Sage advice for astronauts

If you’re in the future, and you work on a spaceship, and you get a call telling you to go and check out some remote colony because contact has mysteriously been lost, do yourself a favour and call in sick that day. Skive for your life. The only reason space colonies, and the drifting spacecraft spookily orbiting above them, stop communicating is because they’ve been overrun by bloodthirsty monsters. This is scientific fact.

Eurogamer reviews sci-fi horror game Dead Space.

“RealPlayer: like the Black Death, but made of software”

Feeling ranty? Techradar’s just uploaded “48 things we hate about tech“, which enabled yours truly to cheer himself up by being nasty about things. Any I’ve missed?

A happy Xbox experience

My Xbox 360 developed the dreaded Red Ring of Death the other week, and after trying the various troubleshooting tips it was pretty obvious that the ‘box was broken. So with a sinking feeling I called tech support to try and arrange a repair.

What I expected was this:

• Hours on the phone being passed from pillar to post
• Days and days before my console was picked up
• A couple of months without an Xbox while it sat in Germany gathering dust
• A returned Xbox with “there’s bugger-all wrong with it” written in biro on it

What I got was this:

• Talking to a real person within a few minutes
• An emailed shipping label that arrived during the phone call
• Pickup of the console within three hours
• An email update telling me it was fixed a week and a half later
• Delivery a few days after that, on the promised date
• A note explaining that my motherboard and DVD drive were buggered, so they’d been replaced
• A complimentary month’s membership of Xbox Live

Credit where credit’s due, that’s made me feel very positive about Microsoft.

Dialogue in games: won’t somebody think of the parents?

When you’re a parent, you don’t get a lot of time to play games. More often than not, your gaming time is the odd late-night session when everyone else is in bed – and because everyone’s in bed, you can’t stick headphones on because you won’t be able to hear the baby monitor.

That’s not a problem if you’re playing arcade games or dumb shooters, but it’s a pain in the neck with more immersive things. You need to hear the dialogue because if you don’t, you haven’t a clue what’s going on. However, you can’t turn the TV up loud enough to hear the dialogue because if you do, there’s bound to be a HUGE BLOODY NOISE that wakes the baby, brings your gaming session to an abrupt halt and ends up with you sleeping in the shed.

Last night, I attempted to play Alone In The Dark. It certainly looks good, but I gave up after about 20 minutes. There’s loads of speech in it (in the first 20 minutes, anyway), but because the speech is interspersed with HUGE BLOODY NOISES I couldn’t turn the TV up loud enough to hear it.

GTA IV has loads of speech and lots of HUGE BLOODY NOISE in it too, but it has – yes! – subtitles. It spoils the immersion a little bit – some of the dialogue is even more clunky/cliched/annoying when it’s on the screen rather than in your ears – but at least you can work out what’s happening without ending up in the shed.

I know subtitles aren’t a big priority for game developers, but given that the average gamer is in their thirties there’s a good chance that a lot of game buyers are in the same quiet boat as me – and of course, people with hearing difficulties play games too.

A right royal pain in the GTAs

I’ve written before about the bad design decisions that can suck the joy from a game, encouraging you to put it back on the shelf and never return, and Grand Theft Auto 4 has a doozy: stupid bloody save points. It’s particularly noticeable on a mission where you have to trail a drug dealer’s car before taking out his associates; get any part of it wrong and you have to replay the whole mission again, cringing as once again your character makes an ill-judged and unfunny wisecrack about stalking women. It wouldn’t be so bad if the bits you had to replay weren’t so ARSE-NUMBINGLY DULL.

Computer games, diddies and the breakdown of society

This morning’s episode of Radio Scotland’s Morning Extra was about videogame violence and GTA IV (yep, I was the one who called in at the end to call irresponsible parents “diddies”, heh). I know phone-ins don’t exactly attract rocket scientists – I mean, they let me on air – but even by the usual standards of jaw-dropping nonsense I was gobsmacked by one caller. He thinks violent videogames are bad. He, er, lets his eight-year-old play 18-certificate video games for hours on end. He doesn’t approve of this.

WTF?

*bangs head on desk*

Blacksite? Blackshite, more like

I bought the Xbox game Blacksite (no, not at full price – are you mad? Fifteen quid from Amazon Marketplace) to find out whether it really was as bad as the reviews suggested.

It isn’t. It’s worse.

It’s not the bad voice acting, the soulless regurgitation of every first-person shooter cliche, the lazy respawning enemies to keep levels vaguely challenging or the fantastic decision that means your super-tough army type is incapable of opening a door by himself (seriously – you need to wait for a bit for no good reason and then summon a squad member to do it for you); it’s that the makers seriously expect you to pay fifty quid for a game that simply doesn’t work.

I’ve never played a game with so many bugs in it. Dead bodies float in the sky. Driving sections get confused and make you retrace your steps before an exit that wasn’t there before magically appears. Objectives don’t get updated, so you’ve cleared a level but keep being told you need to clear the level. And best of all, the frame rate doesn’t just drop – it dies. In one section you go round a corner and the frame rate drops below zero, with the screen freezing for a full ten seconds before lumbering back into arthritic life at a staggering 1 frame per second. And that’s not even a busy section with stacks of on-screen enemies pushing the console’s processor to the limits: it’s a bit when you’ve killed absolutely everybody and there’s sod-all happening.

There can only be three explanations for this. One, the game was never tested. Two, the game was tested but the testers were idiots. Or three, the publishers really wanted to rub their doughy buttocks in the face of every purchaser, but they didn’t have enough AirMiles – so they decided to make a rubbish game instead.

This is a game that still retails at forty to fifty quid. And publishers wonder why so many gamers rent or pirate games instead of buying them.

Xbox is “crack for kids”, says woman

A nice, reasoned piece in The Times by Janice Turner:

I refuse to buy them portable gaming consoles, Xboxes, GameCubes, PS2s. These are Satan’s Sudoku, crack cocaine of the brain. Even the crappiest cartoon or lamest soap teaches a child about character, plot, drama, humour, life. Playing videogames, children are mentally imprisoned, wired into their evil creators’ brains.

Consoles are crack for kids? I suspect that increasingly, the crack for kids is, er, crack.

From The Independent:

Drug agencies in the city [Cambridge] report a marked increase in clients using crack cocaine in the past 18 months, mostly men in their 20s and 30s. Younger people are also getting hooked. Cambridgeshire Youth Offending Service is treating a girl aged 13 who is taking crack more than once a week.

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?

Escapist review of Halo 3

Absolutely bang on.

Via David. Language isn’t safe for work…