X Button: Kill!

Lulz Security and the pursuit of lulz

2011-06-15T06:44:00.000-07:00

So, for those of you that missed it, yesterday was Titanic Takeover Tuesday, brought to you by the hacker group Lulz Security.

Now before I go any further, I’ll go on record to say that I don’t agree with what LulzSec are doing. I prefer to get my lulz via other means. At the same time, I’m not a /b/tard, or anyone with a particular grudge against LulzSec.

At the weekend, the group announced that they had hacked the Bethesda servers, pilfering the user data of some 200,000 Brink players. They also hacked into the US Senate website.

During the course of Titanic Takeover Tuesday, they launched coordinate DDoS attacks on The Escapist website, the Eve Online login servers, the site of IT security company Fin Fisher , and the login servers for both Minecraft and League of Legends.

Cue much wailing and gnashing of teeth from irate gamers and, doubtlessly, many lulz for LulzSec.

I should say that I am possibly one of the people whose details were hacked from the Bethesda servers as I regrettably purchased Brink. I have a Minecraft account, have played Eve Online, and regularly read The Escapist.

So I must be pretty pissed off right now, right? Nope, not really.

Don’t get me wrong; at first I was jelly. But when I thought about it, I realised I didn’t really have any business being angry.

For a start, the whole thing reeks of double standards. I was one of the people cheering on AnonOps when they were hacking websites in the wake of the arrest of Julian Assange, and applying pressure to those who would seek to deny Wikileaks funding. I even deleted my PayPal account in protest.

But it’s a bit fucking hypocritical of me to support AnonOps simply because they choose ‘right on’ targets, and then get annoyed when LulzSec do the exact same thing to a target I care about. It’s that classic ‘It’s fine as long as it doesn’t affect me’ attitude, and it’s not right.

This attitude was evident on various gamer web forums where people were one minute gloating at Eve Online being taken offline, then later crying because they couldn’t play League of Legends. I felt like reaching through the interwebs and bashing some heads together.

It’s a tangible atmosphere present even in the professional media, with outlets who were previously silent on the AnonOps hacks being up in arms about LulzSec messing with the PBS site, and I can’t stomach that kind of hypocrisy.

Even then, that’s only when the media chooses to report accurately. Ars Technica had me under the impression that LulzSec were going to release the Brink user info if Bethesda didn’t give out more details on the upcoming Elder Scrolls: Skyrim and also add top hats to the game. When I actually got the chance to read the statement from the group, the tone was light-hearted, and not very threatening. The top hats suggestion was added almost as a funny afterthought. Not quite the blackmail that Ars Technica had implied.

There also appears to be general misunderstanding about what motivation LulzSec have. Reading some forum posts on the topic yesterday, it was clear that the poster were divided between those who thought LulzSec were terrorists (yes, terrorists) and those who thought of them as being some sort of collective freelance security operation.

They are neither, as best I can see.

The posters claiming they were terrorists reasoned that since they had the pron.com user database, they could use this info to sow fear and blackmail the individuals contained therein. I would suggest that, given the abundance of free pronography on the internet, it could be considered a bit foolish to wilfully add your details to a huge database of pron users. Especially if one was in a position whereby the revelation of such ‘hobbies’ would be harmful. But then I have a thing for individual responsibility.

Nor are they hugely interested in their target’s security. Sure they may have advised Bethesda to ‘fix their junk’, but, if we use the burglar analogy, that’s like a burglar kicking in your back door, drinking all the lemonade in your fridge, sniffing your dirty laundry, taking a dump on the kitchen table before leaving a note that says ‘Your back door is broken.’.

So why do they do it?

Really: It’s for the lulz.

It’s not that knocking down a particular website is entertaining in itself. But when the myriad users of that site then take to Twitter to castigate LulzSec, lulz are had. When it is revealed that Lulzsec have stolen user details and people take to newsgroups and web forums to register how angry or fearful they are, lulz are had. When the Senate website is hacked and the FBI are called in, lulz are had.

Taking pleasure in the misfortune of others is a timeless concept, and LulzSec represent schadenfreude in the digital age.

Their activities are arguably criminal and I wouldn’t be hugely surprised if some arrests came from it, but I’m also certain that LulzSec are doing their best to avoid this outcome and hide their tracks, with seven proxies and the like.

As for me, you and Joe Average, there’s not a hell of a lot we can do about it. Evidently general web security isn’t as sophisticated as it should be and these attacks will no doubt serve as part of a catalyst of change.

Until the proverbial hatches can be battened down, all we can do is keep an extensive list of alternative passwords. Think of it as background radiation or environmental change, something you just have to put up with.

Oh, and try and have some lulz along the way.

Crunch Time - Do we need ethical game development? I think so.

2011-06-01T08:47:00.000-07:00

Last week, an article about 'crunch time' appeared on the Ars Technica website, about the problem of crunch time in game development and it got me thinking.

For the unitiated, crunch time is the period in a games development cycle where the developers have to shift their working patterns into the highest gear in order to ship a game on time. The worst of these are 85-hour working weeks that can last for months, but the practice of operating at a 60-hour working week for periods of up to a year is becoming increasingly common.

There are two reasons for why this happens. Firstly, when a game is set to release on a particular date, delays hurt profits. Well, that's the theory anyway. In this age of pre-orders and easy internet patching, ensuring that the game is released on time is of paramount importance to studios and their bean counters. Secondly, and somewhat more cynically, working studio employees harder and therefore shortening the development cycle means less money spent employing full teams of staff per project and a higher bottom line.

Most gamers will be familiar with the EA_spouse essay from 2004. In this letter, Erin Hoffman, then fiancee of EA developer Leander Hasty, highlighted the horrendous labour practices that developers at EA were subjected to. Read the letter. It's a hugely depressing tale of 12 hour days and 7 day working weeks. There was huge attention drawn to this issue at the time and it led to some law suits and some changes to the industry at large. All good right?

Not really. Following the release of Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar were criticised for using excessive crunch time. Mike Capps, president of Epic Games, made comments suggesting that his studio wouldn't employ anyone who wasn't willing to work 60 hours a week. It would seem little has changed. Indeed, if industry insiders are to be believed, the practice has got worse.

There are obvious drawbacks to crunch time. There is a tangible human cost. Individuals who are working an 85 hour week (12 hours a day, 7 days a week) are paying a toll with their physical, mental and emotional health. Working those kinds of hours leave no time for anything short of eating and sleeping. No kids birthdays, no Sunday lunch with the family, no hungover Saturday mornings in bed with the other half. In short - no opportunity to do anything that makes life worth living.

As well as that, it destroys people creatively. The standard 40-hour working week has been shown to generate more employee productivity over an extended period than an increase in hours. The more hours an employee has to work, the less productive they become. And in an industry that relies heavily on creative people being productive, heck, needs creativity to survive, treating game developers in this way is nonsensical. To paraphrase the Ars Technica article, do you think that Clint Eastwood would be directing movies aged 80 if he was expected to work twelve hours a day?

Erin Hoffman aka EA_Spouse

It is also worth noting I'm not talking about a team of developers throwing their weight behind an unplanned game feature that they have to rush to finish before the game launches because, to quote Tenacious D, that's fucking teamwork. I'm talking about treating people like machines.

One could point out obvious comparisons between games developers and, say, junior doctors who work a similarly punishing schedule. Why should it be any different for games developers? I'm not saying it should, I'm saying that asking an individual to work 80+ hours a week isn't desirable in any profession, but at least there is a possibility of making changes to how the industry operates.

You see, as consumers, we endorse this system. Every single time a studio employs ridiculous crunch time practices, only to see the game in question make millions, we are sending a message. We are saying "Hey, it's ok! Run these men and women into the ground. Show no regard for their wellbeing or that of their families. Just make sure you get that game out in time so I can claim my pre-order bonus. I don't give a fuck about the people who made this product, and I will prove as much by giving you my money." Don't get me wrong; I'm not claiming the moral high ground here. I have bought crunch time games, and because the practice is becoming more pervasive, I will probably do so in future. It also doesn't help that we often don't find out about these tings until well after the game is released, so it is impossible to make an informed choice on release day.

Either way, it makes me feel fucking shit doing so and I would like it to stop.

Personally, I would like to see studios sign up to a voluntary code that ensures their developers are not subjected to unreasonable and damaging crunch time, and that they are properly remunerated for those periods when overtime is unavoidable. Similar to the Fair Trade mark which idenifies genuine fair trade products, a stamp could be awarded to those studios who can prove that their games are ethically produced. It would not only provide reassurance to the consumer, it would also identify those studios whose labour practices are in tune with what we expect from a decent society.

I was recently interviewed for the Culture NI website on whether games can be considered art. It occurs to me that this issue has relevance here.

How can we ever elevate games into an art form if we allow their creators to be treated with such contempt?

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Goodbye Guitar Hero! And Fuck You Activision!

2011-02-11T08:24:00.000-08:00

Yesterday brought the sad news that Activision Blizzard have decided to axe their music-game business areas.

What that means is buh-bye to Guitar Hero, DJ Hero, and True Crime: Hong Kong, as well as around 500 Activision Blizzard employees losing their jobs.

First and foremost, it sucks to see people losing their jobs. Sadly there is no shortage of developers out of work at the minute thanks to the ongoing financial fuckup and a significant number of studios going tits up in the past year.

I never played DJ Hero. I didn't aspire to be a DJ when I was young and I reckon I can get the same effect from listening to a single earphone, while saying 'fikka fikka' in a high-pitched voice and pretending to scratch a record.

Also, the one True Crime game I did play was a mess of a game that tried, and failed, to compete with the Grand Theft Auto series in the glory days of the PS2.
In short: I’m not hugely disappointed that we won’t be seeing any further DJ Hero or True Crime titles, though their cancellation is symptomatic of a sickness that has already infected one major studio, and may begin to pop up in others.

The first time I heard about Guitar Hero, my reaction, I’m sure, was the same as many other people’s: Why the fuck would anyone willingly be seen in public with a small plastic guitar strapped to them? It struck me as the kind of thing Lennie Small might do if left unattended in the Early Learning Centre.

But then, one drunken night, I found myself gazing blearily at a friend’s TV screen, trying to mash buttons in time with Sum 41’s Fat Lip and it occurred to me then that ‘HOLY FUCKING SHIT, THIS IS THE BEST THING THAT HAS EVER BEEN INVENTED EVER!’

The following Friday, I took a trip into town and returned to my house with a plastic guitar and a copy of Guitar Hero. I tried to coax my flatmate Fil into having a go on it. I explained the principle behind it:

‘Look, it’s simple. Just press the coloured buttons as directed on screen, at the same time as hitting the strum bar and that’s basically it.’
‘Errrr…I dunno, seems a bit…stupid’
‘Oh, go on. Look, it’s got ‘Ziggy Stardust’ on it. You like that.’
‘Oh alright, but just a quick go, I have things to do.’

Next thing I know, it’s Monday morning. I’m drunk, probably sacked, I’ve spent all my money on booze, there aren’t any cigarettes left in the world because we’ve smoked them all, Fil and I haven’t left the house in two days and there are people whom I’ve never met before arguing over who gets the next go and whether the song choice should be ‘Symphony of Destruction’ or ‘Bark At The Moon’.

That was the beauty of Guitar Hero. It could bring people together under the mighty banner of rock and get them fucking smashed in the process. In the weeks that followed, our hand eye co-ordination skills improved while our livers took the beating of their lives. People actually started coming into our fusty, damp living room of their own free will! It was a magical time, and the release of Guitar Hero 2 and the purchase of a second guitar gave us the gift of rock competition. In our heads it was like Jimi Hendrix and Eddie Van Halen having a shred-off, only WE got to be Eddie Van Halen!

And then what happened? Two things. One, the people behind the development of Guitar Hero, Harmonix, were purchased by MTV Networks to work on a new IP known as Rock Band. The second event was that the manufacturers of the game peripherals, Red Octane, was bought by Activison, who also retained the Guitar Hero brand.

And this is where things went wrong.

Alternative caption for this pic: 'So be it, Jedi'

Activision Blizzard, under the helm of Bobby Kotick (read: the gamers Antichrist), are a force for pure evil. If there was ever a Galactic Empire of the gaming world, it is Activision Blizzard, and Bobby Kotick is a mixture of Emperor Palpatine, Darth Vader and Jar Jar fucking Binks, poured into a lumpen, shareholder-friendly container.

Kotick has talked in his past about the desire to take the fun out of making games, and his aim to exploit Activision franchises for the maximum bottom-line. And from what we’ve seen from Guitar Hero, that second ambition is very true.

Now, as the head of a public company, that Kotick only feels a responsibility to his shareholders is both understandable and nothing new. He only desires to maximize the profit generated by Activision Blizzard’s titles, which keeps the Activision Blizzard stock prices high, and gets him pats on the head from the shareholder. The sad part about this is that, in doing so, he systematically dismantles and destroys his franchises in order to wring as much money out of them as possible before discarding them, and in doing so, devalues the positive memories and experiences that his companies’ games have offered.

Let’s look how this happened with Guitar Hero.

Guitar Hero 3, admittedly, wasn’t bad. It was pretty much complete by the point Red Octane was acquired by Activision. It retained the core gameplay from the previous Guitar Hero games, added online multiplayer, introduced a narrative story mode and had a decent track listing. But even then, it had started to feel stale. Bear in mind that Guitar Hero 3 released in the same year (NA, 2007) as Rock Band, a game which allowed you to play guitar, drums or do the vocals on a range of tracks. In short: Rock Band was Guitar Hero, but more.

It was after this point we began to see the Activision conveyor-belt game development system in action. In case you aren’t aware, this means putting out a game from a particular franchise once a year. The problem with doing this is that a) it provides fuck-all time for a studio to make any major innovation between two titles of the same IP, b) gamers get fatigued, as the lines between one game and another blur, and finally c) it pisses gamers off, as it is generally accepted that such a short turn-around time reflects a shitty, churned-out product.

Therefore, the fourth game, Guitar Hero: World Tour, released in North America almost exactly one year later in 2008. And what was new this time round? They had added support for drums and vocals! And only a year after their main competitor Rock Band had done so. La-dee-fucking-da!

What other ‘innovations’ did World Tour offer? The introduction of a Beginner/Retard difficulty level, where the player simply had chew on the end of the guitar controller and say ‘Duuuuuuur’ and the game would say ‘Good job! You rock!’. It removed the need to actually unlock songs, so there wasn’t really a difficulty curve as such, apart from that imposed by the player. And it also had a loveable feature whereby it would require the player to play notes that didn’t actually exist in the song, and to remain silent for notes that did. Maybe this game should have been called Guitar Idiot?

2008 also saw the first Guitar Hero expansion (read: desperate attempt to squeeze as much money from the fans with as little effort as possible) dedicated to a specific band, namely Guitar Hero: Aerosmith. Not a bad effort, if you’re a fan of Aerosmith, but it highlighted an issue that would blight subsequent band-focused expansions; a large percentage of the songs in the game weren’t actually by Aerosmith. If you look at the track listing, you’ll see The Clash, Blue Oyster Cult and others. You see, due to licensing, many Aerosmith songs weren’t available, so they had to fill out this release with other guff. To be fair, this wasn’t as pressing an issue with subsequent expansions, but it gives an indication of the level of thought going into the Guitar Hero franchise at this point. 2009 saw the release of Guitar Hero: Metallica, Guitar Hero: Van Halen, and Guitar Hero: Smash Hits (a cynical collection of tracks from earlier GH games, not an expansion based on the now-defunct pop magazine). That’s right. Three separate expansions released in a single year, of which one was decent, one was shite in a jewel case, and one was a rehash. 2009 also saw the release of…

Guitar Hero 5 is memorable mainly for the legal wrangling to get Kurt Cobain as a playable character in the game. To this day, I don’t understand why Activision didn’t just take a shit on his grave? As much as I loved Guitar Hero, I’m fairly certain Cobain wouldn’t have endorsed a game produced by a multinational corporation where the player can rock out to ‘In My Place’ by Coldplay, so defecating on his final resting place would have been a much more effective way of giving his memory the finger. But then again, without regular injections of Botox and engine oil, Courtney Love just grinds to a halt, and that shit is expensive, yo. Guitar Hero 5 also saw the reintroduction of unlocked tracks, but by this stage to difficulty curve was so shallow, you could just put the guitar on the ground and stamp on it to proceed.

Finally, in 2010, came Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock. When Rock Band 3 released in 2010, it added a new instrument in the form of a keyboard as well as a new feature in the shape of a ‘Pro’ mode, which had the potential to actually teach the player how to play guitar. When Warriors of Rock launched, it added Gene Simmons.

Yes, Gene Simmons, a man built from money and self-importance, voiced the game’s antagonist, the Beast. I say ‘voiced’, but it was more like ‘stumbled over the words like a child learning to read’. The game also devoted a significant section of the ‘Quest’ mode to 2112, Rush’s seven-part prog-rock wankfest. Aside from that, there was nothing new. It was the previous year’s game with new songs and venues and some other cosmetic changes, but that was it.

It was at this point it became clear that Activision had given up on trying to do anything even remotely interesting with the Guitar Hero series and this last shot was just a test to see if fans would continue to vomit money on the latest peripherals. The answer to that question was no. Warriors of Rock performed poorly, both amongst critics and players. The critics didn’t like the lack of innovation, felt that many of the songs didn’t fit the feel of the game and that it was, overall, boring. With poor sales, it would seem that gamers concurred.

For most other studios, if one of their major franchise titles performed so poorly, they would hold back, rework the game, try something new with it and if it didn’t float, bin it/put it on hiatus. Not so with Activision and Guitar Hero. The second that the franchise ceases to be profitable, or requires reworking to become profitable again, they ditch it. Fuck the people who spent years making it, fuck the people who spent their money making it successful, just ditch it and move on to the next thing.

In terms of pure numbers, between Activision acquiring the Guitar Hero series and their announcement yesterday, they released eight (EIGHT!!!!) Guitar Hero titles. That is eight titles in the space of just under four years, and I’m not counting special Wii/DS or mobile releases.

And you can see the same thing happening with Activision’s Call of Duty franchise.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare was developed by Infinity Ward and published by Activision in 2007 to huge critical acclaim.

Call of Duty: World at War was released in 2008. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 arrived in 2009. Call of Duty: Black Ops was released in 2010, and Modern Warfare 3 is expected to release this year. And yet the best of those games listed is the first, with subsequent releases becoming more derivative, and attracting less favourable criticism, with nothing approaching innovation included.

Such is the level of ‘all eggs in one basket’ currently being employed at Activision, they currently have five separate development teams working on various elements of the Call of Duty franchise. Other than Blizzard’s titles (WoW, Starcraft, Diablo), the only AAA Activision has left is Call of Duty.

And all it will take is for another multi-platform, innovative FPS to take a bite out of CoD’s market share and then maybe we’ll see Activision’s share prices take a nose dive, hopefully with Bobby Kotick removed from the games industry and a message firmly sent that you can’t run a long-term successful videogame company on a minimum investment/maximum profit basis.

Or, more likely, Bobby Kotick will just find another burgeoning franchise to exploit and run into the ground.

Movies, Games and Videos

2010-12-16T08:30:00.000-08:00

Heeeeeeeey! What up peeps? Long time no see, huh? Yeah, I had things to do! You're not my mum! Unless you are, in which case: Hi Mummy! Can I have a glass of chocolate milk?

Now, with that out of the way, let me tell you what has been happening in the exciting life of Mr. Kill. I've been working and playing video games and rolling deep with my homies and drinking (chocolate milk for me, and also chocolate milk for my homies).

I've been seduced by World of Warcraft again thanks to Cataclysm which is, sadly, fucking awesome. But more on that at another time.

Did you know that a Warcraft movie is in production, huh? I bet you're as excited about it as I am. Because I'm not. Ha! Videogame movies uniformly don't work, for a myriad of reasons that I'm not going to go into here because a) it's fucking boring and, b) I didn't want to do that much research.

What I would like to do, however, is have a look at some examples of this genre of movie and make snarky comments about them which distracts from the fact I am deeply insecure about my own sense of creativity and position in life. DOES THAT SOUND GOOD? NO? THEN LET'S GO!

Super Mario Bros. (1993)

Oh dear. The first major motion picture to be based on a video game, Super Mario Bros. stands as a testament to the enduring ability of videogame movies to be crap. I would have loved to have been at the pitch meeting for that movie.

'So we wanna make a movie based on that videogame, Super Mario Brothers.'
'Super Mario Brothers? Hmmmm, I dunno. How would that work?'
'Well, we looked at all the imagery in the game, and the themes, and the idea that even the most unlikely of people could become a hero...'
'Yeah?'
'And we decided to ignore all that and make it about a race of futuristic human dinosaurs'
'FUCKING FUTURISTIC HUMAN DINOSAURS? Why didn't you say so? Where do I sign?!'

The flaws in this film are too numerous to mention, but I'll point out a few:

A lot of the movie is Dennis Hopper chewing scenery and wondering where his career went. Also, what is with the bleach blonde hair ridges? He looks like Annie Lennox.

There's some form of mechanical boot contraptions, which Bob Hoskins secures from a dinosaur transsexual. They allow him to bounce around for no good reason other than to fit in the 'Look! Mario is jumping like he does in the games' factor.

John Legui...Legoo...John Legozammo plays Luigi. Not that he's a bad actor, as such, it's just that the movie contrives to set up Luigi in a romantic entanglement. Now to be fair, it would have been a trifle odd to see Bob Hoskins putting his tongue in Samantha Mathis' mouth, but I feel the filmmakers overlooked one crucial aspect of the Mario universe, namely: Luigi is a filthy, dirty man and he is kept in a basement and he never gets anything good because he deserves to be treated badly.

Street Fighter (1994)

Oh Street Fighter. Street Fighter, Street Fighter, Street Fighter.

Where to begin? Let's start with the cast. Trying to recreate the roster of characters from the game was always going to be a tough call, but instead of focusing on two or three central characters, the producers opted for an ensemble cast and shoehorned in every character they possibly could. An ensemble cast works beautifully when you have A-list actors involved, but if you look at the cast of Street Fighter, it's like a who's who of who the fuck are you.

Also, Cammy features prominently. Fucking Cammy.

The plot of Street Fighter 2 was genius. A bunch of men and women with abilities bordering on magical fly around the globe, meet in a variety of locations and kick the shit out of each other. Hence the Street part and the Fighter part of the title. Genius in it's simplicity and throrough in its exploration of man's need to travel and punch.

Not so for Street Fighter, the movie. At this stage, I was going to point out some of the crappy elements of the plot, and decided to check out the wikipedia page of the film to refresh my knowledge. After reading the page, it occurs to me that the plot doesn't make a lick of fucking sense. Not one. Seriously.

The film begins in the fictional nation of Shadaloo, where a drug lord turned General named M. Bison (the M is for Marianne) has taken hostage a number of members of the Allied Nations, which in no way bears any resemblance to the United Nations. It's also refreshing to see that career opportunities are plentiful in Shadaloo. If you tire of your chosen job path as a drug lord, you can look to the military for a career.

Now this M. Bison cat is threatening to kill the hostages if the Allied Nations commander, William F. Guile, doesn't secure a $20 billion dollar ransom. Incidentally, the 'F' stands for Fanny. Bison asserts that if the hostages are executed, the world will blame Guile. Two things here: Firstly, M. Bison couldn't have been much of a drug lord if he needs to extort money from the international community. What was he dealing? Aspirin? Secondly, I hate to break it to ya Bison, but if you kill a bunch of hostages, people are probably going to blame YOU for it, not some other bloke.

Meanwhile, Ken and Ryu are fighting some dude and then another dude is a dude who dudes a dude. I can't even try and poke fun at the plot anymore, it's depressing me too much. It just does not...make sense. Seriously, check out the wikipedia page. I could cry.

Also, the fighting in it is shit. Which is a problem when a film called Street Fighter features a poor selection of both streets and fights.

The only saving grace is Raul Julia, who plays M. Bison. He also played Gomez Addams. No doubt he knew that the role and film were trash, but he was too professional to give it anything less than his best shot. Sadly, Street Fighter was Raul Julia's last film. What a note to end on :S

Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001)

This is one of the better ones of the bunch, but it's still not very good. It's like shitting your pants just as you are leaving the house. Sure, the damage and embarrassment are limited, but you've still just shit in your pants.

Lara Croft is played by professional tits-on-a-stick Angelina Jolie, who effects an awkward English accent throughout. That is, of course, whenever her gigantic lips aren't flapping about in the breeze.

The film opens with Lara Croft in some sort of temple, trying to secure a diamond when she is attacked by a big robot. Luckily, Lara manages to rip out the robot's motivational circuits and it gets all depressed and just wants to lie in bed all day. She secures the diamond and it transpires that the whole sequence took place in a specialized training room inside her mansion.

Oh yes, in case you didn't know, Lara Croft is a toff. It would have been much more humourous had this film been called Lara Croft: Toff Raider, and featured Angelina Jolie riding around with a pack of beagles, wondering aloud where one can find a reliable silversmith these days and thoroughly misunderstanding the plight of the working class. But I digress.

The plot is the usual sort of non-offensive adventuring and derring-do (incidentally, what the fuck does 'derring-do' actually mean?) that makes it acceptable family viewing and centers around the usual 'messages from a disappeared father leading our heroine to a variety of exotic locations and implausible action set-pieces' scenario with an ending that's as utterly predictable as it is setting up a sequel. It's also worth pointing out that, until the release of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (which I won't mention here because I haven't seen it), Lara Croft: Tomb Raider was the highest grossing film based on a videogame of all time.

It also features Daniel Craig. You know, James Bond with the wee swimming pants.

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001)

I'm not going to dwell too long on this film. This is a weird one, this is. As much as a 'look at how fucking realistic we can make shit look, bitches' demonstration as it is a film, this movie suffers again from the rambling, incoherent plot disease that infects so many videogame movies. However, in this case it's not unexpected as it's related to JRPG's, which themselves are not known for having the most coherent of plots.

No shitting, but it is pretty. It was on TV again some weeks ago, and even after all this time it looks impressive.

The story features a future Earth which has been overrun by Phantoms, aliens which kill on touch. A scientist called Aki is trying to collect 8 spirit signatures, like some sort of ghostly petitioner, which will rid Earth of these aliens. At its heart, it's the common theme of touchy-feely understanding of spirituality versus man-made violence and destruction. And, unfortunately, the touchy-feely part wins.

Come on, I can't have been the only one who watched Avatar and wanted to see the Na'vi get their asses kicked? That dude with the grey hair and the scars was one cool-ass motherfucker. PEW-PEW! 'Your flying birds are no match for my tactical missiles, budgie boy!' BOOM! 'Your creepy hair tentacles won't protect you from a sniper's bullet, you gangly blue bastard!'

'Ha, ha! Stop crying, you fools! It's just a tree!'

Sigh.

Resident Evil (2002)

Last one on my list. I've seen others but writing about how terrible games are as movies hurts my very soul.

I saw this one in a cinema in Paris with French dialogue and English subtitles. Even watching Milla Hohohovitch running around saying 'Sacre bleu, le zombies!' couldn't really improve it.

The opening sequence, with a whole bunch of office workers being wiped out by a malevolent AI and a grisly sequence in an elevator, is unfair. Unfair because it's pretty awesome, and makes the remainder of the film pants by comparison.

The director Paul W. S. Anderson, who directed the brilliant and terrifying Event Horizon, eschewed any of the subtlety or creeping sense of dread present in the games in favour of a heavy metal soundtrack and guns. Lots of guns.

It features Milla Hohohovitch, also known as MultiPass weirdo from The Fifth Element, as Alice and Michelle Rodriguez as a mean-faced hardass with an indistinct sexual preference. So pretty much Michelle Rodriguez playing herself, then.

If you are familiar with the games, the film involves zombies and other nasties and I won't bore you with the details. All I would say is that the special effects aren't great. The zombies often look like the zombies from Michael Jackson's Thriller video, and there is a scene later on involving a CGI creature called The Licker (which, now I think about it, sounds like a ladies sex toy) and the damn thing looks like it was made on a Commodore 64.

There have been a number of sequels to Resident Evil, which have apparently been much better, but I don't care and you can't make me.

Honourable mention: The Wizard (1989)

This is one of the few films I can think of that, while not based on a specific videogame, features videogames heavily and didn't shit all over a game franchise that I loved.

It features a young boy called Jimmy who has been suffering from an unknown mental condition since the death of his twin sister. Jimmy doesn't really speak, is obsessive and always carries his lunch box. Not because he's a fat fucker, though.

Jimmy's mother and his step-father are very understanding of his needs and put him in an institution.

But luckily his older brother, played by Fred Savage, comes along and busts him out in order to take him to California. Point of interest, I always thought that Savage was a made-up name, it's like being called Mr. Beast. But then I met a guy with the name Savage, so now I know it's real.

They go across country and it transpires that Jimmy is a genius at videogames. Some skank they pick up along the way nicknames him 'The Wizard' (you see?) and suggests entering him into a gaming tournament called Video Armageddon, where he could win $50,000. Don't worry, easily frightened people, the world doesn't actually end, there isn't really an Armageddon.

They also meet a pretty dude who has a 'Power Glove' and makes a lot of fists. The homoerotic subtext is mindblowing.

In the end, Jimmy wins the contest, evades a runaway-child hunter (read: paedo), and stops acting like a retard.

It's a beautiful film. And it's pretty much a 100-minute long ad for Nintendo.

Nuclear war has never been so much fun

2010-10-28T08:23:00.000-07:00

Ok, so again it has been a whole since my last post but there are three main reasons for that: Halo: Reach multiplayer, Dragon Age: Origins and Fallout: New Vegas.

On the first, the multiplayer on Halo: Reach is awesome fun. On release, the Sniper and SWAT game modes were included in the Team Slayer playlist, but thankfully a recent patch has rectified that so now the retards can run around shouting 'Herp derp I killed that Halo with a haedshot' in their own games and leave the rest of us decent people in peace. Add to that the future removal of the rank cap and a new map pack coming at the end of November, and it looks like Halo: Reach will be around for a long time to come.

As for the second, I picked up Dragon Age: Origins on a whim and I don't regret it. I was thinking about doing a few retrospective reviews on games that people might have missed and DA: O would make an excellent study. A friend asked me what it was like and the answer was that it was like 'Oblivion meets Knights of the Old Republic meets Baldur's Gate meets World of Warcraft with a pseudo D&D ruleset and a small helping of bestiality'. So, all in all, it's very good, and also soaked in gore. Yummy.

The last, and most recent, reason is Fallout: New Vegas, which was an unexpected gift from my other half.

I must confess I never played the first two Fallout games. I was never a huge fan of the isometric perspective, and somehow the games passed me by.

I loved Fallout 3 however.

The sheer wealth of options and playstyles made it, quite simply, a very sound investment. In a time where it feels like single player campaigns almost feel like an afterthought to the multiplayer aspect (yes, that means you, COD), a game that you can get engrossed in for hours and marvel at the depth of character and story created by the developers seems more and more like a rarity. Therefore, £30 on Fallout 3 in return for hundreds of hours of gaming meant that picking up the sequel was a no-brainer.

And thanks to my lovely, lovely lady, I got it the day after release.

I'm not that far into it, only about ten hours but so far, it's like seeing your father in a dress.

By that, I mean you know it's your father, it's familiar, but a lot has changed. I am the motherfucking king of analogies.

The story so far (and I have only played about 12 hours of the game) is so so. You play a courier who has something stolen from him and been left for dead, and you set out on a mission to find the men who did it and recover your property.

Combat has been refined, you can now aim down the sights of whatever firearm you are carrying, which blurs the line between RPG and FPS even further. VATS is still around but it doesn't have the 'must use or die' quality that it had in Fallout 3.

As well as being able to build weapons, they have added a feature to allow you to create new ammo or convert existing ammo into another type. Of course this is all dependent on your chosen skills, but it saves you from the somewhat ironic position I found myself in with Fallout 3 where it was possible to build a weapon and then spend ages trying to scrape together enough ammo to actually put it to meaningful use.

In a move reminiscent of The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, Bethesda have added various plants around the game world which can be collected and, when cominbined with the Survival skill, used to create rad-free foods, boosters and trading commodities. Personally, I find this addition a bit...meh. Unless you decide to max out Survival as a major character trait, you'll have little spare points to put into the skill, meaning a lot of the things that can be crafted will pass you by. And the items available from investing heavily in Survival just aren't enough to justify diverting points away from other skills.

Also added are various factions that you can win or lose confidence with. This has been implemented extremely well, as the relationships you can develop are quite complex. For example, near the start of the game I wiped out an entire camp of bandits and became villified by their faction, meaning they would attack me on sight. Much later on, I inadvertantly rescued two of their members and now I am known to them as a Kind Thug. They hate me and refuse to trade with me, but they won't kill me.

The game world is huge, and you will constantly be discovering new things. The game is also packed with humour, depravity and pop culture references, all the hallmarks of a Fallout game. So far I have picked up references to Blade Runner, Robocop and Anchorman, as well as seen children eating a rat and had a mad man tell me he was taught magic by a mole.

The game is far from perfect though.

If you have read any of the mainstream reviews of Fallout: New Vegas, you will have read about the bugs. I played on the PC version on the day after release, by which stage a patch had already been released that should be coming to the consoles soon. Apparently this fixed many of the issues, but I have had repeated crashes and texture pop-in. Minor but annoying.

A less minor, but kind of funny, bug I encountered was in the middle of talking to a character about a quest, he shouted 'What the hell?' and ran out of the room, through a wall and out of the game world. Which meant that I had to fast travel to another town, reboot the game, and return to the NPC to carry on with the game.

If you do pick this up, SAVE OFTEN.

One other gripe of mine is the map and compass. It remains unchanged from the previous game. Meaning that if there is an enemy nearby, a red blip will show up on your compass. If the enemy is above or below you, there is no indication of its elevation, meaning you can wander around an area looking for an enemy who is two floors above you. Also, the local map is woefully inadequate. It looks poor, doesn't reflect an accurate picture of your surroundings and frequently get's confused. It really isn't acceptable.

All in all, Fallout: New Vegas is an excellent game. It is clear Bethesda had some pretty ambitious ideas, and for the most part, the meet their aims. In pure terms of value for money, I've already got my next two playthroughs planned.

For the next playthrough, I intend to create an avatar that looks exactly like my other half, dress her in a summer dress, make her specialise in energy weapons and play it through as evil as I can possibly be.

After that, a melee-weapon-using bruiser with a heart of gold.

Mojave, mo' problems. Stay classy New Vegas.

Why It's Awesome Being Me

2010-09-30T10:50:00.000-07:00

Right, well, the title of this entry might be a bit misleading. Sure, you might be thinking ‘What makes you so fucking awesome, Mr. Kill?’ and I assure you, there isn’t enough storage on the internet for me to properly answer that particular question, but what I really meant to explain is: Why it’s awesome being a gamer.

But before I get into that, I must apologise for the lack of new posts recently. You can blame Halo: Reach multiplayer. I find myself in a strange situation, namely somewhat addicted to a game I’m shit at. I plan to review the multiplayer elements of Halo: Reach at some point in the future, because it does have its flaws, but maybe not anytime immediately soon. I don’t know. Shut up.

There’s also been tons of gaming news recently that I should mention: Sony showing that they still hate their customers, a release date for the 3DS, positive reviews for the Sony Move system, a HD re-release of cult classic Beyond Good and Evil, and a whole bunch more.

Anyways, on to the task at hand. Now, if you are a gamer, you probably already know what I’m talking about. Most of us stride throughout the land, towering over lesser mortals, reacting to things with the reflexive speed of a Jedi on Ecstasy, giggling at jokes about George Lucas, while pirate wenches and zombies fall at our feet (the former from hysterical lust, the latter from a well-placed headshot).

But it has occurs to me that not all of our digitally-inclined brethren are aware of just why it’s awesome being a gamer, so I’m gonna point out a few things.

We are never, ever bored
It’s true. While other people may wake up on a Sunday with a hangover, lazily watch T4 for four hours and then catch the Eastenders omnibus before getting a Bargain Bucket from KFC in their pyjamas, finishing the day off by wanking themselves into oblivion and then crying themselves to sleep, this isn’t true of the gamer. Bored? Fire up a game of Fallout 3 and play it as an evil lady who only kills with a pistol while wearing a summer dress. Or boot up your favourite online shooter and belch down the microphone while repeatedly killing your team mates with grenades until you get permabanned from the server. Great fun, and before you know it, it’s time for bed. Obviously, I can’t guarantee you won’t still wank yourself into oblivion and cry yourself to sleep, but at least you didn’t have to watch Big Mo’s bulldog face banging on about her haemorrhoids for two hours. Maybe I should take that back. The actress that plays Big Mo is Gary Oldman’s sister, and that cat is Sirius Black and I wouldn’t want him to Jinx my Bubotuber. Maybe I would, it sounds sexy.

We are the first point of call for tech stuff
Generally speaking, if the non-techy people in your life have a problem with their printer/laptop/calculator, they will come to you. Why? Because identifying yourself as a gamer is equivalent to identifying yourself as knowledgeable in tech. It’s great when it comes to earning points with your work colleagues. Sure you never get invited to the park for an office kick around on account of your wheezing and deathly pale complexion, and you aren’t included in the office football sweepstakes because you can’t tell your Sheffield Tuesday from your Charlton Automatic, but when Dean, the beef-cake in Accounts who everyone thinks is cheating on his wife with the intern in IT can’t sync his Blackberry with his mail server, you can charge in like a polygonal white knight and save the day. And next time Dean is popping out for a fag, he’ll offer you one, but you’ll have to say no because you had polio as a child and using your lungs too much makes your heart sore.

Small talk is a doddle
Personally, when I meet someone for the first time, I tend to ignore them. This will continue for some time. It’s not because I am an ignorant fucker…well, I am an ignorant fucker…but that isn’t responsible for my reticence. No, I just feel awkward making small talk when sober. When I’m drunk, I’ll be all up in the new persons grille, blowing smoke and breathing Buckfast fumes on them and touching them in a slightly inappropriate manner, but sober, I’m mildly sweaty and quiet. Unless said new person expresses even the slightest interest in games and then I’ll be all like ‘NO WAI!’ and we can talk for ages. To ensure this tactic has the widest spread possible, it’s best to play as many different types of games on as many different systems as possible. That way you can converse on everything from the best builds to take on 4-1 in Demons’ Souls, to the most effective way to ‘catch ‘em all’ in Pokemon on the DS. Also, it pays to familiarise yourself with the likes of PES and Fifa. That way, if you ever find yourself surrounded by manly men who like to talk about fighting on buses and playing sport in the fresh air, you can pose this question: Which is better, Fifa or PES? You’ll immediately be one of the gang and the men will buy you beer and fight people for you.

You’ll have improved spatial awareness and reflexes
It has been shown in scientific studies, by scientists, that people who regularly play certain types of videogames have higher levels of spatial awareness and quicker reflexes than non-gamers. This is only half true for me. Sure, my reflexes are like a cobras. At all times I am coiled and ready to go off, like a bomb or a carton of milk that’s been left out. No seriously, give me plenty of notice, and a lot distance, and call my name and then throw something gently toward me and 45% of the time, I’ll catch it. That’s what 20 odd years of gaming will do, make you a fucking catching supremo. However, as for spatial awareness, maybe not so good. I can’t reverse around a corner without hitting the kerb and I still manage to piss all over the floor when I pee, even if I’m sitting down, but I figure one out of two ain’t bad, like that Meatloaf song.

You are at the cutting edge of media
In post-WWII America, kids were flocking to cinemas to watch movies like the Wolfman, or Boris Karloff sucking. It was a new form of media, an art form refined far beyond what was initially thought possible. It was a great time to be alive, apart from all the socially-acceptable racism and threat of atomic kitten war. And who would have been raised on these sorts of films? I’ll tell ya, people like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas and shit. Now, despite the fact that Stevo has daddy issues and George Lucas would stamp ‘Star Wars’ on dog shit and try to sell it, these guys were partially responsible for revolutionising cinema and have made some truly awesome movies. Now, imagine the generation of kids who are being raised on games like Call of Duty, or Mass Effect, and one can’t help but look at the future and smile.

Finally, a riddle

How many bears would Bear Grylls grill if Bear Grylls could grill bears?

Reach Around: My first one and a half hours with Halo: Reach

2010-09-13T14:38:00.000-07:00

So, ya, I ordered Halo: Reach when I bought my 360. On Saturday I had an email from Amazon saying delivery would be delayed, and today I came home from work to find it awaiting me amongst an envelope from the Reader's Digest (apparently I have won £100, 000 in a draw I don't remember entering) and associated other shite from local businesses.

Awe-fucking-some.

I've played the first hour and a half, maybe, and figured it might be a good idea to give you a grasp of the initial stages and my first impressions.

Before I loaded up my first game, there was a message for the beta testers explaining that, as it is ahead of release date, some features aren't working, mainly multiplayer. Not that I'm bovvered, it'll take me a week or so to get my head around multiplayer and I just wanted to talk about a few things that had struck me during play.

Modern Warfare, you have a lot to answer for

Seriously though.

The influence that games like Modern Warfare exert is particularly telling in Halo: Reach.

From the outset it is clear that Halo is a half-step outside the Halo formula we have come to know and love and that is definitely no bad thing.

For a start, Halo: Reach is darker. I hate to use that term, but it is the only one that fits. In it's own way, Halo: Reach is much more military shooter, somewhat less sci-fi shooter, and benefits considerably from it. If you've come to depend on the bright colours and vibrant environments familiar to the Halo franchise, you may have to adjust a bit. Sure, the plasma grenades are still neon blue, the Jackals carry Mardi-Gras shields but there is definitely a more understated, realistic palette put to use here. It could divide Halo purists but I, for one, love it. The counterpoint of gritty rifle fire, explosions and hot pink Needler rounds is excellent. There is so much more of a sense of humans fighting against a thoroughly alien foe.

A further addition is your squad. You can pick up rank and file marines to join your fire team as you go along, but the story is driven by other members of Noble team, and so far their characterisations are very good. I'll need to play more to determine whether the player will connect with them, but so far I am pleased.

Towards the beginning of the game you are warned by a colleague that your 'lone wolf act' won't work on Reach. Heed these words carefully. The beautiful one-man-army gameplay of Halo, running into a crowd of Covenant flinging grenades and spamming melee attacks, is here in all it's glory but you must pick your battles carefully and make more precise use of tactics if you wish to succeed.

And with good reason, as the enemies I've encountered so far have learnt some new tricks. The Grunts are a lot more grenade happy and also much more keen on the plasma kamikaze attacks. The Elites are...well...fast. Seriously. Whilst the roll mechanic was something new in Halo 2, they clearly learnt from these guys. Not only are they rolling, but they are jumping, dodging your gunfire and generally being a wee bit sneakier.

I must also mention the equipment you can now select for your character. One of the features of Halo 3 was the ability to get a single use out of various pieces of equipment, bubble shields etc. The same principle returns in Halo: Reach, only this time the player can use these items repeatedly, dependent on a cooldown. So far I have encountered Sprint (bog standard sprint ability) and one that makes you invincible for a few moments and can allow your shield to regen whilst fully immobilizing you. These are great wee additions and I can't wait to find more and also see how they play out in multiplayer.

There are some negatives so far.

Back when Halo released, it was at the cutting edge of graphics. Not so much the case here. Don't get me wrong; they are great and very sharp. It's just they aren't mind-blowing. I also noticed some drops in framerate when there was a lot going on, which is a particular pet peeve of mine which I hope doesn't carry over into multiplayer.

Also, as with Halo: ODST, the ability to dual wield is gone. I'm personally not fussed, never used it much, but that may annoy fans of the system.

In all, Halo: Reach is great. I cannot wait to see how the story pans out and I'm itching to have another bash at it. I had a browse through the multiplayer menus and that, and there appears to be a HUGE amount of unlockables, as well as a dearth of new game modes.

From this early taster, it would seem that Halo: Reach is the perfect game to end the Halo franchise and I sincerely hope I am proved correct.

Shit the bed, Andrew Telford got free toffee bon-bons at work today.

2010-09-10T08:20:00.000-07:00

NEWS JUST IN: Oil magnate and convicted sex offender, Andrew Telford, today announced that he had received free toffee bon-bons from his place of work. Many world leaders have yet to comment on these developments but Pope Benedict has described the situation as 'fucking mental'.

If you wish to congratulate Andrew, you can do so through his facebook page.

More to follow on this exciting story.

Bytes: What's keeping you up?

2010-09-09T12:30:00.000-07:00

Right, yeah, so this is my first blog post in a little while. Sorry.

Ha, I’m not really sorry. I recently became the proud owner of an Xbox 360 Slim and have spent a lot of time playing Halo 3 online and no time writing about games.

So far, mightily impressed and looking forward to Halo: Reach. I know that's pretty behind the curve, but fuck it, I only play what I pay for, so it's all new to me.

Xbox Live is a lot more robust than my experiences with the PlayStation Network. Also, it doesn’t require frequent mandatory, non-background updates to maintain its online functionality, so that’s a novel experience for someone more used to the PSN. Of course, I’m paying for the privilege, so to the long-pondered question of who has the best online service between Sony and Microsoft, the answer is they are both wankers.

So I’m a little bit out of the loop when it comes to all the latest gaming newses.

Here are a few things worth reporting on:-

Duke Nukem Forever is coming in 2011: One of the most anticipated games of all time, and one which has been in development for pretty much a decade, Gearbox Software have recently announced that they will finish (?) and release the oft-delayed and twice-unofficially-cancelled Duke Nukem Forever at some point in 2011. I was a little too young for Duke Nukem 3D, so I haven’t thrashed myself into a spunking frenzy the way some gamers appear to have, not least Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford. For someone who was just a bit too young at the time, the reason why Duke Nukem appears to have been so popular is due to the boobies and scatological humour of the earlier games. I like boobies and poo-poo-fart jokes as much as the next child, but the internet is full of boobies and poop and we might be a bit numb to it, and whilst you could view Duke Nukem Forever as a kind of satirical humour, games like GTA IV have shown us that video games can handle satire in a more restrained, sophisticated manner.

Also, seeing boobies and farty bum words in games is no longer uncommon.

Another factor in my ambivalence is that it has been ten years. TEN FUCKING YEARS!! Even if Duke Nukem Forever is released in 2011, to live up to expectations, the game will literally need to be the Second Coming of a Jesus Christ that is capable of turning into a jet to fly you to the nearest ATM to get money out of your bottomless bank account before flying you to your private tropical island where Elton John and Rihanna are performing a cover of Lady Gaga’s ‘Poker Face’, backed by the Allman Brothers Band.

Sony Fights Back Against Jailbreaking: To the lasting surprise of no-one, this week Sony released a mandatory security update designed to counter the piece of software going around the intertubes that allows users to jailbreak their PS3s. I’m sure that this security fix will prove to be a lasting barrier against this form of piracy. HAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAH!

Look, Mr. Sony, if you don’t want people to resort to these types of measures to mod their PS3s, then here is a hint: STOP REMOVING FEATURES, ASSHATS! First it was backwards-compatibility, then Linux. Fuck knows what’s next. Maybe support for removable memory and old SingStar mics. You’d better not though, or I’ll get mighty pissed when I can’t holler ‘The Greatest Love of All’ into an unhearing machine at 3:00am and then save it to a memory stick which I then mail to my mother. Love me, Mummy, LOVE ME!

Lots More Hype About Reach and Black-Ops: Both Bungie and Treyarch are in overdrive mode with hyping their big releases, Halo: Reach and Call of Duty: Black Ops respectively. There's no doubt that Black Ops is going to be the bigger seller of the pair, but Halo: Reach is a formidable opponent. Treyarch took over as the main developers of the Call of Duty series after an acrimonious split between original creators/developers Infinity Ward and publisher/overlord Activision. There is huge demand on them to produce something perfect, and if Black Ops isn't up to snuff, a better-reviewed Halo: Reach will only exaggerate its flaws.

What I really wanted to talk about was food. But maybe not just food. I dunno. Gamers sustenance maybe?

You know, if you are sitting down to a long session, what do you need within easy reach at all times? The foods/drinks/whatever that gets you through to the end? What works well and what doesn't?

My needs are simple.

I need some sugary drinks. Preferably energy drinks: Red Bull, Relentless, a litre of Tescos Kick is good and reasonably priced. If I can't get that, then just something fizzy. Or water. Fuck it, I don't know. I just need something to drink.

I need my smokes. You might be one of those healthy people, good for you, you'll live like an extra ten years. Years you'll spend crapping your pants and wondering why no-one comes to visit at Christmas, but hey, ten years is ten years. I, however, am a filthy smoker. So I need my smokes. Marlboro Red please. And cigarettes are controller friendly too! Easy to dual wield. Also, I read in one of my sisters books that smoking makes you look cheap and men will think you're easy, which is fine by me.

I don't eat much when I game. There's rules to eating though, and it all depends how dirty you are. I can't stand grease on my console controllers yet my mouse is grimey like...er...Dizzee Rascal. So, for me, it means no greasy crisps, no chips, nothing like that. Dry food only. Like a dog with an upset stomach.

One wonder food that fits the bill perfectly is hotdogs. They are easy-to-make, require little technical know how and can safely and easily be eaten while gaming. No grease on them, wooo!

Here's my favourite recipe for hotdogs:

1) Buy some hotdogs and buns.

2) Cook hotdogs according to instructions on packet.

3) Place hotdogs in buns.

4) Eat hotdogs.

My lovely other half has astutely pointed out another one. Sweeties, preferably gummy things. Haribo or Wine Gums or some such shit. I had a great blast on the Halo 3 campaign the other day with just a can of shandy and a packet of Fruit Pastilles. Epic times were had.

[EDIT] Something has gone fucked up with the formatting on this page. Dunno what. Oh well.

Some Like It Hard

2010-08-20T07:01:00.000-07:00

You might not have heard of Demon’s Souls before and I would understand if you hadn’t. Released in Japan in early 2009 and the US in late 2009, it quickly gained a cult following and was heavily imported into Europe until a European version was released on June 25 2010.

Demon’s Souls is a fantasy action-RPG set in a Medieval European-esque world called Boleteria and the player is tasked with slaying a variety of demons in order to buy equipment, improve stats etc. So far, so familiar.

Aside from some fairly innovative online content (one example is that players can leave notes on the ground for other players to warn them of dangers ahead), one of the most reported upon aspects of the game is its difficulty.

Demon’s Souls takes an old school approach to gaming where you learn through trial and error and, ultimately, repeated deaths. And it is unforgiving in this approach, removing such staples as mid-level save points and the ability to pause the game. If you sit down to play, you are going to complete an entire section and you are not going to move until it is done.

This approach flies in the face of what modern gamers have come to expect, and Demon’s Souls makes no apologies for it. Indeed, the challenge appears to be what has endeared it to gamers, with many reviewers commenting on the satisfaction one feels when one completes a particularly tricky level.

Difficulty in computer games is a delicate thing. Sure you can make a fiendishly hard game, but if it isn’t well designed, it will be an exercise in frustration. There are a few games I have switched off in anger because the difficulty was too great and success seemed to be based purely on luck, or other arbitrary factors.

One example that comes loosely to mind is a level in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, where you have to get to and then protect the ‘Warpig’ tank. On the harder difficulties, I would die repeatedly, sometimes at the start of the section, at times towards the end. I tried a variety of different approaches and still couldn’t manage it. When I finally did complete the section, it was with a method I had tried a few times and luck seemed to be the main factor in my success. This, in my opinion, was poor design. A well designed level should encompass both player ability AND a measure of luck, something which Demon’s Souls seemingly hits perfectly.

Which got me thinking on some of the hardest games that have been released, in terms of both good and bad design.

Mike Tyson’s Punchout

Before he developed a taste for human ears and sexual assault (though not necessarily in that order), Mike had his name attached to a NES boxing game called Punch Out. Punch Out wasn’t horrendously difficult; in fact its difficulty was moderate and the game was fun. Up until you came to the last boss, Mr Tyson himself. The fighters you had met previously could not prepare you for the Biter from the Bronx. He had these very oddly timed uppercuts that could knock you out in one hit, plus a bucket load of health making him very difficult to down. These factors made defeating Tyson nearly impossible. However, with hours of practice, it was doable. So, while being the first (but not last) game where the final boss is jarringly difficult compared to what came before, I’m going to mark this one down as well designed, only extremely difficult. Also, the quote below is attributed to Mr. Tyson, and its awesomeness is enough to balance out any complaints:

"One morning I woke up and found my favorite pigeon, Julius, had died. I was devastated and was gonna use his crate as my stickball bat to honor him. I left the crate on my stoop and went in to get something and I returned to see the sanitation man put the crate into the crusher. I rushed him and caught him flush on the temple with a titanic right hand. He was out cold, convulsing on the floor like an infantile retard."

Bayou Billy

I never played Bayou Billy, and I’m glad I didn’t because it looks fucking shit. A prime example of difficulty by bad design, Bayou Billy’s controls were apparently as fluid as a swimming pool filled with glass, the levels were overlong and the enemies had as much health as you did. Check out this video. Look at those fuckers! They don’t stop getting up. Stay down, you Australian bastards! The bayou is in Australia, right? Yeah, course it is. Not only that, but after watching the intro, I wonder what Godfather Gordon wanted with Annabelle? With that moustache, I think we can safely assume he has no sexual interest in her. Later on, the game branched out and featured driving sections that were even more overlong and difficult that the side-scrolling stuff. Sounds fucking A. Really. The one positive that stands out from that video is the soundtrack. It’s funky!! It’s funky like George Clinton took a dump on a sound chip. That’s the soundtrack to my life and it’s playing in my head ALL THE TIME.

Super Monkey Ball

A more recent release, Monkey Ball likely deserves to be recognised as a rather difficult game.

Let’s start off by saying that the title of the game is misleading. First of all, the monkey has nothing to do with it, other than being inside the ball. So the game should be called Super Ball. But there is nothing particularly ‘super’ about the ball. So the game should be called Ball. But then, when you play it, you realise that you don’t actually move the ball with the controller, you move the level.

So the game should really be called Level.

With that out of the way, the reason this is on the list is that due to the physics, various collectables and obstacles, the task of staying on the level in Level is quite a challenge. Furthermore the difficulty increases with the player. The levels can be stressful, and that stress only serves to make the game harder, with the player needing absolute focus and care to complete some of the later stages. It is telling that many players never graduated beyond the easy levels due to the ‘easy’ levels being very difficult.

Not my friends though. They stayed in at weekends and made Level their bitch.

Ninja Gaiden

True story: A guy in an old guild of mine in World of Warcraft thought this game was called Ninja Garden. Ninja Garden sounds like a fucking amazing game. I’d love to grow my own organic ninjas.

Ninja Gaiden was a revolutionary game and also its place on a list such as this is considered controversial by some.

It was revolutionary in that it introduced cutscenes and narrative to drive the gameplay, a cornerstone of modern gaming as well as sharp, extremely responsive controls.

Controversial because it was possible to beat the game by memorising routines.

Either way, the boss fights in Ninja Gaiden were very tough, with the player often dying upwards of 20 times in order to beat them. And if you died during the boss fight, you would be ported right back to the beginning of the level to try again. As well, environmental challenges were ever present, with the jumps and leaps becoming larger and more complex as the levels progressed. However, it was possible to beat this game simply by playing it a lot and memorising level patterns and boss sequences, even if it took you many nights alone in your bedroom.

Ninja Gaiden sequels have followed and they have remained notable for their difficulty, but few games can bring gamers out in a cold sweat the way the original can.

Battletoads

Another one that I haven’t played unfortunately, and considered by many to be the hardest game produced in 20 years.

Right, so there are these toads that fight evil, the Battletoads. What? They hit and punch evil, that’s how. Amphibian? I dunno, they spray themselves with water or something. It isn’t explicitly stated. Shut up, that’s not the point.

A standard 2D beat ‘em up affair, it also featured horrifically excessive obstacle course sections, an example of which is here. You would need to have the reflexes of a Jedi Mr. Miyagi catching a fly with chopsticks made from a single strand of human hair in order to successfully navigate these shitters.

Throw into the mix an underwater section (which should have been pretty easy because, let’s face it, you’re a fucking toad), a climbing section plus only three continues and no saves, and you have yourself a game that is harder than Gandalf’s staff.

The reprieve Battletoads gets is because of its co-op play, during which friendly fire cannot be turned off. So if your little brother accidentally killed you, you could at least vent some frustration by smashing his face off with your controller.

The interesting observation here is that it is difficult to source more recent games that would be on par in terms of difficulty with the likes of Battletoads etc. Whilst many old fart gamers would point to this as being a sign of modern games being made for idiots, this isn’t entirely true. Most of the above games would have seen an arcade release before being released onto home consoles. The onus was on ensuring customers would keep pumping their change into the machine to get their name on the high score board. If the player could complete the game on only 25 cents it wasn’t fulfilling its purpose. The only way of ensuring this was to make the games a lot more difficult than they need to be nowadays. I, for one, am glad, because I’m fucking shit at video games.

So, yeah, that was a fun stroll down Difficulty Lane. If you’ve got anything to add, please do so in the comments. I’ve overlooked a bunch of games, Contra, Ghosts and Goblins, blah blah but then I don’t get paid for this shit, I do it out of the goodness of my black, dead heart.

In other news, Xbuttonkill will hopefully be moving to a new, hosted site in the next month or so, so keep your eyes open. There is now also an xbuttonkill twitter feed, so feel free to follow me like a rapist on a dark night.

Google and Verizon: The end of net neutrality?

2010-08-16T07:08:00.000-07:00

If you look at any of what I lovingly refer to as the geek press, (Ars Technica, Wired etc.), you'll see a lot of chatter involving Google, the American telco Verizon and the words 'net neutrality'.

You might have heard the term before, but if you haven't, it's a fairly simple concept.

The internet was designed to accommodate the 'end-to-end' principle, which basically states that control of the internet is in the hands of the users and that all traffic on the internet is treated equally. Upholding this rule has become known as 'net neutrality', and it has been one of the guiding principles of the internet for as long as it has existed.

This principle was considered acceptable throughout the early days of the internet, when the traffic it carried was of a fairly low volume and websites were relatively simple affairs. However, as the internet became a major contributor to both economic growth and content-holder revenue, certain parties, ISPs in particular, began to resent the concept of net neutrality as a self-imposed rule that diminished their potential to generate money.

For the past decade, a storm has been fomenting as ISPs jealously watch developers and content holders/collators such as Youtube, Facebook, and Skype make millions from operations which require internet access in order to be viable.

What many ISPs would like to do is bring an end to net neutrality, and wring more money out of users and content managers alike. The rough idea would be similar to a paid TV service.

Think of Sky. You can pay for a basic Sky package which gets you the standard channels, but if you want to watch movies or sports, you pay a premium.

Similarly, you could reasonably expect ISPs to charge extra for music streaming (Spotify), VoIP (Skype) and other things such as downloading large files, or online gaming.

This proposal is coming to a head. In 2007, Americas largest ISP, Comcast blocked the BitTorrent file transfer protocol. This was challenged by the Federal Communications Commission, with the then FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin saying '...the order was meant to set a precedent that Internet providers, and indeed all communications companies, could not prevent customers from using their networks the way they see fit unless there is a good reason.'

Unfortunately, this ruling was challenged and overturned in court with the judge finding that the FCC had no legal basis on which to punish ISPs for trying to limit network neutrality. As a result, the FCC has found itself unable to properly mediate in matters of net neutrality and large corporations have simply began devising their own rules. The FCC could form a sound legal basis for its authority, but it faces a lot of pressure from ISPs and wealthy lobbying groups to allow telcos to act unimpeded.

The latest event in this saga is last weeks announcement of a 'traffic prioritisation agreement' between Google and another of the US' largest ISPs, Verizon. On the surface, the proprsed agreement doesn't seem like a piece of pure evil. However, whilst conceding that net neutrality principles should remain in place for wired networks, excluded from these proposals are 'differentiated or additional services'. What exactly 'differentiated or additional services' means, I don't know and your guess is as good as mine, but from the vague detail given, it could refer to anything that that an ISP wants. Also, the proposal specifically excludes wireless services, and given that more commentators consider wireless internet service to become commonplace in future, it doesn't paint a pretty picture.

Most disturbing of all, Google and Verizon have called for advisory groups led by telcos to write the rules of the internet in the future. When it comes down to matters of consumer protection and internet traffic management, the FCC would be subject to approval from the very companies it is meant to oversee.

It's easy to see why this is attractive to companies. ISPs would be able to charge users and content providers with access to internet 'fast lanes' and a company as large as Google could easily pay millions to ensure their content is delivered faster. Using Google to carry out a web search would deliver fast results, but if you wanted to use the less well funded, and sometimes better, Metacrawler, you would have to wait. And if you found out that your ISP was blocking BitTorrent, you could write a letter of complaint to the FCC or Ofcom, but they would be powerless to act.

Personally, it sickens me. And for a variety of reasons.

First of all, that Google have, if not reversed, then retraced their steps in relation to net neutrality is saddening. Oh yeah, Google, the 'nice guys' of the internet. We're cool! Look at our headquarters! We didn't change our minds on net neutrality because it allows us to prioritise our content over others! We did it 'in the spirit of compromise'! We were just trying to be fair!

Net neutrality is one of the last remaining pillars of an open internet, and it is crumbling.

Whilst originally intended to be a forum for sharing ideas and enhancing education, it wasn't long before people realised the internet was equally suited providing people with far more pornography than they would ever need and pictures of cats with cheezburgers.

Then the commercial possibilities were exploited and the internet became another route through which advertisers could force their shite down our throats, helped along by developments like Google Ads.

And now we get to the stage where ISPs, the middlemen of the internet, envious of the profits of others, intend to remove the enduring character of the web in order to pursue greater profits for their shareholders, and also eviscerate the power of those government agencies that would have oversight.

The ISPs, of course, are being disingenuous in regards to their desire to end net neutrality. If you ask them, they will say it is down to networks being congested and that operating a multi-tiered service will allow people who only need to browse the web slower, smaller bandwidth access with heavy users able to pay a premium for better, wider access. Of course, that's exactly how it works now only without a paid premium, with all users of the internet using the same tier and, you know what, it works pretty well.

We have bandwidth throttling in the UK, as well as download caps, and while I like neither, at least there is a technical reason for their existence that doesn't involve fucking the customer over for more money.

As simple analogy that I have read somewhere(?) that disproves the suggestion that the ISPs are doing this in the interests of their customers.

If you have a stretch of road that is constantly getting jammed with cars, you widen the lanes for everyone. You don't start letting people pay to drive over the top of everyone else.

Either way, I believe it is only a matter of time before we see the end of net neutrality and a paid-for, tiered-service will become standard.

Why?

Because this battle is being fought in America. Aside from Liberal or Conservative, the overriding ideology is that of corporatism. Big business holds all the cards and it calls all the shots. Politicians do not have the power or the bank balance needed to resist companies the size of Google or Verizon. Against this backdrop of economic crisis, ISPs have an avenue through which to pursue profits and that magic word 'growth'. The US government will not be able to deflect the opportunity for telecommunications growth for much longer, and capitalism abhors a financially exploitable vacuum.

And when it happens in the US, there will be no logical reason ISPs in the UK won't follow suit.

Gaymer-friendly Environments: Homophobia in online games

2010-08-04T05:08:00.000-07:00

If you've spent a significant amount of time playing online games, you'll have encountered it at least once.

And if you haven't, then this video will provide a good idea of what I'm talking about.

The video I have linked above relates to a specific game on a specific platform with homophobic comments coming exclusively from American gamers, but this is by no means unique. Personal experience playing Call of Duty on the PS3 has illustrated the fact that homophobic speech patterns are almost an accepted part of online gaming. I have never heard anyone dissenting over such remarks.

It can range from the fairly timid 'That's so gay' right the way through to the more vitriolic 'Fuck you, you fucking faggot.'

Whatever the words used, homophobia appears to be rife in the world of online gaming.

A survey carried out in 2007 made for some interesting reading:

88% of respondents said they had heard the phrase “that’s so gay” while 84% said they had heard ‘gay’ used in a derogatory fashion. Over 50% said they felt that games portray gay people in a stereotypical way, while 42% believe gays are under-represented in games. 15% said the industry creates a culture where gay employees “feel like they must stay in the closet”. 52% believed that the gaming community is hostile to gay and lesbian gamers. Only 9% said they “never” encounter anti-gay sentiments from online gamers.

The Gay And Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, as well as The Consumerist have both reported on the lack of recognition for LGBT gamers from the main console manufacturers. GLAAD, in fact, continues to work with both Sony and Microsoft in order to ensure their online policies do not discriminate against the LGBT community.

It's interesting to see just how wrong both Microsoft and Sony were originally getting it.

The Consumerist reported that, initially at least, Microsoft would ban anyone who had the word 'gay' in their Gamertag. They also included a letter from a gamer, identified only as Teresa, who was banned from the service for identifying herself as a lesbian in her profile. Furthermore, there was a mention of a player called Richard Gaywood being banned from the Xbox Live because, despite being part of his actual name, the word 'gay' was obviously so offensive that it couldn't appear in any context.

In response, Stephen Toulouse, in charge of policy and enforcement for Xbox Live, tweeted:

Expression of any sexual orientation (straight or gay or otherswise) is not allowed in gamertags. However we’ve heard from the user base they want that capability, so I am examining how we can provide it in a way that wont get misused. I can’t say any more at the moment, except to say I’m working right now in finding a way to safely express relationship preference.

Riiiiight, so I can see what you are trying to do here. I just don't think it works.

Basically, to prevent people from creating a Gamertag that says 'IH8GAYS' or some other equally puerile derivative, Microsoft has simply banned any expression of sexual preference from the Xbox Live service. Interesting. I wonder could they not have implemented a more specific policy that allowed someone to identify themselves as belonging to a particular sexual persuasion and still protect against plainly offensive Gamertags? You know, like they do with existing Gamertags. Try creating a profile called '1sh1tmypant5' on Xbox live and see how long it takes to get suspended. It won't take long.

Sony had a similar policy for player interactions during the beta for their Playstation Home service. Words such as 'gay' or 'lesbian' would be blanked out with asterixs and a message like 'I am gay' would come through as 'I am ***'.

Now, we are all familiar with the Internet Fuckwad rule, and it does seem that Microsoft and Sony have implemented these policies with the best of intentions, ie. to prevent harrassment and defamtion of LGBT players using their online services. But the methods used so far are akin to using a machete to cut your toenails. Instead of simply limiting harrassment, it makes these companies look as if they are behaving in a discriminatory manner.

For some reason, this topic always generates a lot of discussion amongst gamers. I remember a conversation on the World of Warcraft forums regarding a guild that had started up that only accepted LGBT gamers. There was widespread condemnation from other players, who argued that the admission policy was unfair and discriminated against non-LGBT gamers. Was this discrimination? Possibly. Was there anything inherently wrong with a LGBT-only guild? I don't think so.

Indeed, after the creator of the guild dismissed the criticism, players asked for an official 'blue' response and Blizzard basically stated that as they have no role in the creation of guilds, and as players are accepting of guilds that were 'Swedish-only' or 'English-speaking-only', there was no precedent for banning a guild that catered for specific sexual preferences. The question was posed as to what the response would be for a 'whites-only' guild. Again, Blizzard stated that there were no specific rules against it, but that they would expect such a guild to find life very difficult when it came to their reputation and dealing with other players. Ultimately it was a question of letting the community police itself, and in some ways, I can't help but think that it might have been a better route for Microsoft/Sony to follow.

During this whole debate, there were a number of players who questioned whether or not sexual identity had a place in online games. Something like the US military, they advocated for a 'don't ask, don't tell' approach. And there was me thinking that one of the positive aspects of online gaming was encountering people who came from different walks of life, had different political views, values, tastes etc. Apparently this is ok, but the small matter of sexuality wasn't included in this list and therefore inappropriate for discussion. My feelings on this line of thought can be summarized in a quote from a GLAAD report into homophobia in games: 'And with new technologies, come new challenges. LGBT people have fought hard for years to come out of real-world closets – we’re not willing to accept virtual ones.'

On a personal level, I actively try and avoid playing with people who use terms like 'faggot' to mock their opponents. My last guild in WoW, before I stopped playing, had strict rules on using this kind of abusive language. Similarly, alot of the servers I play FPS games on will also have strict rules on racism, homophobia, etc.

There is one area where I would be guilty, however. And that is use of the word 'gay', not as a direct insult, but often in a pejorative sense. This actually applies to day-to-day to life moreso than online gaming.

'That's so gay' is an utterance that you might hear from me on any number of occasions. Even in the examples mentioned above, where homophobic language was not tolerated, describing something as 'gay' wouldn't have fallen foul of the rules.

I can't speak for others, but personally, I have always divorced my meaning of the word from its association with homosexuality and with being jolly. For me it can mean both of those things, but also mean something that is just not very cool, or something that is great in a bad sort of way, like...er...Mean Girls.

And it seems that I'm not alone. Nine times out of ten, when I hear someone use that expression, they do so in the way I have described, not as a pure insult based on a certain sexuality.

It could be simply a case of evolution of language, or it could be me trying to justify my ignorance. Who can say for sure?

SoundBytes: Audio in videogames

2010-07-29T07:03:00.000-07:00

Now you might be asking yourself, 'Jake, is audio really that important and how do you get your hair so silky soft?'. The answer to that is 'Yes, and I wash it in unicorn blood. Take that, Harry Potter!'

When sizing up a modern computer game, the average person might look at gameplay or graphics as the features which add the most value. Rarely will a person even consider the role of audio in building a quality computer game, and audio continues to be an area that is overlooked by both developers and games critics, though this is a trend which is changing.

Loosely, three strands of audio can be identified: voice acting, music and sound effects.

Of the three, voice acting is the most recent development. In the good old days of the Amiga, Megadrive etc. voice acting was extremely limited. Limited in the sense that there really was none. The odd sample of audio dialogue might be found, but certainly not what could be termed voice acting. Due to processor and media storage constraints, any recorded voices were generally heavily sampled and of poor quality. One great example stands out in my head and that is the theme song from Cannon Fodder, the 1993 action/RTS game. Other games tended to treat the short samples of voice acting as sound effects and certainly not as a means of story exposition.

This started to change as the capacities of media storage increased, with games such as Perfect Dark or Resident Evil. By the time the Xbox and other DVD-based consoles came out, voice acting was considered a standard method of advancing the game plot.

Currently, you can find big oul' Hollywood stars providing voices for computer game characters. The likes of Martin Sheen, Ray Liotta and Jack Black have all provided their vocal talents for games, and that is just the tip of the iceberg. Indeed, voice acting appears to have gained legitimacy among screen actors. I'm sure the huge amounts of money paid to them have helped.

However, the quality of voice acting varies wildly. In the main, this is due to poor scripting. Often, character dialogue is written by games developers, not screenwriters, which means nuances and modes of speech which would be commonplace in a professionally written script are lost. And as any actor can tell you, acting is nothing without a good script. Even Heavy Rain, a game so story-driven that the dialogue is arguably the most important feature, suffered from some terribly stitled lines.

Of course, there is a flipside to this. Games like Mass Effect or the Grand Theft Auto series feature excellent writing and voice-acting and, as a result, draw you into the plot in a way other games can't. Other games developers seem to be learning from the producers of these games, and I am hoping that we will see a greater consistency in audio dialogue in coming years.

I'm going to go off on a bit of a tangent here and point out that I am deliberately discounting Japanese RPGs here. With Final Fantasy X through Final Fantasy XIII in mind, JRPGs are something of an anomaly. Generally, they feature excellent voice acting, with voices generally very appropriate for their characters. However, the actual scripting for dialogue is, by and large, horrendous. I think something is lost in translation. What might come across as an insightful and heartfelt comment in Japanese becomes hideously cheesy and cliched when translated to English. Final Fantasy XIII saccharine optimism, angst and naivety was enough at times to make me gag, but it is a staple of JRPGs and, as such, must be forgiven.

When it comes to examining music in video games, primarily two things have advanced the role of music in video; technology and budget.

We are now a far cry from the 3 channels of sound found on the Commodore 64. The PS3 offers 256 sound channels as well as Dolby 5.1 compatibility. Therefore, there is no reason why a modern game couldn't have the same level of sound quality as, say, a Hollywood movie.

Central to this process actually taking place involves a blurring of the lines between games and other media, and studios investing a greater part of their development budget into sound engineering.

Nowadays, it's not uncommon for games to be fully scored. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic on the Xbox is one example, with a full orchestra playing classical Star Wars themes and original music composed specifically for the game.

In a sense, this is what I am talking about in relation between blurring the lines between games and other media. Because the music is one of the most iconic things about Star Wars, it is essential for a Star Wars game to include the famous music in order to invoke the spirit of the films. This was especially true in older Star Wars games, such as on the Atari 2600, where the graphics quality was so poor that the developers had to use every trick in their arsenal to mark their product with the Star Wars license.

You will see this in other games. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare has little in the way of music during gameplay, but in the intros and cutscenes, there is a punchy, militaristic soundtrack that sounds like the theme tune to an Arnold Schwarzenegger film written by Tom Clancy that was directed by Michael Bay. To sum up, it fits the tone of the game perfectly and puts the gamer in exactly the right frame of mind.

A more recent offering, which also shows the power of music in setting a tone, is Red Dead Redemption. This gunslinging epic uses music to set tone, differentiate between physical locations in the game world and is truly evocative of the Old West. The end result directly contributes to the feeling that you are the lead character in a Sergio Leone film which goes to show how powerful carefully constructed audio landscapes can be in modern gaming.

Moving on to the role of sound effects in games, in some ways there isn't a lot to comment on. Sure, we've moved past generic gun sound effects being used across a dozen games to a point where a sound engineer will record 52 different types of footstep for a game. Gaming had easily caught up with films in terms of the quality and range of sounds used.

However, really effective sound design still, in my opinion, has some way to go.

I have two examples, which are by no means the only examples, but reflect the fact that sound design doesn't always get enough love.

One, the first Resident Evil game. Okay, so it had absolutely horrendous voice acting, but the sound design of the game was quite good for the time and definitely contributed to the sense of disquiet I felt the first time I played it. C'mon, the creaky doors every time the game loaded a new room, or how about that silent, deserted corridor that you are running along and then CRASH, helldogs everywhere! That was good gear for the 90s.

If we look to a more recent release, one title, for me, stands head and shoulders above the rest. That would be EAs survival-shooter, surprise hit Dead Space. As if the subject matter of the game wasn't troubling enough, the sound effects of the game were truly fear-inducing. Here you are, clanking around on a silent, dead ship. You hear a dull clang from somewhere deep inside, reminding you that things may be crawling around in some dark recess and then BAM! a screech of stretching metal and some hideous deformity comes cascading out of an overhead vent. The music picks up volume and all of a sudden, your heart is thumping and you're wishing it wasn't 11:30pm at night.

The opening sequence is a prime example of this. Quiet discussion amongst your shipmates on the loading dock of this deserted ship and then all hell breaks loose, sirens going off, steam vents hissing, glass breaking, leaving the player in a state of confusion and fear. It also uses a technique seen in movies, most recently in Sam Raimi's Drag Me To Hell, whereby the volume of the music and sound effects rises to such a level that it becomes oppressive, almost painful and you just want it to be over. When used in an interactive environment like Dead Space, it becomes a tool for generating despair. It sounds somewhat melodramatic to say it, but if you have played Dead Space with the volume up, you'll know exactly what I mean.

Even more impressive, when you finally get a handle on the creepy background noise and the overwhelming action sequences and start to adjust to the noise, the game goes an pulls the rug out from under you by introducing sequences where the player is put in the vacuum of space, and you can't hear anything. So the absence of sound means you can't hear that horrible mutation sneaking up behind you, and it achieves the exact same feelings of panic and fear as you did when there was too much noise. It is a masterstroke and it constantly plays with your expectations.

To wind this up, audio, particularly music and sound design, is a factor oft overlooked by gamers which is a pity seeing as it can make a good experience amazing. Game design, overall, is constantly improving, in all aspects, so I expect that we should see more games like the examples above, which I for one welcome as it makes the escapism of video gaming all the more complete.

A Blokes Guide to Games for Girls

2010-07-22T07:22:00.000-07:00

Ok, before I start, my other half has lovingly warned me that I could very well come across as a chauvinist Neanderthal with this post. I'd make a joke about 'Hur hur, so I told her to get me a sandwich' right about now, but she'll probably read this and murder me.

So as a disclaimer, I have no intention of coming across as a Victorian patriarch. If I do, just put it down to the fact I was raised by wolves and am extremely socially inept.

Traditionally, gaming has been a male hobby. When the first electronic computers were developed in the 1940s, the social circumstances of the time meant that these innovations were almost exclusively the domain of men. This continued through the 50s and 60s and, to a lesser extent, the 70s.

The 60s saw the first computer games being developed and the 70s shaped that work, defining elements common to gamers even today. The male bias of the programming world continued right throughout the 80s and 90s. Tell you what, boot up a game like Cannon Fodder or Super Mario Bros. and have a gander at the credits. I guarantee you that the vast majority, if not all, of the staff who worked on the game will be male. And even if there are women featuring on the credits, they would likely have worked in the areas of art design, localization or marketing, and probably not in programming or game design.

It's hardly surprising then that the iconic female characters from video games tend to be a digital representations of adolescent wank frenzies. A prime example would be Lara Croft, a character who, at least initially, was a pair of boobs, a set of lips, and a gun superglued onto a broom. This trend continues today with characters like Bayonetta and possibly Rubi Malone from WET. Shit, even Lulu from Final Fantasy X has a bit of a BDSM thing going on.

But that was then, this is now. A fairly recent study of gamers found that almost 40% of players were female which is a huge increase compared to 15 years ago.

So what changed?

A whole huge shit of things, that's what. The profileration of information technology and the expansion of the interwebs in the 90s meant that far more people, male and female, pursued a career in programming and application development. Therefore studios became more likely to have female developers in key positions meaning more females in a position to make design decisions for a game.

Market innovation helped as well. I assume Nintendo woke up one day and thought 'Hmmm, I wonder if there is a potential market out there that has been largely ignored by games developers?' and came to the conclusion that encouraging female gamers would be a profitable avenue to explore. And it has paid off dividends. Out of every ten games consoles bought by women, seven will be a Nintendo DS, two will be a Nintendo Wii and one will be either a PS3 or Xbox. Admittedly, much of the games designed for females on the Nintendo systems are designed for girls (My Dress-Up, Pony Trekking Bastards etc.) but it definitely reflects a changing attitude from publishers.

And of course there are the technological changes which I have mentioned in another post. Systems like the Wii and DS eschew traditional game control in favour of more instinctive methods of direction. Whilst I'm not trying to imply that women can't get their heads around the more complex control systems, the accessibility offered by the Wii and DS is surely one of the reason's for the popularity of Nintendos hardware amongst females.

So, say you're a guy who is buying a game for his wife or girlfriend that enjoys games but isn't a full-fledged geek yet? Here's some observations that might be worth considering:

- Generally speaking, women don't go for games which focus on guns and explosions
I've encountered a few women on games like Call of Duty or Team Fortress 2, but they have always been far in the minority. I'm sure there is a scientific reason why ladies don't enjoy shooting Russians in the face as much as men, but I'm a bloke so I can't even relate to the concept of someone not enjoying the sound of a grenade exploding in a walk-in fridge. Bottom line, unless she has expressed an interest or has a picture of an AK47 as a tramp stamp, don't go buying her Killzone 2.

- If the game you are thinking of buying her is designed for females, don't buy it
What I mean by this is if you are thinking of purchasing a game that features cooking, dressing-up, ponies, or dating, don't. Seriously, you wouldn't buy your lovely lady a cookery book or a pony for her birthday, so you sure as hell shouldn't buy her a game about it. Also, the current trend with this type of game is that they have shockingly low development standards and are generally just crap games. It's the geek equivalent of buying her a necklace from Elizabeth Duke.

- Party games don't count

Party games and casual sports games like Wii Sports don't count. Why? Because they are designed to be played by anyone and everyone. They don't make for a particularly thoughtful gift, and if we're agreed that a game can elicit an emotional response, that is what you should be aiming for. If the game sticks out in the mind of your other half, then so will the person who gave it to her.

- Sex is important

Not like that you filthy fucking pervert. If you purchase a game for her whose main character is a muscle-bound grotesque with a neck thicker than his head, your other half might have a hard time relating to the character. Unless, of course, your other half is a muscle-bound grotesque, in which case...er...lucky you? John Travolta is a good example. His neck is thicker than his head. If the man on the box looks like John Travolta, then you probably shouldn't purchase the game.A decent rule of thumb* here is to opt for a game that lets you decide your characters sex, or one that doesn't involve a male protagonist who eats bears and shits bullets.

- Story can be just as important as gameplay
I'm not convinced that this applies solely to female gamers as I know I would agree there are circumstances in which story can be just as important as gameplay. But if you want to dazzle that special someone, then go for something with a strong story that is well expedited. This applies doubly so if you are trying to get your partner more heavily involved in gaming. It's one of the true strengths of games over other forms of media, and therefore definitely worth considering.

So with that in mind, what games would I recommend? Here's a very small sampling.

Heavy Rain
This game is perfect for showing the storytelling power of games. Even if the gameplay and voice acting can be a little off sometimes, the players' hunt to reveal the identity of the Origami Killer is truly compelling and this game can tug on a range of very different emotions. As well as allowing the player to control four different characters, it has a different style of gameplay to most other games out there and the decisions you make will affect the outcome at the end of the game.

Professor Layton and Pandora's Box or Professor Layton and the Curious Village

For the DS, these games a perfect for someone who isn't too keen on hardcore gaming and prefers to use games as a distraction during idle hours. Presented beautifully, both games have a light plot and revolve around the title character and his nephew/love-slave Luke solving puzzles in order to unravel a greater mystery. My other half loves these games. Professor Layton engages the brain and, although it made me want to cry with frustration at times, it, like crack, was very moreish. Fuck you, Knights Tour 4, by the way.

Mass Effect 1 or 2
If your missus is a fan of the oul' sci-fi and doesn't mind a wee bit of shooting, you can't go far wrong with the Mass Effect games. You can play as a male or female with the story options adapting to your choice. It encompasses a range of different themes and allows you to play as a paragon of virtue, or a bit of a shit. Mass Effect is simply one of those games that is cooked to perfection and it's epic space opera flavour will appeal to most people.

The Sims 3

Really, any of the Sims games would work here, but number 3 is the most recent and comprehensive. Whilst it is effectively a dolls house game, it is very popular amongst female gamers. Yes, you can build your own house, decorated it, create Sims to live in it and watch them interact and grow. That's all great fun and part of the strength of the series, but it also encourages use of the imagination. Like, what would happen if your Sim is in the living room and you take the door away, effectively making him a prisoner? Or how about your Sim decides to pay an uninvited visit to her neighbours bedroom at 3:00am? Great stuff.

World of Warcraft
I was in two minds about including this, as it could be compared to introducing your other half to recreational heroin use. However, there is definitely some strong points for it being a great game for the love of your life. It's inherently multiplayer, so if you already have an account, it's a great activity that you can do together and it counts as both geeking out and quality-time. It also has a high focus on social interaction, which is something you don't find on offline computer games. It is fairly easy to pick up, and already popular with female gamers, meaning there's less of the 'Hurr durr, girlz don't play teh vido games, u n00b' attitude found elsewhere online.

Well, that's my two cents on the subject. Either way, in the future I look forward to seeing some mature games that are designed for female gamers, and I guess it is only a matter of time.

Real ID: Blizzard Drops The Ball

2010-07-07T14:02:00.000-07:00

For those that don't know, Blizzard, makers of MMORPG demi-God World of Warcraft (WoW), recently announced a new policy. Shortly, any individual posting on the official WoW or Starcraft forums will need to use their Real ID, which is basically the players first and last name.

There has already been uproar over this news, with the official announcement thread on the European WoW forums having generated over a thousand responses, the majority being negative.

Blizzard opine that doing so will reduce the issue of trolling and abusive posting on the forums, certainly a point worth considering in light of John Gabriel's Internet Fuckwad Rule. They believe that the forums will become a much friendlier, more welcoming place, a veritable land of digital milk and pixellated honey. Official Blizzard employees will also be identified by their real names.

Why all this outcry? In the main, people are concerned about the potential for invasions of privacy. In this age of social networking, it isn't hard for someone to ascertain the identity of a person using just their full name and a few other scant details. Heck, 4Chan do it all the time.

The potential for abuse of this new system is huge. As we all know, gamers can be a hot-headed bunch. There are plenty of news reports of gamers who have exacted physical revenge on an opponent in real life for some percieved slight. And with WoW being the most populous online game in the world, I believe there is potential for real harm here.

I have had the experience of being on Ventrilo (VoIP) when some members of my former guild decided to quit, and the threats and language directed at the guild master at the time was chilling, along the lines of stomping said GMs face in and cutting her throat. If the guild master in question had her name displayed as part of her account, it would only take an individual with a minimum of skills and determination to get more exact personal information about her.

I also would seriously question the wisdom of having Blizzards employees easily compromised by their playerbase.

So there is that point to consider, and it is a valuable point. I would hate to have employers being able to search my name and, finding my Facebook with maximum privacy settings on, perusing an old game forum post where I've dissed my boss or some such shit.

Another aspect that Blizzard haven't seemingly considered are the implications for minors. Globally, countries have very different, and often very strict laws regarding the privacy of minors online. In the UK, if a company is providing a service that is proven to attract minors as a major part of it's customer base, they legally have a duty of care towards those minors. I would love to see how this plays out in the case of some 14-year old who commits suicide after bullying resulting from WoW. That is entirely conjecture, I know, but it can't be denied that it is a stark possibility.

There is a further issue I would like to address and it goes to the heart of the issue for me personally:

Having a screen name is a neccessary step to separate the individual from the people he plays/talks with.

It might seem like a moot point in the Facebook era, but the people on my friends list are people I know and who, more or less, know me.

On the flip side of that, the forums I frequent will know me only by my screen name and that's the way I like it. Why? Because it allows me to discuss issues or put forward opinions that I can't normally express in real life. Whilst being anonymous online encourages lies and exaggerated emotions it also allows absolute honesty as there is no point in mincing your words if the opinion can be judged without the context of the individual.

WoW comes from a background of old school online gaming, where people were known exclusively by their screen names. Heck yes there was trolling, and flaming and abuse but, fuck, that was just part and parcel of the experience and most people are mature enough to ignore it. That is something I think most players have learnt to live with.

Blizzard need to realise that social networking (which seems to be the flavour they are aiming for) and online gaming are only related by degrees, and those degrees should be exclusively decided by the player, not the developer.

And aside from everything else, trolling and flaming might be a pain in the arse, but it also gives Blizzard an accurate insight into the love that some people have for their product and the emotions it can generate. I dread to think what a sanitized, polite place forums would become if everyone used their real name all the time.

I just hope that Blizzard will revert this misguided policy, but hey, what the fuck do I know?

Baddiest Baddies in Games

2010-07-06T08:34:00.000-07:00

Following on from ten of the best video game toons, here are ten of the worst. Some are here because they are just too evil, some are here because they are so frustrating. Sephiroth isn't on this list. He killed Aeris, fucking get over it. Oh, and there is no particular order.

Kaepora Gaebora (The Owl) from Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

There's a very good reason why this piece of shit is on the list. Because he is pure fucking evil. Don't think so? I beg to differ, see below:

"Hoo hoot!
Link...
Look up here!"

*Pressing A to skip, skip, skip*

"It appears that the time has finally come for you to start your adventure!"

*Pressing A to skip, skip, skip*

"You will encounter many hardships ahead...That is your fate. Don't feel discouraged, even during the toughest times!"

*Pressing A to skip, skip, skip*

"Go straight this way and you will see Hyrule Castle."

*Pressing A to skip, skip, skip*

"You will meet a princess there..."

*Pressing A to skip, skip, skip*

"If you are lost and don't know which way to go, look at the map."

*Pressing A to skip, skip, skip*

"The areas you have explored will be shown on the Map. Press START to enter the Subscreens and [R] or [Z] to find the Map."

*Pressing A to skip, skip, skip*

"On the Map Subscreen, you will also see a flashing dot showing you which way you should go next."

*Pressing A to skip, skip, skip*

"Did you get all that?"
--->No
Yes

*Pressing A to skip, skip, skip and the owl starts again*

"Hoo hoot!
Link...
Look up here!"

FUUUUUUUUUUUCK YOU, KAEPORA GAEBORA!!!!!!

Maester Seymour Guado from Final Fantasy X

Where even to begin with this guy?

Let's start with his voice. He's got this soft, delicate voice that sounds like he was raised in the Baaj Island Finishing School for Effeminate Teenagers. The end result is that when he's telling you about his plan to become Sin and destroy Spira once and for all, he sounds like a priest telling you off for swearing at your brother and sentencing you to seven Hail Marys.

Then there is his dress sense. On top, his hair looks like something from Jean Paul Gaultiers sketchbook. He is also rocking a strange sort of dress that does nothing but show off his chest tattoos, making him look like some multi-coloured hair metaller from the 80s. The he finishes it off with a bottom half that looks like a lamp shade from a Victorian hotel and a ribbon on his waist that would be better on one of Elton Johns birthday presents.

His whole reasoning behind being thoroughly evil is questionable too. To stop the suffering of the people of Spira, he decides killing everyone is the best solution. Top marks genius, you think you could have a bash at solving world hunger?

And he thinks he can marry Yuna, the shit.

Dr. Bad-Boon from Super Monkey Ball 2

Baboon wasn't born evil. Exposure to violent computer games and filthy movies warped his damaged little mind, and when selecting his third-level education, Baboon opted to do a foundation degree in Cruelty and Applied Nippleclamping. It was during this first year of university he changed his name, first to Baboon Guevara and then to Bad-Boon. He transferred to an undergraduate degree in Pain Studies before finally completing a PhD in Evil, with a dissertation Udderly Awesome: The Role of Cattle Prods in post-Industrial Europe, which earned him his title Dr. Bad-Boon.

Dr. Bad-Boon has a strong infatuation with MeeMee, the slutty monkey with the bow in her hair. However, he is distraught to find that she is married to AiAi and that the pair have a baby called...Baby. So instead of doing the easy thing and waiting for AiAi in an alleyway with a gutting knife, Dr. Bad-Boon builds a fucking time machine and travels back in time to an era before MeeMee is married. Because that's what you do.

He tries everything to split them up. He even has sex with a donkey and superimposes AiAi's face onto it which he then sends to MeeMee. Sadly, due to an oversight, he actually sends a photo of himself having sex with a donkey that has AiAi's face. MeeMee remains uninterested.

Dr. Bad-Boon eventually commits suicide, alone in the bath, and Monkey Island celebrates with a banana binge.

Gammon/dorf from the Legend of Zelda series

A nice bit of gammon. Because my Ma is from the country, I like a nice bit of gammon in my hand before getting on me Massey-Ferguson and headin' out ti thon field, sir.

But I don't like Gammondorf. I definitely wouldn't want to have him in my hand, unless he was very very small.

This cat gets his kicks out of kidnapping young princesses. I'm pretty sure that if he lived in our world, the Sun would have a campaign to keep him in prison, where the other inmates would call him a 'nonce' and tell him he is going to get 'fucking shanked' in the 'kharzi'.

Luckily for Gammon, in Hyrule, abducting royal children is a minor disturbance, with recovery of said royal minor left to an untested, Peter Pan-lookalike. Fair enough.

Gammon is also notable because he is a major computer game villain who also happens to have a serious genetic disability. He is ginger, and ginger people don't have souls.

Kreia aka Darth Traya from Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2

Yeah, so I didn't figure an elderly woman would make it on to this list. But this coffin-dodger isn't just any OAP. This burden-on-her-children also happens to be a Dark Lord of the Sith, oh yeah. And she is using you as a vessel of her revenge!

The reason why Kreia made it on to her list is that you can never really tell which side she is on. She will give you similar advice for similar circumstances. She will tell you to avoid relationships with other members of your party to avoid extremes of emotion, yet she'll also suggest you be prepared to leave them to die in order to complete your mission.

The main deal is that in the Star Wars movies, the line between the light and dark side of the Force is very clearly defined. There are good choices and bad. What the character of Kreia does (and in doing so identifies a real strength of video games) is add a high level of ambiguity and makes an intangible concept like the Force very very real, and very difficult to apply. If you want to play the game as a light Jedi, you can't follow all of Kreia's advice. If you want to play as a dark Jedi, you can't follow all of Kreia's advice. Instead you have to think for yourself what your character would do to follow a particular path, and the answer isn't always obvious.

GlaDOS from Portal

GlaDOS (Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System) is my favourite bad guy(girl?) on this list by about a million fucking miles.

Initially coming across as a matronly voice of concern, this Artificial Intelligence construct is your guide through the early levels of Portal, promising you a lovely slice of cake when you have completed the assessment. And I fucking love cake.

As you play through Portal, you soon learn that GlaDOS has suffered a mental breakdown and has become quite evil, killing everyone in the Aperture Science labs, and attempting to prematurely cremate you. Worst of all: The cake is a fucking lie.

Her voice changes from motherly encouragement to sarcastic mockery and, in it's own way, becomes strangely intimidating. At the same time being truly hilarious.

Sample GlaDOS quotes:
"Deploying surprise in five... four... Time out for a second. That wasn't supposed to happen. Do you see that thing that fell out of me? What is that? It's not the surprise... I've never seen it before. Never mind, it's a mystery I'll solve later, by myself, because you'll be dead."

"That thing you burned up isn't important to me. It's the fluid catalytic cracking unit. It made shoes for orphans. Nice job breaking it, hero."

And not only that, but once you have completed the game, GlaDOS sings you a lovely song.

Waluigi from the Mario series

Right, I don't know what the fuck this dickhead's problem is but I do know he can fuck right off.

Created for no apparent reason other than to give Luigi an archnemesis in the same way Wario is the enemy of Mario, Waluigi is a complete bastard.

No-one gives a fuck about Luigi anyway so people will give even less of a fuck about his nemesis. And the naming is all wrong. If Mario becomes Wario, then it stands to reason that Luigi should be morphed into Wuigi. But it's fucking difficult to say Woo-eee-gee, right? No it's fucking not, I just did it. That just reflects the total lack of thought that went into creating this character.

And he looks like a paedophile. Attractively-coloured outfit to entice children? Check. White gloves to deter fingerprinting techniques? Check. Old-timey facial hair? Check. Clogs? Check. Dungarees? Check.

Also there's a reason why, in Mario Kart, Waluigi has a van that says 'Free Candy Inside!' on it.

Dr. Ivo Robotnik from Sonic the Hedgehog 1, 2, & 3

The second doctor on my list is also known as Dr. Eggman, a title granted due to his unique, egg-like shape. Personally, I think it should be Dr. Eggdoctor, but I've already ranted about one name, so no more.

Dr. Robotnik is a crazed genius, possessing an IQ of 300 and is hot shit when he comes to robots. Which is cool, everyone likes robots. Johnny 5, R2-D2, Bishop from Aliens, Keanu Reeves etc. So yay, go robots. But Dr. Robotnik is being a right shit about things, capturing cuddly fuckers from the forest and using them to build his nefarious creations!

Which makes me question his expertise on robots. Surely the whole point of a robot is to build a machine that is independent of natural life? If you need to kill little animals to make your robot work, then it's a shitty robot, pal. If I superglue tinfoil to my cat, I haven't invented anything, I've just made myself liable to animal cruelty charges.

Obviously no-one has pointed this out to Ivo, so most days you can find him in his shed, abusing animals.

Albert Wesker from the Resident Evil series

Albert Wesker is a prick.

He starts off being your commanding officer in the first Resident Evil and is typically aloof and uninterested which really made me doubt myself and affected my self-esteem. Not only that, but the chufter is only a bloody double agent, working for the Umbrella-ella Corp. and using you as a human guinea pig to see how easy it is to kill infected zombies. This rotter gets his comeuppance when one of the monsters kills him.

Only no he fucking doesn't! He comes back in Resident Evil: Code Veronica, only this time with fucking superpowers. Turns out the git had only gone and injected himself with the virus just before his death, granting him superhuman abilities at the expense of his humanity! Why did I not get any virus? Humanity-schumanity, if I could speed around and do my shopping in the Co-Op in 30 seconds, I'd be well up for it.

Eventually Wesker meets a sticky end. You shoot him in the face with two rockets while he is waist deep in lava from a volcano. He's dead then....right?

Pyramid Head from the Silent Hill series

So I was tempted to just put the entire town of Silent Hill in as the tenth baddest baddie. That place is fucked up, slimy dead things everywhere, distraught men looking for their wives roaming the streets with guns, hideously disfigured female zombies, it's almost as bad as Larne.

But Silent Hill's scariest resident is a guy known as Pyramid Head. I'm not sure how he got that title, but he's working it.

The character designers used the iconography of pain when designing this character. I think it looks snazzy. From the blood-stained butchers smock, to the metallic, triangle-shaped mask, to the oversized, rusted machete he wields, Pyramid Head has a style that works in summer or winter.

Interestingly, Pyramid Head is the only character on this list who likes to indulge in a spot of sexual assault, as he does a few times in Silent Hill 2.

Seriously though, Pyramid Head is not the sort of motherfucker you want to mess with. He even manages to be scary in the abortion that was the Silent Hill movie.

Ten Awesomest Good Guys in Computer Games

2010-07-05T08:19:00.000-07:00

I've noticed pretty much every major gaming news site does like a top 100, or top 50 or something computer game characters list, and since I'm a major gaming news site, I'm going to do my top ten.

There's no particular order here, just ten great games characters. If you think I've overlooked a really important one who just deserves to be in the top ten, you are wrong, I haven't overlooked anything.

Link from the Legend of Zelda series

The above screenshot is taken from the new Zelda game. It's currently in development and is called The Legend of Zelda: Pasty and Porky. Despite dressing like a cross between Peter Pan and Robin Hood, Link is as hard as fuck. He has an array of deadly weaponry, like a bow and arrow or a hookshot, which is basically a spring-loaded harpoon gun on a chain which he uses to cave peasants faces in before smashing up all their earthenware pots and stealing the rupees they were saving to send their hermaphrodite son/daughter to Hyrule Hospital and get their extra junk lopped off.

Link has also saved Princess Zelda from certain doom, like, fifteen times. All this, and he still hasn't seen her royal boobies.

Lara Croft from the Tomb Raider series

Continuing the boobie talk, the main thing about Lara is her chesticles. When the first Tomb Raider game was released in the 90s, Lara had breasts so disproportionate that, if she were a real woman, she would have been crushed by the gravitational pull of her baby globes.

Personally, I never paid much attention to her babs, I was always more of a kneecap kinda guy. Still, Lara is handy with a gun, independently wealthy and wears tiny wee shorts, so she is pretty bad ass. It's also worth pointing out that Lara is the only female character on this list, which is evidence that all games developers are misogynistic chauvinists who have some kind of homoerotic fixation with alpha-male stereotypes. If you disagree, don't argue with me. Talk to Einstein because he said it first and he does science.

Solid Snake from the Metal Gear series

Ok, so the guy has a name that sounds like a euphemism for poo poo, but he is still more badass than every Jackie Chan DVD melted down into a big stick of shiny plastic with an axehead glued to it.

Based on the most manly action heroes of the 80s (Michael Biehn, Kurt Russell, *ahem* Mel Gibson), Solid Snake is a six-foot tall portion of ass-whoopin'. He basically spends his time creeping around, pulling bad guys' heads off and generally upsetting some secret order that wants to rule the planet. Not only that, but he fights against nuclear proliferation. That's right, like fucking Greenpeace or some shit. So not only does Solid Snake score highly with emotionally damaged women who like to pump 'ron and then get mistreated by their other halves, he also gets points with the ladies who don't shave their armpits and consider washing their hair to be 'raping Mother Nature'.

Also, look at his fashion sense. Not enough people wear a steel-blue one piece and a low-hanging bandana with a built-in Wind Direction Indicator. North-west, Solid, north-west!.

Pacman from...Pacman

What can I say about Pacman that hasn't been said before? Plenty.

In Japan, Pacman is known as Hungry Yellow Man Consuming the Pebbles of the Approaching Honourable Ghost, a title which was shortened for the benefit of a confused Western audience.

Pacman, pursued by ghosts, runs around inside a fixed course eating as many pills as he can find until he finds a magic pill that allows him to chase after the ghosts and eat them, regurgitating only their eyes. Pacman is really a meditation on the relationship between an individual and their past, a past represented by the ghosts. Each of us must find and consume the pill of Acceptance to allow us to hunt down the painful memories of our past and come to terms with them (consume them). It is also a reflection of the changing social relationships of people of different racial groupings in the postmodern landscape. Pacman is determined and powerful art.

Parents groups have also celebrated the positive educational message found within Pacman. Children are taught that should they find themselves trapped in close-quarters with a variety of pills, they must eat every pill they can find until they have the ability to consume ghosts and vomit their eyes out.

There is also a Mrs. Pacman, so our boy here must get some skank.

Gordon Freeman from the Half Life series

Dr. Gordon Freeman, the one free man. A name that is a little bit like Morgan Freeman and a face that is a little bit like Dr. Gregory House.

If you ask a gamer what they want to be when they grow up, the answer will be Gordon Freeman. Even if they don't say it, everybody wants to be Gordon Freeman.

He's a strong-but-silent type, lethal with a crowbar, comfortable in the operation of guns and experimental technologies, he's got an awesome power suit, the ladies love him, and to top it off, he's a scientist. That's right, not some muscle-bound grotesque, grimacing because of the strain of pooping another grenade, but a skinny-ass nerd. And not like a psychologist scientist, a real one, like a geologist. Glory be to Gordon.

Sonic the Hedgehog from Sonic the Hedgehog 1, 2 & 3

Right, a few common misconceptions to clear up. First, hedgehogs can be blue. Secondly, blue hedgehogs have been known to move at speeds approaching the speed of sound. Third, hedgehogs and foxes have been known to develop deep bonds of friendship.

Now that we've got the scientific stuff out of the way, let's look at why Sonic the Hedgehog is on this list.

He's all about the bling. Motherfucker collects rings and when he's collected 100, he gets another life. Just like Jesus. Or Gangsta Jesus, maybe.

He's also got this devil may care attitude. Like there was this one time when he was chasing down one of Dr. Robotniks inventions and accidentally rolled through an orphanage and blinded this six-year old and the media were all like 'We must imprison this dangerous vigilante' and 'How many more will be maimed?' and Sonic was all like 'Pshaw, it ain't no thing. GIVE ME MY FUCKING RINGS!!!! ARRGGHH!' and that's what makes him great.

The sad thing is that Sonic only appeared in three games, Sonic 1, 2 and 3. It's a pity but at least they didn't follow up those games with a bunch of shitty titles that ruined Sonics reputation. And if anyone tells you otherwise, then they are LYING.

Mister Chef from the Halo series

Mister Chef is the main protagonist of the Xbox's flagship Halo games. His real name is John-117, because in the futures, people decided to jazz up their names by adding numbers at the end. John joined the military at the age of 17 even though the thought of her only son being at war kept Mrs. 117 up all night with worry and John was originally supposed to work in his fathers fish shop, Mr. 117s Underwater Bounty Emporium.

Mister Chef is basically your cybernetically-enhanced supersoldier type, possessing an unnaturally high sex-drive and unflinchingly loyal to the chain of command. He is never seen out of his armour and the games he has featured in have never shown his face. Therefore there is a lot of speculation as to what he really looks like. Thing is, I already know. Bungie appeared to me in a dream and showed me the true face of Mister Chef. I have included a sketch below. Prepare to have your mind blown.

Mario from Super Mario Bros.

Mario, an Italian plumber who lives in the Mushroom Kingdom, is one of the most iconic video game characters of all time. Most put his success down to the fact that, shortly after completing his apprenticeship in Naples, he moved to the Mushroom Kingdom. Mushrooms, being simple, unimaginative creatures, had never seen an Italian or a plumber before and thus Mario's fame was assured. Therefore, when the Princess was kidnapped, the Mushroom People didn't turn to the Armed Mushroom Forces or the National Mushroom Security Agency, they turned to Mario.

As far as the games themselves are concerned, they are stuffed full of communist propaganda. Mushrooms and turtles are the two main symbols of capitalism, and as Mario spends much of him time stomping said fungi and reptiles, he is considered to be one of the main proponents of a global communist state and has often been asked to give evidence at the United Nations.

The Mario games are also notable as they encourage children to explore abandoned pipes and eat any brightly coloured mushrooms that they find.

Captain Price from Modern Warfare 1 & 2

Captain Price is the embodiment of modern military prowess and oldtime gentlemanly facial hair.

In many ways similar to Jack Bauer, Captain Price enjoys a spot of torture, putting a knife into an unsuspecting cranium, the illegal launch of nuclear weapons and long walks along the beach.

From being the greatest uncle you've never had in the first Modern Warfare through to going fuckballs banana crazy in Modern Warfare 2, your time with Captain Price is always a laff riot and he is always on hand to offer some advice on your choice of weapon or the best way to ensure your hands stay baby soft during prolonged exposure to Arctic temperatures.

When away from the frontlines, Captain Price (Teddy to his friends) likes to unwind with a nice glass of Pimms and a Danielle Steele novel, in between visits to the face barber and the sauna of his local YMCA.

Auron from Final Fantasy X

There has never been a videogame character as manly as Auron from Final Fantasy X.

Showing up at the start of FFX, the first thing we see of Auron is him slurping from what appears to be a bottle of scrumpy cider. Next thing you know he is saving you from death and giving you gruff instructions like a drunk uncle trying to teach you self-defense at a wedding.

His sense of style is breathtaking. He manages to pull of the whole steampunk-glasses-with-a-billowing-red-coat-plus-one-single-glove-and-a-massive-neck-warmer-while-wearing-a-sling-and-holding-a-massive-sword look perfectly.

Spoiler alert: Not only does he shine in an emasculated darkness like a beacon of radiant masculinity, but he is also dead. That's right, he's a fucking zombie.

Everything is better with zombies.

World of Weirdos

2010-06-30T07:04:00.000-07:00

There are certain things you can't say in civilized company.

You can't admit that you pick your nose and eat it, for example, or that you find Justin Bieber very sexy. These things make you look like some sort of strange, unsocialised half-breed. Believe me, I have personal experience of both.

When it comes to computer games there is an equivalent. And that is to admit that you play World of Warcraft.

World of Warcraft (WoW to its adherents) is a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, or MMORPG, or Muhmorpuhguh based in the fantasy world of Azeroth. Players choose to become a member of one of two rival factions, the Horde and the Alliance. The Horde are, predictably, not fluffy bunnykins, consisting of your usual Tolkien-esque bad guys, Orcs, Trolls, Undeads and...erm...cow people. On the flip side, the Alliance consist of humans, elves and that sort of shit.

Players pick a class which will follow one of three archetypes, healer, tank or damage-dealer and enter a massive world filled with wonderment and dragons and other types of beasts.

It would be worth mentioning that WoW is the most successful Muhmorpuhguh of all time. It had 11.5 million active subscriptions as of December 2008 which had no doubt dipped now, but will increase upon release of the next expansion.

11.5 MILLION PEOPLE. That's almost twice the population of Ireland and 11, 499, 999 more people than live on the Moon! Elvis, in case you're wondering.

Let's look at this in terms of money.

11.5M people bought the game, paying between £10 and £25 for the privilege. So assuming a median cost of £17.50, sales of the client alone has generated over £200 million for the developers Blizzard, and their corporate overlords, Activision.

Not only that, but WoW has a subscription payment model, meaning every single player pays, on average, £9 a month to play the game.

That's £103,500,000 a month. Which is about £40 a second.

To quote Eminem, wowzers, I just made a mess in my trousers.

I started playing WoW not too long after it's release in 2004, after reading a magazine article proclaiming its awesomeness. And awesome it was. I made a Night Elf Hunter called Neowyngor (don't have a fucking clue why) and set about shooting things with my bow, doing quests and chatting idly to my fellow gamers. It was a truly unique gaming experience and, to be honest, I have never experienced anything like it since.

WoW, to me, was like crack that had been dipped in toffee and then rolled into a fat cigarette of addictiveness.

I played it pretty much every hour I could. My girlfriend at the time hated it, but to be honest, I didn't really care. All I wanted was to gain one more level, kill one more mob, complete one more quest. This situation only got worse when I started working at Emectronic Farts and met a bunch of other geeks who played it too. I started an Undead Rogue called Springheel and joined my workmates in their guild. I can't remember the name now, so let's call it Anus of Thunder.

In retrospect, my behaviour was quite destructive. My friendships suffered as I spent more and more time isolated and I increasingly became withdrawn, favouring spending my time alone and inside.

I'm not blaming WoW for all of this as there were other factors in my life that contributed to that behaviour. However, WoW was the perfect crutch, a great form of escapism that I was wholly invested in. It was an odd situation. There I was, paying a monthly subscription for a game that would never end, that I could never win, the paradigm of time-wasting and utterly inconsequential, and yet I was treating it as if it was the sole concern of my existence. You may think I am being overly dramatic. Sadly, I am not.

The break for me came when I moved back home from London, and had no internet connection. No internet, no WoW, and I finally got a handle on real life again.

But my story doesn't end there.

World of Warcraft is kinda like an unattractive ex-girlfriend you keep hooking up with when times are tough. And every time you go back you notice that her ass has gotten kinda fat, or the mole on her neck has started to sprout hair, and after every liaison you sort of feel disgustedwith yourself and vow never again.

But then the time rolls around where you decide to have another go.

I've gone back to playing Warcraft too many times to mention. Normally it coincides with the release of an expansion, but I've also gone back after trying out other Muhmorpuhguhs and need to be reminded of how a well-rounded MMO plays. I've never experienced anything close to the level of addiction that I had previously, and that's because two things have changed.

First off, I have changed. I like to play games for escapism, sure, but not as a second life. I have too much wicked awesome things in my life that rank higher. Sure, I can still geek out and get completely absorbed in games, much to the irritation of my other half, but I thoroughly understand that real life comes before pixels.

Secondly, WoW has changed, and in a big way. When I started playing it, there was a huge gulf between certain types of players. There were those who, through personal circumstance, could devote 8 hours a day to the game. Then there were those who had a job, kids, seventeen cats, whatever and could only manage a couple of hours. I fell into the latter catergory. The former would be the players with the best gear, the most money, the furthest progress. The rest of us would just be running around, trying desperately to get a piece of epic gear.

When Activision, headed by ~~The Devil~~ Bobby Kotick, bought a substantial share of Blizzard, things began to change and WoW started to follow a new design direction.

Retaining subscriptions and generating revenue became a much greater priority, and it was simply bad business to have huge sections of WoW only obtainable to a fraction of the playerbase. So things were made easier, and the gulf that had once existed between the 'casual' and the 'hardcore' players lessened with good gear and end-game progression made available to all. This has been the source of endless debate on the official forums, but when the shareholders are in control, profit becomes the driving force behind design. This is further emphasised by the fact that Blizzard have recently begun selling in-game items for real money, something they said they would never do, a position which changed to 'we won't sell anything that offers an in-game advantage for real money'. With Activision pulling the strings, it's very possible that we will see a reversal of that policy in future.

I'm not complaining about that situation at all. Companies like to make money, and there is no reason on earth why a subscriber who pays the same money as the next guy should be deprived of progress just because he has a job, wife and kids. I much prefer the WoW that is more accessible.

I just don't think it's as fun.

And that's why, when I periodically return to WoW, I don't stay. It doesn't have the same pulling power it once did. Its expanded playerbase has meant that an awful lot of Call Of Duty kiddies have begun playing it and you can only be told 'HAHAHA UR A FUKIN NOOB, U NED TO FCKIN LERN 2 PLAY, I FUKED UR MOTHR!' so many times before you tire of it completely.

This all isn't to say I think WoW sucks or I hate it or that. In my most recent venture into Azeroth to check out the latest expansion, I joined a guild which reinforced one of my favourites aspects of the Muhmorpuhguh genre. Our guild leader was a woman who lived in London, our main tank was a British guy living in Dubai and one of our most vocal members was a bloke in his late 50s who needed constant reassurance in everything he did. And this is aside from the drunk Scandinavians and nose-biting Toons I encountered. I've always enjoyed the variety of people you encounter and with WoWs playerbase, variety is guaranteed.

Still, for those in the know, admitting you play World of Warcraft in public is tantamount to admitting you've soiled yourself. Other gamers immediately imagine you to be the sort of person who dresses up as a Night Elf and reads Warcraft fan fiction. For people who don't play it, it's unfathomable. And God help you if you try to explain it. It's name doesn't even make sense.

Warcraft. War-craft. It is about the crafting of war? Papier-mache tanks? A sundial made out of shell casings? Why is there a world of it? It's just one of those things that you say and it sounds bad. Like ghonorrea.

Just tell people that WoW is an online game where you kill Nazis. It's the sort of answer that makes everyone happy, because everyone likes to kill Nazis.

Anyhow, I hope you've enjoyed this little rant.

All I know is that the World of Warcraft: Cataclysm expansion will be released fairly soon, and Azeroth will be redesigned and unreconizable. Players will be encouraged to create a new character and level-up all over again, visiting the same zones they have been to dozens of times before, wasting more time and money in the pursuit of the intangible.

I'll be buying it on launch day.

Short Blog Because I Hurt My Arm and Cried Like a Bitch

2010-06-29T03:48:00.000-07:00

Yeah, so I was supposed to cover the Sony and Nintendo offerings from E3 last weekend and that, but I didn't.

Why? Because I fell while mountain boarding and fucked up my shoulder, leaving me unable to update my blog for a while, and during that time, the new news from E3 became old news, but what are you gonna do?

Either way, it proves the saying 'Never put a six-foot tall geek on a board with wheels and let him roll down a hill', no?

So yeah, Sony Playstation Move. Similar deal to the Wii, only the controller has a ball at the end that glows like a pixies testicle. I'm really quite unconvinced by it. It doesn't have the hands-free innovation of Kinect, and at this point, seems pretty much like a Wii knock-off. I suppose we'll have to let the software do the talking though.

Nintendo, on the other hand, pulled off another coup. While the other big names were busy playing catch-up in relation to motion sensing controllers, Nintendo moved the goal posts once again with the first concrete details of the 3DS.

The 3DS is the new handheld offering from Nintendo. I'd post a picture of it, but there is little point. It looks quite similar to a DS.

Aside from a huge boost to processing power, a hint at the main feature of the 3DS is in its name. That's right, it displays games in 3D.

Because of its unique display system, photos and videos can't show the 3D effect which is a pity because it basically leaves me saying that industry journalists think it's awesome. But they really do think it's awesome.

I just love it. Nintendo, purveyor of casual games featuring poorly rendered cutesy animals is running rings around the competition, always one step ahead of them. It would be fairly easy at this stage to predict that the 3DS will massively outsell the control systems announced my Microsoft and Sony, although a direct comparison in terms of future numbers sold may not strictly be fair.

All I know is out of all the hardware announcements made at E3, I would be most likely to purchase the 3DS.

I just hope that E3 2012 isn't dominated by the PSP3D and the Xbox 3D60 etc etc.

The Tester: Series 2

2010-06-18T06:52:00.000-07:00

I'm wondering if anyone watched the Playstation Network TV exclusive called The Tester. I didn't. Instead I watched a recap of the series while priming this blog post. And even that was too much.

(L-R) Nathan Drake, Sisqo, Smellen, Wallflower, Lunchbox, Mohammed Jihad, Out Of Place,

Middle Class Boy who likes Yanni, Amateur Magician, The 'Brainy' One, Maths Homework

The show was basically as bastardized version of Big Brother, only with a gamer focus. Each contestant had to perform weekly tasks where a panel of celebrity guest judges would decide who had performed best and send one contestant home, whittling them away until only 1 remained. I should point out that 'celebrity guest judges' should be taken in it's loosest possible sense seeing as one week the celebrity judge was the Director of Product Development for Sony Europe... I love games and all, I truly do, but if you told me I was going to meet a celebrity and then rolled out an Assistant Art Director, I'd punch your fucking face in while crying in disappointment.

Of course, this contest attracted the usual mix of attention-seeking desperates and inexplicably self-assured asshats.

And what was the star prize for the winner of this epic competition? A JOB AT SONY BEING A GAMES TESTER! Woooooooooooo! Yaaaa....wait....what?

A fucking job as a QA tester? That's a minimum wage job in the UK. Why not have a show called 'I'm a McDonalds Employee, Get Me Out Of Here'?

And Sony took the opportunity to announce a second series at E3. Great news, I'm sure, for the dozens of fans of the first series.

Now you might ask yourself why I'm reacting like this, and you can bet your ass I'm going to tell you.

See folks, I was a QA tester for about 6 months back in 2004.

It was for a major games studio but I did sign a contract saying I wouldn't discuss my time there and I don't want to get sued so let's just call this company Emectronic Farts.

Whenever I saw the job listing, I thought to myself 'Wow, a job where you get to play computer games all day aaaaaand you get paid for it! Fuck me, I was born to do this.'

I was wrong.

I should have known it was going to suck from the day of the 'interview'. There were about 30 of us in total who came along to the EF headquarters, which aren't in Chertsey, Surrey. An amazing, open plan, glass building, with it's own artificial lake, replete with fish and ducks plus a video games library/shop for employees. It also possessed it's own canteen with highly trained chefs cooking fresh food everyday for exceptionally reasonable prices. Needless to say, I was in love.

Anyways, the 30 of us who were there for the interview were herded into a conference room and told we would have to undergo an aptitude test to ensure we were suitable for the job. Righto, on with the test, a fairly basic assessment on numeracy and attention to detail, completed in about 15 minutes. The answer papers were taken away by the HR lady, Emma (more on her later) to be marked, and all 30 of us were treated to an introductory video showing how awesome it was to work for EA...er...EF and all the perks we could expect. Afterwards, I think we were all blown away and really psyched for our new jobs. That's when Emma came back into the room and called out 18 names (mine not among them) and asked them to follow her. We watched as she led them back down the stairs to the front doors and waved good bye to them.

They had failed the test.

That should have set off alarm bells immediately. If EF were prepared to treat job applicants, people whose experience would forever colour their opinion of the company, with such disdain, how would they treat us, their new employees? At the time, I remained oblivious. Emma came back and told us to come back on Monday morning for our first shift.

So, I showed up first thing on Monday morning, clean-shaven, with deoderant on. I wondered what the soup of the day in the restaurant was. I never found out.

You see, the headquarters is where all the design, development and marketing took place. The QA took place in a small, cramped, red brick building about half a mile away. It was there that Emma led us. Needless to say there was some disappointment, but hey, we got to play games for money!

Hmmm, not so much.

The fault for this misapprehension falls entirely at my own feet. I was a much younger man and didn't truly realise the number of possible faults an average game could have, or the detail that had to be explored to get it ready for public release.

Before I move on, I just want to mention Emma, the HR lady, one more time. I remember telling her that I had changed my address, something they needed to have on record so I could get paid. She asked me to jot the new address down on a Post-It note and give it to her next time she was in the office and she would file it away, which I dutifully did. When she came into the office for my details, I realised she had a truly unique filing system. Her handbag was filled with literally hundreds of crumpled-up Post It notes, plus one lighter and twenty Marlboro Menthol. Still, I got paid two weeks later, so it must have worked.

The first game I tested was a PSP racing game, Burnout Legends. The system was that at the start of each day you would surrender your mobile phone and take a numbered build that was registered against your name and after two hours you would sign that same build back in, and have a 15 minute break, 30 minutes halfway through. The reason you would have to sign out a build was to ensure that no employee stole a test copy of the game and leaked it. That was fair enough. The ban on mobile phones was a bit harder to explain. Were they worried people would take a photo and release unofficial screenshots? Record the soundtrack on their phone? Fuck, I don't know but that shit was strict!

It was drilled into us early on that we were not playing games, we were testing them. And test I did. For Burnout Legends, here's a few things I can clearly remember doing, often mandated by the developers:

Driving the wrong way around the track.

Reversing the wrong way around the track.

Reversing the right way around the track.

Colliding with as many other cars as I could on purpose.

Avoiding all cars and objects as much as I could.

Sitting on the start line after the race began and doing nothing.

Repeatedly pausing and unpausing the game for five minutes until the AI won the race.

Grinding along the track barriers the whole way around the course to make sure you couldn't fall through.

Turning the soundtrack up, driving for a second, turning it down, driving for a second, turning it up etc. etc.

I did this for eight hours a day. For two months. So yeah, definitely not playing games. Strangely though, I enjoyed it. It was a geeky job and it attracted geeky types, and there was great banter. Our boss Ian was a South African guy with a very dry sense of humour. He told us that he had shot a man in the leg with a rifle because the man was being 'a dick'. He also had a wide selection of T-shirts, some of which were awesome pictures of like panthers or tigers or something, others were gleefully nerdy, saying things like 'Now we're out of alpha, things can only get beta.'

Sadly, this trend didn't continue for my next QA assignment. It was the one no-one wanted to work on but most people were assigned to because it was going to sell shit loads. It was the Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire movie tie-in game.

I played that buggy motherfucker for eight hours a day for FOUR MONTHS. IT ONLY HAD 11 LEVELS! The early stages were mind numbingly frustrating because the AI hadn't been implemented, which was a problem because you needed Ron and Hermione to help you lift big old fucking rocks that were blocking your path. I remember early builds where you would partially levitate a boulder and that ginger bastard Ron would run underneath it and then the rock would promptly plummet back down to earth and crush him. Then Hermione would berate YOU for not concentrating hard enough. Yeah? Fuck you Hermione.

So yeah I did that shit for four fucking months. It also made me realise the fruitlessness of making games and why I think the younger generation is ultimately doomed.

Because the game was a movie tie-in, it came with certain stipulations, one of which being that it couldn't feature any on-screen death. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire feature someone dying? Is this death not integral to the future plot? No, no mustn't scare the kiddies, so Cedric Diggory getting an Avada Kedavra right up his hole happened off screen.

Not only that, but what would happen to the players character if they got hurt? Beans would come out of them. Bertie Botts Beans.

Now I don't know what is going to be more harmful to a child's development. Having their character die and letting them start again, or suggesting that if you drop a rock on a person, or burn them with fire, or hit them with a sharp object or kill them, beans will come out?

One other final little thing. EF liked to think of the QA environment as being a fun one, as opposed to the minimum wage tech sweatshop it actually was. To this end, they encouraged people to bring relevant artifacts to work to decorate the office with. For example, if you were testing a shooting game, you could bring in some action figures and decorate the workstations with them.

You could even dress up in the theme of your test game.

There was a guy I worked with, and I can't remember his name now, let's called him Stuart, and Stuart was one straight-up weird mofo.

The guy was 42 then, I think, and he lived with his parents. He was one of those people who you knew could understand the advanced maths behind the Laws of Thermal Dynamics, but probably also had a collection of reptiles and was obsessed with inventing a revolutionary new toaster. If I recall correctly he had developed some piece of software in the early 90s which had sold for big money and did the testing gig really just for something to do. Still, I wouldn't have trusted him to wire a plug.

When testing on Harry Potter began, I noticed a couple of guys wearing wizard hats while they worked, but these were cool wee emo kids and the wizard hat wearing was done in a very ironic kinda way.

Poor Stuart missed out on the 'ironic' part though.

One Thursday he came into work in a full fucking wizards outfit. A fucking blue velvet robe, with big old sleeves. A rope belt, a staff, a wand, a fucking fake beard, and a massive conical wizards hat. The motherfucker drove into work dressed as a wizard, and walked round the office like it weren't no thing. I saw him working controller in hand, dressed up as Gandalf, no sweat. Having a coffee and a smoke on his break, hanging out like Dumbledore, no big deal. English people are too polite, so no-one said a peep to him. I saw him at lunch time and asked him what the fuck he was doing. He didn't know what I was talking about. I pointed out the costume and he kinda said:

'This old thing? I just had it lying around.'

'What, you just had a plush velvet Gandalf suit with staff, wand and beard hanging up in your house and thought you'd give it a bash?'

'Yeah, why not?'

That's about the smartest answer I've ever been given to any question I've asked.

Anyway, I stopped working there towards the end of the Harry Potter project. I can't recall the circumstances of my departure, I just think I didn't go in one day.

But, if you watch the video below, skip to about 2:36 and under QA Testers, you'll see the mark I made on the world.

E3: Microsoft

2010-06-17T12:37:00.000-07:00

I'm gonna have a look at each of the big manufacturers in turn, starting with Microsoft and their hardware announcements.

With 70 million units sold worldwide, the Nintendo Wii has regularly trounced its competitors in terms of consoles shipped since it's launch in 2006. The console tapped into a market that hadn't been given serious attention up until then, namely the casual gamer. It seems that Microsoft and Sony have decided to wade into this territory and take the biggest bite they can out of the Wii's target market.

At E3, Microsoft took the opportunity to officially announce their motion controller project, hitherto known as Project Natal, officially called Kinect (see, its a play on the word Kinetic and Connect, because it has motion and social interaction capabilities. Clever marketers.)

It seems that Microsoft looked at the Wii and wondered how they could come up with something even more innovative than the Japanese motion controller. And innovate they did.

Kinect is a "controller-free gaming and entertainment experience" according to Microsoft, the important words there being 'controller-free'. That's right, Kinect will read your entire body motions and allow you to interact with games without the need for any wand, nunchuck, or funny remote control-type thing with a bubble on the end of it.

Using motion sensors, camera and a microphone, as well as a powered 'motorized tilt mechanism', Kinect allows users to interact with games using gestures, spoken commands and software-specific objects. Incidentally, if you purchase the new model XBox 360 (see below), you won't need an independent power source as Kinect will use the new, dedicated USB port.

The potential for this tech is astounding. So far the number of features it offers is quite staggering, and would seriously tempt me into purchasing both an Xbox 360 and Kinect.

For example, the built in microphone allows you to turn on your Xbox using your voice. It also functions as a voice activated remote control for the XBox DVD functionality, allowing you to stop, pause, rewind etc. Imagine the potential for annoyance if your family is watching High School fucking Musical 3 on a Kinect-enabled Xbox 360...

One thing Kinect can't do very well apparently is detect sitting down gamers, which doesn't surprise me, seeing as it uses digital skeleton mapping to work. The flip side, and a really nifty ass feature, is that the Kinect can look at the bone structure of a player and ascertain whether or not they are a child and adjust the difficulty of a game on the fly. Kneeling down won't work, because the system will be able to notice you're missing a leg joint. As I type this I can hear DUH-DUN DUN DUN, DUH-DUN DUN DUN playing and I imagine this was how SkyNet began...

There's very little decent video of the system at work on the interwebs, but I'm sure this will change as the November 4 release date approaches.

Yes, you too can be a jumping woman with the power of Kinect

There will be 15 games available at launch:

Kinect Adventures - A game about adventures, like kayaking, mountain biking, and Nazi war crime re-enactments
Kinectimals - Kind of like Nintendogs, except with bigger animals, and much more fulfilling, intimate relationships
Kinect Joy Ride - Steal a car! Drive it around! Now burn it out! Predicted to be very popular in West Belfast
Kinect Sports - Wii Sports
Dance Central - A dancing game, very different to the Wii's Let's Dance
Your Shape: Fitness Evolved - A game about personalised geometry. An alternative version for Creationists will be released called Your Shape: Fitness the way God made it
EA Sports Active 2 - An imaginitively titled sequel to the first game, Sports Active
Deca Sports Freedom - Allows you to simulate hurdles with your bollocks hanging out like a baboon
Dance Masters - Very different to Dance Central
Adrenalin Misfits - I honestly don't have a fucking clue
Sonic Free Riders - Hedgehog-based orgy game
Zumba Fitness - Apparently Zumba is a dance program designed to make exercise fun. To me, Zumba sounds like some sort of OAP sex aid
The Biggest Loser: Ultimate Workout - For those who like to pump 'ron and share showers with members of the same sex
Motion Sports - Another fucking sports game
Game Party: In Motion - Dunno about this one, but its title makes it sound awesome. 'Game' and 'Party'? I love to do both those things. What's that? AND it's In Motion? £40? Shit, I should be paying you for this.

Ok, so those titles do sound a little bit Wii, no? I was hoping for something a bit more original. But I suppose they shot all their innovation spunk with the controller and only had a dribble left for the games. Ah well, hopefully Child of Eden will be special. Oh, and I don't think there is enough sports games in that list, make another dozen will ya?

Whilst I will be interested to see what happens with this thing, Steve Ballmer has already referred to it as the 'next Xbox'. Hey Microsoft, don't get so caught up with this motion-controlled casual malarkey that you forget the gamers that made the Xbox a success. We like to play games sitting on our asses.

The Kinect will launch in the US on November 4, with a somewhat ludicrous price tag of $149.

The other big announcement for Microsoft was the launch of a new, slimmer XBox 360.

Normally, dolled up re-releases of existing tech piss my tits right off, but I'll forgive Microsoft because they don't rip the piss out of it like Nintendo and Sony do, likely because they don't cater as heavily toward the Japanese market.

But maybe Sony and Nintendo should pay a bit of attention to their Yank counterparts, because this version has some nice little upgrades.

First off, it comes with a 250 Gb hard drive. Now that isn't anything completely fucking out of this world, but it is a fairly decent size. Also, the hard drive is a lot smaller and sleeker but still a proprietary add-on, so if you want to upgrade in the future expect to pay through the nose for it. Also, with the new model, support for proprietary memory cards has been removed.

More importantly, the new model will feature built in Wi-Fi, something Xbox owners have been banging on about for ages. The existing Wi-Fi adapter, like all Microsoft accessories, is extremely expensive.

To boot, it will also feature a HDMI output(but no fucking HDMI cable will be supplied. Again.), be much quieter and will also have a powered USB slot, designed exclusively for use with Kinect, removing the need for an independent power supply for that semi-sentient device.

The new model is due to launch immediately, priced around the $300 mark, with $50 being taken off the old style model.

On a final note, every person who attended the Microsoft E3 press conference received a new style Xbox 360.

For free.

Motherfucking free-loading, schmoozing games journalists.

How I wish I could be one.

Next blog post will be on Sony's E3 offerings. Bet you can't wait.

E3 Trailers - A Round Up

2010-06-16T12:39:00.000-07:00

You may be aware that the Electronic Entertainment Expo (better known as E3) is taking place in Los Angeles right now. It's that magical time of year when professional geeks of all shades meet up and give the attendant journalists and industry movershakers the equivalent of an Amsterdam Red Light district window display. They hope to whip the onlookers into an orgasmic frenzy of pixels and bits, subsequently ensuring plenty of people shoot their big loads of cash all over the industry's coffers.

The focus this year is definitely on hardware, and I intend to cover the big announcements in the coming days.

For now I want to look at the trailers, those shiny, pretty things that inevitably make games look a lot better than they actually end up being. This years E3 has not disappointed and you'll find a big 'ol list of them below.

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood

I don't play Ubisoft games. The studio has made some poor choices when it comes to DRM and they are also a bit too French. As well, I played Assassin's Creed before I had principles and found it to be the gaming equivalent of Lindsay Lohan: pretty enough on the outside, but a bit of a meandering mess underneath the surface. However, I won't let that stand in the way of a fine bit of CGI. The trailer features Ezio, the hero from Assassin's Creed 2, possibly attempting to assassinate the Pope, something I'm sure many in Northern Ireland can aspire to. Standing in his way is a company of soldiers and the Sheriff of Nottingham from Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. And it seems Ezio has brought friends, with equally questionable dress sense.

XCOM

I dunno if you played the original X-Com game. It was an isometric strategy game set slightly in the future where you had to defend the Earth from invasion by hostile alien forces, a highly original concept. The original game had an intoxicating blend of micromanagement and action sections, and was the sort of thing you would inadvertantly end up playing for 14 hours resulting in erectile dysfunction. So you can imagine my fucking RAGE when I learned that the newest XCOM game would be a first person shooter. I like the 1950s style, but what's with all the fucking black goo? That isn't scary, that's ink.

Killzone 3

I enjoyed Killzone 2. It wasn't perfect but when it was good, it was awesome. Killzone 3 looks like it will build on the strong foundations of it's predecessor. And add some jetpacks too. The trailer contains plenty of gameplay footage, and aside from the jetpacks, it appears that there will be a greater focus on melee attacks. Which is fine by me, I like to use my hands. Also, if anyone is interested in buying a jet pack, let me know, I have one for sale. I bought it off Michael Jackson at the end of the Dangerous world tour. All he wanted for it was three wheels of Dairylea and a photo of my cousin.

Fallout: New Vegas

Did anyone else think that blowing up Megaton in Fallout 3 was the most satisfying moment of gameplay you'd ever experienced? I know I did. I don't care if it made me mega-evil, it got me all the bitches. I even killed Free Dog. Video didn't kill the radio star, I did. See what I did there? Sigh. Anyways, New Vegas looks like it will be more of the same gameplay-wise, and that is certainly no bad thing.

Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

I don't know if it's even worth getting excited over. I want so much to enjoy each new Zelda game, but deep down I know nothing will compare to the Ocarina of Time, a game which made both ocarinas and time travel fashionable again. This one has a slightly different style of art, somewhere between Twilight Princess and The Wind Waker. It's on the Wii which means that playing it will no doubt involve multiple masturbatorial gestures, something I should excel in. And my other half loves the Zelda games, so I'll doubtless check it out at some point.

Star Wars: The Old Republic

This is the second trailer from Biowares Muhmorpuhguh, which is due to be released in Spring 2011. The first trailer was AWESOME. Coming in at just under 6 minutes long, this trailer is like a mini movie. I'm the sort of person who gets excited at Star Wars and MMORPGs. So this game has got me harder than Gandalf's staff. And with Bioware at the helm, I can only hope it lives up to my expectations in the same way The Phantom Menace didn't. I'm totally making lightsaber noises in my head right now. If you watch this trailer and don't find yourself doing the same thing, I won't be your friend anymore.

Child Of Eden

Coming from the same people who made the unforgettable Rez, Child of Eden is one tricky motherfucker to describe. It's creator, Tetsuya Mizuguchi, likes to base his games on the concept of synaesthesia, a neurological condition where a sufferers senses become crosswired, and they can taste sound or hear colours. Yeah, I totally just googled that. Anyway, this game is sort of a musical/visual shooter and will use some of the new hardware announced by Sony and Microsoft. It looks damnedly intriguing, and if the hardware lives up to expectations, definitely worth developing epilepsy for.

Portal 2

If you didn't play the first Portal game, shame on you! Valve's first-person puzzle/platformer was a sleeper hit, taking the company by surprise. It is definitely one of the most eagerly anticipated games at E3 2010, and the trailer above sent little shivers up and down my spine. The sequel promises to be bigger and better, and if it is injected with the same black humour as it's predecessor, this could be one great game.

Finally, I said I was going to cover the hardware announcements in later posts, and I will. I have deliberately avoided Kinect or PSMove software for this reason. However, have a look at this footage of a Star Wars game designed for the Kinect system.

What the fuck is that? Why are there stormtroopers AND spider droids AND tanks? That's completely incongruous! Why the hell do the stormtroopers just fall backwards like a sack of potatoes when they die? Darth Vader? What the fuck are you doing here? Why are you so skinny?

I sincerely hope that is something of a technical demo and not reflective of the final product. I'm pretty sure that if LucasArts has okayed this, George Lucas is going to hell.

A Personal History of Consoles and Machines

2010-06-16T06:40:00.000-07:00

Fuck my pants. I've just realised I've been playing computer games for 22 years. For clarification, not continuously. I also spent a lot of time drawing pictures of lightsabers.

My first gaming system was the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. This bad boy featured a breathtaking 16KB of RAM, which allowed for blistering processing of characters AND numerals. I'm not sure if I can really call it a gaming system, as I don't really remember playing any games with it, but I did program it to draw a circle and a clock. Fuck your Kinect, geometry and chronometrics is how we rolled in the old days. An interesting side note is that the ZX Spectrum was the first computer to be endorsed by the Lesbian and Gay Alliance, as it featured both male-to-male and female-to-female ports, earning it it's distinctive rainbow decal.

Now, I never really owned a Gameboy. It belonged to a kid in my class, Mark. Remember the fire in Leisureworld? They had an awesome fire sale afterwards and Mark picked up a Gameboy for £6. It had a crack in the screen and smelt of burnt Monster In My Pocket, but what are you gonna do? Mark kissed my girl on the P7 trip to Millisle, so he let me play with his Gameboy a bunch out of guilt. Coming in a snazzy grey and red colour combo, this beast featured a dazzling black and off-green display. It also introduced the world to Russian mind-control program Tetris. Everytime I hear that distinctive theme tune, I feel the strangest urge to kill Nelson Mandela, comrades. Interestingly enough, in Japan, the console was called Fanjitsan-su, which literally translates into RentBoy. This was changed for the Western market. I still haven't forgiven you, Mark.

I'm going to jump on a bit, simply because I never really played the Atari 2600 or it's ilk, so that brings us to the Amiga 500.

I have the fondest memories of this computer. Where to even begin? The pale gray colour, sat like a slab of sexy marble on my desk, aesthetically pleasing yet masculine. This bad boy rocked a 7.2 Mhz processor, with a massive 512Kb of RAM. It also featured a games catalogue that made most other manufacturers crap their pants in despair. Many hazy summer nights I would sit up for hours, playing Cannon Fodder or Sensible Soccer, or trying to draw boobies on Deluxe Paint. The Amiga 500 also used an external graphics adapter that plugged into the back of the machine to allow display on a TV. I was warned that if that the adapter was ever unplugged while the machine was on, the consequences would be as dire as crossing the streams of a proton pack. Sadly, I never got the chance to find out, as said adapter eventually exploded for some reason. My Dad said it was my fault. I think the blame should be placed at the feet of the Coke I spilt on it.

After the Amiga was buried (quite literally, in a shallow grave on Downhill Beach, which I visit once a year), I managed to get my hands on a Sega Megadrive. I had many happy times with the Megadrive. I became adept at the art of blowing a cartridge and tapping up, down, left, right, a+start before the theme tune ended. Aside from entering Sonic into the Gamers Hall of Fame, the Megadrive also gave me my first experience of 4-way gaming, through it's multitap. Nowadays, that sort of thing is irrelevant due to the expansion of online gaming, but back then having a four player game of Mega Bomberman on Christmas morning before vomiting chocolate reindeer on your cousin was a breathtaking experience. Here's a fact for you: In the US, the Megadrive was called a Genesis. The name was changed for the UK market as the band Genesis lodged a legal complaint. Apparently they were concerned that their fans might not be able to tell the difference between a cold, soulless machine and a games console.

Battle lines had been drawn in the previous console generation between Sega and Nintendo. You were one or the other, never both. If you like fruity looking controllers and games about rescuing unicorns from castles made of love and hearts (I made that up), you chose Nintendo. If you liked manly, dangerous consoles with games featuring men on motor bikes hitting each other with cattle prods (I didn't make that up), then you chose Sega.

Sega kinda lost their way a bit with the Dreamcast and the Saturn. Admittedly, there were some excellent games on the Dreamcast (Soul Calibur etc.) but the public didn't buy enough of them and Sega became developers rather than manufacturers.

Gamers now had a choice between Sony and Nintendo, with their Playstation and N64 systems. I chose the N64, and to this day I still think I chose wrong. There was just so much more going on with the Playstation than the N64. Disc-media driven, better processing power, more variety, and it had Final Fantasy 7 on it, possibly the best game ever made? The only thing that the N64 had which trumped the Playstation was Goldeneye and it's spiritual successor, Perfect Dark. Goldeneye and Perfect Dark introduced some of the staples of FPS gaming we know today. Sniper rifles, manual aiming, secondary functions on weapons, maiming innocents for fun whilst keeping within mission objectives. Fantastic. Also, Joanna Dark was the first videogame character I ever had a crush on. Man, I woulda dragged myself naked through broken glass just to hear her fart through a walkie talkie. Actually, you know what? Fuck you Playstation! N64 Thugz for life!

Well, that brings me to the end of this little trip down memory lane, and it's been pleasant. I've overlooked some things that I'm ashamed of (Sega CD32X), and some things that are too traumatic to write about (Sega Game Gear with a TV Tuner).

I hope you've enjoyed it.

Now I'm off to print out a picture of Joanna Dark and enjoy myself some more.

On being a gamer...

2010-06-14T11:10:00.000-07:00

If you play computer games with any level of passion, the following should be familiar to you upon meeting a new person.

Person: So, what do you do in your free time?
You: Oh you know, the usual sort of stuff. I play computer games quite a bit.

Right there. That's when you know the entire conversation is going downhill from here. Even saying the words 'computer games' to someone I assume to be a non-gamer makes me gag a bit. It just doesn't sound good. I can't help it though, that's what they're called. You could go for the more American 'video games' but then you come off even worse I think.

Likely there will be a bit of a pause. Not long enough to be uncomfortable, but long enough for you both to register it. The person is likely now desperately trying to find something to say, and this furious neural activity will probably manifest with a slightly constipated look on their face. The conversation can go one of two ways now. The conversation can end abruptly with the individual walking away making a mental note not to bother you again, or it can continue, along the lines of:

Person: Oh really? What sort of games do you play?

This question can either be asked with a genuine innocence (which is ok) or a smirking, condescending sneer that makes you want to hit yourself in the face for getting into this conversation (which most psychologists would say is not ok).

The problem with that question is it's like asking a ballet enthusiast what their favourite type of ballet is. Chances are they prefer the ballets that feature ballet dancing. I have a friend who only plays Pro Evolution Soccer. It's the only *hurp* computer game he plays and it's times like this I wish I was him.

So instead you're forced to give the stock answer.

You: Oh, you know, I like all different types.

Which isn't a very good response. Why? Because it begs additional questions, the answers to which will dig you deeper into your hole. Observe:

Person: What game are you playing right now then?

Don't say World of Warcraft. Even if you do play WoW, pretend you don't. I'll explain why some other time.

You: Oh, I'm playing Bioshock.
Person: Bioshock? What's that?

Now, you could go off into a diatribe on Bioshock's artwork and style, its discourse on Randian philosophy and its examination of the nature of men, but you won't. Because you know the other person probably just won't get it.

You: It's a shooting game. It's sort of underwater.
Person: Oh, ok, sounds fun. I'll see you later.
You: See ya.

So now you've done it. You are now a gamer, and the individual you have just spoken to believes that the second you get home, you'll strip down to a wifebeater and boxers, open a two litre bottle of Coke, game for seven hours straight and then cry yourself to sleep.

Which might be true, but I'm not here to judge.

One problem is the games themselves, another aspect are the gamers who play them.

Let's face it, even in these days of Animal Crossing, and the Wii and Nintendogs and all that crap, games are generally quite a boyish experience, with explosions and fast cars and wicked awesome guns.

I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with this, but there is no denying that this is probably the only lasting impression a non-gamer is going to have after a brief exposure to the medium. And it's likely that this impression will stop a non-gamer from sitting down for couple of hours and actually trying a game out, which is a pity.

Maybe it's an issue inherent in the medium. A book, a movie, a TV show, they require only passive participation on the part of the spectator. A game, on the other hand, requires commitment from its player. It is a wholly active pastime, and the player needs to invest time and energy to ensure an emotional connection with the characters and thus a satisfactory experience.

Personally, I feel that dismissing computer games *boke* on the basis of observation of gameplay is akin to dismissing a film after watching the opening credits. Sure, you've had a look at the constituent components, but the sum is always greater than the parts.

But a change in this arrangement will only come with time, and one can't deny that advances in technology will help speed this process. An Xbox or a PS3 controller, to me, feels natural, it's operation buried deep down on some subconscious level. For a non-gamer, a controller is just a lump of plastic with WAY too many buttons on it. For that individual, the controller requires constant awareness and this fact stops them from fully engaging with the game. I hope that control systems like Kinect and the Sony motion controller can help allow non-gamers to see beyond the technical limitations of input devices and really enjoy games at the same level they would enjoy a good book etc. but only time will tell.

As I said earlier another problem is gamers themselves. We don't do ourselves any favours.

Person: What are you playing?
You: Grand Theft Auto 4. It's basically a crime game, but that isn't really doing it justice. It's set in Liberty City, basically a living, breathing digitised version of New York. I can sit here in my car and watch cops chasing down thieves, see car accidents happening around me, listen to the radio, or I can drive to another part of town and walk along the beach. It has this epic story centering around a refugee trying to leave his past behind and lead a good life, but finding out that it isn't easy to do, and that his past is reaching out to drag him under.
Person: Wow, so what are you doing now?
You: Erm...I'm repeatedly driving over a hooker.

Read Dead Reduction

2010-06-14T07:23:00.000-07:00

Cougars.

Motherfucking cougars.

Apparently in the Old West, a cougar could not only kill a stallion with a single glancing bite, it could also fling a man into the air and off a cliff with ease. I can only assume that these animals were ruthlessly hunted down into extinction as part of Manifest Destiny or they would likely be the dominant species in the modern-day US.

For the uninitiated, I'm playing Red Dead Redemption, the latest videographic (it's a word) opus from Rockstar Games, developers of the Grand Theft Auto series. Taking place during the swan song of the Old West, it weaves the themes of revenge, loyalty, tyranny and...what's that other one? Oh yes, redemption.

You play the role of John Marston, very bad man turned rancher, forced out of very bad man retirement by government agents who intend for you to hunt down and eliminate the members of your former gang.

Thus the scene is set.

In some ways Red Dead Redemption is a shining example of how when a studio gets it right, they get it so right.

But I'm not terribly interested in what they've done right from a technical point of view. Yes, Rockstar have created one of the most detailed game worlds that my face has ever seen. Yes, the combat is much improved over the likes of GTA IV and the Dead Eye system is great fun (I like to slow down time and shoot my own horse in the bum). Yes, the lasso is up there with the Gravity Gun and the Fat Man in terms of fun equipment options.

But RedDedRed has other things going for it, aside from the gameplay and graphics aspect. And sound. Very good soundtrack that I will pay no attention to here.

I'm gonna digress here for a second to go back to the lasso. If any developer ever reads this blog (which is pretty fucking unlikely at this point, but whatevs) and you're making a game, heed this advice: PUT A LASSO IN IT. Do it. I can't think of a single game that wouldn't benefit from some added lasso action.

Call of Duty: Modern Lasso. "Ramirez, defend Burger Town. With your lasso!"
World of Lasso. "You are not prepared! For my lasso!"
Super Mario Lasso. "Your princess is in another castle! Likely doing something with a lasso!"

Just do it. Except on the Wii. I want to be able to lasso things, I don't want to look like a retard in my own living room while I'm doing it.

Anyway, back on topic.

Yeah, so as I was saying, forget about all the standard things that make RedDedRed excellent. I'm going to focus on the things you won't have read about in reviews.

The horses are as integral to this game as the guns are. I loved the fact you could go out onto the plains, catch your own horse (WITH THE LASSO) and then break it in (dirty). I loved the fact you could then whistle for your horse and it would come to you. Eventually. And when I say come to you, I actually mean sprint to a point about 10 feet away from where you are standing.
I also liked how you developed a bond with your horse over time, increasing it's stamina. And then how you could mercilessly shoot your horse in frustration because you failed to stop a roadside robbery and then skin it. And then dance around with it's blood smeared all over your body. Ok, so I added that last bit, but being able to skin animals and sell the hides is a nice touch.

On that note, wouldn't it be great if we lived in a simpler time where we could skin animals that we find lying around and sell them to Sainsburys? No? Ok then.

There's a whole shitload of minigames too. You can play Blackjack, Texas Hold 'Em, Liar's Dice, arm wrestling, and Five Finger Fillet. I've probably overlooked something, so let's call it...erm...Miners Strike?

Anyway, Five Finger Fillet is that game you might have seen in Aliens. You know where Bishop puts his hand over Bill Paxtons and then gets a knife and only cuts himself a little tiny bit? You know the scene, and then Ripley flips out because she finds out Bishop is a 'synthetic' and she doesn't want the cornbread? Anyways, you can play that game in RedDedRed. It's like a rhythm game and I'm fucking shit at it, but you might enjoy it. Horse Shoes! That's what I overlooked!

The game has a more serious tone than GTA IV. I'm grateful for that, because the humour in GTA IV wasn't particularly funny. The number of times I wanted to put a bullet in that fat fuck Roman. As my Dad says 'Nobody likes a clown. Or a ginger.' If you fancy a laugh in RedDeadRed, I suggest lassoing some innocent bystander and dropping them on the railroad tracks. Another fun thing to do is when you see someone getting kidnapped, shoot the victim. The kidnapper keeps carrying them. I had a good chortle imagining the kidnapper returning to his base only to find his victim all dead. C'mon, if that happened to you, you would feel like SUCH A DICK.

The cutscenes aren't great, I tell thee. Rockstar can't seem to articulate joints terribly well, so like GTA IV, the cutscenes appear to be populated by grizzled Thunderbirds. I wish they'd work on that.

Before I finish I would like to address the fact that there are a myriad of outfit options in RedDedRed. Apart from some reservations about effectively playing Old West Barbie on my PS3, I might have liked a pretty dress as an option. Just saying, being able to put on a pretty dress and go and shoot mutants in Fallout 3 was one of my favourite aspects of the game, and I think that's true of a lot of players.

Maybe something for the sequel, eh? And there will be a sequel, because in the end it turns out the entire game was a dream. A unicorns lovely lovely dream.