken sexist porno that’s coming up in a lot of game-of-the-year lists, and got huge review scores everywhere but with us. You play a badly scarred grey-haired old man in leather trousers, to whom a procession of identically-shaped redheads surrender themselves sexually after three lines of astonishingly bad dialogue. Post-deed, you are awarded an achievement souvenir card showing the girl naked, just in case you didn’t already feel like a pathetic mysognist.

Somehow it’s even more wretched than the despicable Leisure Suit Larry games – the last of which revolved around date rape. The fact that Larry’s love interests even needed to be date-raped before they’d sleep with the idiot hero automatically makes them stronger characters than the Witcher’s.

It’s not that I can’t imagine what people see in the Witcher – I haven’t played it through, maybe it gets amazing after four hours of insufferable dross. I’m just appalled at what they can ignore. The huge script cutbacks before release have been achieved by simply deleting swathes of lines, so conversations are riddled with bizarre, glaring holes that not just make for abysmal fiction, but in many cases render events truly incomprehensible.

 

“Laurent ran guns for the resistance.”
“Which resistance?”
“He won’t say – apparently they didn’t win.”

Ratatouille: I hate to be down on such a sweet film, but I’m so tired of that nervous kid cliché and the angry boss who’s supposed to be funny because he’s short. Brad Bird has uncharacteristically little to add to those grating, ancient stereotypes, and the central conceit is just surreal.

The premise is a rat who can cook, and a kitchen boy who cannot, but the film has no workable idea for how the two can collaborate. It ends up inventing a physiological mechanic so utterly nonsensical that it’s downright creepy to watch.

The rat and dough physics modelling is fantastic, and it made me laugh perhaps twice, but it’s so far from the spark of The Incredibles.

 

“I’m looking for some alien toilet to park my bricks, who’s first?”

Duke Nukem Forever Trailer: after ten years of development, the first movie of the incarnation that’s actually likely to be released has come out. It features no dialogue until, at the end, protagonist Nukem stands up and says, essentially, “I want to shit on you.”

I am at a loss.

Things I Can Safely Tell You About The Cabin In The Woods Before You See It

• You should see it as soon as conveniently possible. It’s the best film I’ve seen in years.
• Don’t read reviews. I’ve read a bunch that pointlessly pre-empt some fun stuff.
• If you haven’t seen the trailer, don’t.
• If you have seen the trailer, don’t worry. The apparent twist it shows is also made clear right from the start of the film, it’s not much of a spoiler.
• Bradley Whitford (Josh from the West Wing) doing Whedonesque dialogue is something that should have happened sooner.
• I still really like Fran Kranz (Toph from Dollhouse).
• Seriously, it’s almost perfect.

Continued

Thief: Deadly Shadows Development Quotes

I love these – files developers make of things said during development, taken out of context. This one, via Randy Smith, is for Thief: Deadly Shadows, and I’ll paste my favourites below. Continued