Gaming
Videogames eat brains, says woman
Another day, another videogame health warning:
Children should be banned from playing computer games until the age of seven because the technology is “rewiring” their brains, it is claimed.
Claimed by one woman, that is.
Blimey, another year’s nearly gone
As ever, magazines are doing their review of the year thing and I feel inspired to follow suit. Rather than a “what a year that was, eh?” thing, though, here’s a quick list of things I’ve really liked or been let down by this year.
Books: Mr Biffo, David Quantick and Charlie Brooker made me laugh so hard I probably damaged internal organs, and judging by the way Mrs Bigmouth has been laughing like a drain “Mommies Who Drink” is a hoot too. As always I read about 200,000 crime novels, of which the latest Ian Rankin was the most reliably entertaining, and I loved Tokyo Year Zero by David Peace. Although by “loved” I really mean “was utterly freaked out by”. Which also applies to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
Music: Obligatory Radiohead joy aside (Reckoner is jaw-dropping), the Robert Plant/Alison Krauss collaboration was wonderful despite my hatred of Robert Plant’s voice and my loathing of music that sounds vaguely country. I bought all the Talk Talk records I’d already bought several times already, rediscovered the joys of The Big Dish, was let down by a rather anodyne Sugababes album (what a great first single, though!), discovered Regina Spector about a decade after everybody else and danced very badly to pretty much everything Timbaland has had a hand in this year.
Springsteen’s Magic was an unexpected old-school delight, Mark Ronson’s version of Valerie is one of the most joyous things I’ve heard for ages, Girls Aloud’s Tangled Up was worth buying for Call The Shots alone, and the reissued Joshua Tree reminded me why I used to really love U2.
Tech: Both Vista and Leopard fell into the “glad I have ‘em, could live without ‘em” category, DRM didn’t quite die - although the signs are encouraging - and I had to eat my words about the iPhone, which I thought would be a pile of crap but which I - rather shame-facedly - love dearly despite the lack of 3G. I was also wrong about the Apple TV, which I was very excited about pre-release: it seems as if Apple lost interest in it by the time it actually came out, and it’s become a technological footnote rather than anything more exciting.
FARK, Flickr and PopJustice remained brilliant, Facebook walks the line between fun and being really, really annoying, Newsgator/NetNewsWire/iPhone Integration is better than sliced bread and Logic Pro is God’s own music software. Of the big stuff, the scariest stuff happened (and will continue to happen) in the world of privacy.
Games: Halo 3, too short. Timeshift, predictable but fun enough. Bioshock, flawed but great. Still sod-all decent stuff for the Wii. Orange Box is great value for money, but Half-Life 2 Episode 2 frequently feels like Space Invaders (the antlions in the tunnels, the striders attacking). And not in a good way. Crackdown was a hoot and is well worth tracking down second-hand on eBay. On the PC I loved the Minerva mods for Half-Life 2, but the much-hyped STALKER bored me to tears when it wasn’t crashing.
A major annoyance for me was the increasing focus on online gaming, which means the single player bit of any console game can be completed in about six hours by an inept gamer like me. That probably translates as three seconds for anybody that’s any good. At 40-odd-quid per game, that’s hardly value for money.
The interesting/depressing thing about gaming this year was its increasing resemblance to the film industry: blockbuster-driven with months and months of hype and overly excited previews, with reviewers being outflanked so their words don’t appear in print or online until a terrible game’s hit the top of the charts. Never mind the quality, just look at the first-week sales. A lot of very bad games made a great deal of money this year.
Also depressing was the repeat of last year’s Wii bundle bastardy, where retailers took advantage of Nintendo’s inability to make enough consoles by forcing desperate punters to buy big bundles of crap. They’re doing it again this year.
On a happier note, Eurogamer’s featuring some excellent games writing and the new Rock, Paper, Shotgun blog has quickly become a favourite bookmark.
Magazines that I don’t write for: EDGE and The Word were ace as ever, although the latter is teetering on the very edge of the abyss where Uncut and Mojo live. Empire seems to have found its mojo again, Q’s better than before - less list-y, with proper writing again - although I’m now old enough not to care about 99% of the music it covers, and Car magazine remains a work of art with superb writing to boot.
What about you, ladies and gentlemen?
Sam & Max on the iPhone? Yes please
Gizmodo’s been playing with a LucasArts games emulator that works fine and dandy on the iPhone, and says:
I wonder if the LucasArts people will see this and decide to partner with Apple to release updated and higher resolution versions of—at least—the Monkey Island, Indy and Sam&Max series. Or maybe Blizzard can release the good old Starcraft or Warcraft, two games that will play perfectly in this platform. Call me a nostalgic, but I would get them all.
As Alec Meer writes on the excellent Rock, Paper, Shotgun, which is rapidly becoming my favourite gaming site:
…a touch-screen phone with which I can pretend Sam & Max Hit The Road is still as funny as I thought it was ten years ago? Ooh. And yes, I know I could already do this on a horrible Windows Mobile Smartphone, but those are, as I say, horrible.
Escapist review of Halo 3
Absolutely bang on.
Via David. Language isn’t safe for work…
Richard Cobbett on BioShock
In a nutshell, if Bioshock isn’t Game of the Year, odds are good that we atheists are going to look a little silly at having to explain God showing up to make a new Monkey Island. It’s the best FPS since Half-Life 2. It’s the closest thing to System Shock 2 since Shock 2.
And if there’s any justice in the world, everyone responsible for the miserable pile of arse that was Doom 3 is out there right now, slashing their wrists with the retail CDs and sobbing to sleep on unsold expansion packs.
But while it’s great, it’s flawed (I’m still in the early stages, but his criticisms of the stuff I’ve played so far are bang on): Beware the plot twist!
Out of the blue, Irrational suddenly feels the urge to pull down its pants and start mooning you through the screen with a bit of bizarre meta-gaming nonsense. And I’m not sure why.
Wii Fit sounds like a hoot
The next Wii Sports (ie. a top laugh for pissed people)? It certainly sounds like it.
Bioshock is beautiful (and bloody scary)
If you can stomach the download - it’s over a gigabyte, and thanks to my patchy wi-fi it took eight hours to download - the Xbox 360 demo of Bioshock is stunning. You get about an hour of gameplay, and if that’s representative of the game as a whole it’s going to be incredible. The ruined art deco environments are beautiful, the gameplay’s exciting and the atmosphere is genuinely unsettling.
Please please please let the game be as good as the demo.
On game save points and the tyranny of console game prices
Dear game developers: could you make it easier to save game progress, please?
I’ve gone from loving Resident Evil 4 on the Wii to loathing it, the people who wrote it, and anybody who’s met anybody who knows the people who wrote it. The culprit is a section where you’re inside a house as the zombies attack, and to date I reckon I’ve been killed a few hundred times there. Restarting that section every time is annoying enough, but when I’ve had enough and turn off the Wii it means when I come back, the save point is so far back it may well be in Resident Evil 3.
This is one of my pet hates with games, particularly console ones: the combination of a slightly too difficult set-piece and inconsiderate save points sucks all the fun out of a game very quickly.
And my other pet hate: console pricing. Bioshock’s out on the 24th, and it’s £29.99 on PC or £44.99 for Xbox 360. I can only assume the difference is the razor blade model of the console business: sell the kit at a loss and make up the difference in licensing fees from the games. But a 33% price difference between PC and console is taking the piss.
Wii will hurt you
For all I love Nintendo’s Wii and reckon it’s a work of genius, I’m really not sure about the Wiimote from an ergonomic point of view. As someone who’s had repetitive strain injury for years I’m pretty good at keeping the symptoms at bay (so RSI-inducing games such as Rayman Raving Rabbids are a no-no), but over the last week my right hand has started doing the “hello! I’m a claw!” thing anyway. It doesn’t look great, and it’s really rather uncomfortable.
The culprit? Resident Evil 4, or rather using the Wiimote for RE4. Rather alarmingly, just 20 minutes of holding the Wiimote with fingers poised over the A and B buttons is enough to give me crab hands - whereas *hours* on the Xbox don’t cause any ill-effects at all. I’m beginning to think that what’s fine for Wii Tennis - a controller with all the ergonomics of a house brick - is a really bad idea for other games.
I know some of you have Wiis and don’t have RSI (as far as I’m aware) - are you experiencing sore hands from gaming with the Wiimote?
Wii will shock you
I’ve been playing a bit of Resident Evil 4 on the Wii, and it’s amazing - not the game so much as using the Wiimote to play it. What is (so far) a pretty standard O Noes! Zombies! game becomes considerably scarier and more stressful when you’re trying to aim your gun for real or stab someone with the Wiimote.
It also freaks out the dog if you’re playing it on headphones.