Archive for June, 2007
A little business idea
The Scottish Executive’s war on booze is stepping up, with talk of price controls, making booze harder to get and, if doctors have their way, raising the legal age to buy booze in shops (but not pubs) from 18 to 21. Given that I have an estate car and England’s only an hour or two away, I feel a business venture coming on…
Halo 2 PC. Why?
Jim Rossignol reviews the PC port of Halo 2, and he isn’t impressed.
Halo 2 is a lazy port of a less-than-perfect sequel to an FPS that was pretty good on a console and only average on a PC.
As he points out, what’s particularly bizarre is the fact it’s a Vista-only release, so you need Microsoft’s latest shiny OS to play it at all. That’s just silly: this time last year I wrote that Halo 2 was the best game on the Xbox 360, but that was more because there were sod-all Xbox 360 games out. A year back, Halo 2 was in the bargain bins at £4 because it was an old, old game - and now it’s been released for the PC, the platform of choice for cutting-edge gaming and graphics cards that cost more than your house.
I’m sure the reason Halo 2 is Vista-only is because it supports multiplayer over Live, but whatever the justification the result is that you’ve got Vista-level hardware requirements and normal retail pricing for a previous-generation Xbox game. If the plan is to sell lots of copies of Vista on the back of Halo 2, I think Microsoft will be disappointed - and if people buy it in the belief that this is the cutting edge of PC gaming, they’re going to be even more disappointed.
Please God, let Crysis live up to the hype…
Now Sony’s being accused of blasphemy
Sony’s in trouble again, this time because the game Resistance: Fall of Man features Manchester Cathedral.
THE CHURCH of England has threatened legal action against Sony after a violent PlayStation 3 computer game depicts Manchester Cathedral as a back-drop for a battle.
Church leaders accused Sony of “desecration” and said it had not asked permission to use the building.
The new game, Resistance: Fall of Man, sees a virtual shoot-out between warring soldiers inside a mock-up of the cathedral.
If I were a smart-arse I’d make a sarky comment about Church officials being unable to tell the difference between reality and fiction.
The new Linkin Park album is pretty good
There’s a sentence I never thought I’d write - but it’s true. It’s not a masterpiece by any means - it’s derivative as hell, and the band don’t seem to be sure whether they want to be Faith No More, U2 or (on occasion) Radiohead - but as someone who likes Faith No More, U2 and Radiohead that’s no bad thing. Plus, the annoying rapper bloke barely raps, which I’m sure you’ll agree is A Good Thing.
Wi-Fi again
With Wi-Fi scares proliferating, Bad Science is still on the case. Two brilliant comments in particular:
There’s just no point arguing with stupidity. If their arguments were not based on evidence and logic then you’re wasting your time. I can’t remember whose quote this is, but it has served me well.“Never try to teach a pig to sing. It’s a waste of your time, and annoys the pig.”
And a good point here:
In contrast to the few smoking studies before 1950 there are a lot of EM studies now. The studies are ignored by the EM scaremongers because they don’t like the results. So EM scaremongers are something like smoking-is-harmless people.
Biffovision: a review
Jonathan Deamer’s reviewed the pilot of Biffovision, a warped parody of kids’ TV from the mind of Mr Biffo.
I watched it in the wee small hours after one beer too many, which I suspect is the perfect viewing environment…
Games for grown-ups
There’s an interesting contrast between the age of gamers and the mental age of games. The average gamer is 33 (the average buyer is 40, but that average includes parents buying games for their kids) but in many cases the mental age of games seems to be around 14. It’s an endless procession of pumped-up, vaguely homoerotic muscly, monosyllabic men who, like, totally go and kick alien ass!
Don’t get me wrong, there’s always room for daft, childish fun - Earth Defense Force 2017 has a mental age of about three, and it’s a hoot - but the word I’m seeing more and more in interviews with developers is “morality”. In the forthcoming Bioshock, the relationships between non-player characters are crucial and you’ll have to make some difficult moral choices; in Haze, your super-soldier discovers that things are considerably less black and white in war than they might first seem, and so on. I’ve just picked two games off the top of my head but there are plenty more.
Stories in games are nothing new, of course, but what’s significant now is that the technology has grown up, the gamers have grown up (your 33-year-old average gamer has been playing games for 12 years) and our expectations have grown up too. Creating realistic, immersive worlds is routine, and at least some developers seem to have the attitude that pretty isn’t enough.
Of course, not all developers (or perhaps their publishers) have that attitude. Building grown-up games is harder than bashing off yet another Spider-Man tie-in, and desperately bad games such as Sonic 3D still rocket to the top of the charts and stay there. But the same dull cash-chasing applies to other forms of entertainment, so for every American Pie rip-off there’s an American Beauty. As for games, as long as you have developers like Warren “Deus Ex” Spector, who says things like this:
To grow our audience to match our ballooning next-gen development and marketing costs, we have to broaden the range and increase the quality of stories we tell. We need to lure people in with things that are familiar and comforting, and we must take interaction out of the realm of the abstract and into an area they already understand - emotionally satisfying stories about recognizable people, stories that illuminate and enrich their lives.
…I’m optimistic.
I am going to shoot myself in the head
…if I can’t find a way to turn off my internal jukebox. For no good reason it’s decided to fill my head with cheese at the slightest provocation, so for example I’d written the phrase “just say the word” in an email and boom! “Just say the word, woaaaah! Su-su-sudio!” kicks off in my head, Phil Sodding Collins in full effect. Playing with Dreamweaver? Dreams by that one-eyed woman starts up. A mention of satellites in a piece about GPS? Sleeping Satellite by Tasmin Bloody Archer.
Even stuff I like is starting to get annoying.
/takes painkillers
/”the drugs don’t work / they just make you worse…”
/ shoots self
If it weren’t for smokers, smokers wouldn’t be so unpopular
As pubs go, my local is fairly smoker-friendly: there’s a nice outside area with an awning to keep off the rain (when they remember to put it up), halogen heaters to stop you freezing, and a bunch of benches and tables you can park your arse on while you puff. Plenty of ashtrays, too: a bunch of permanent wall-mounted ones, and ones on each bench.
The area is fenced off, and beyond the fence is some nice landscaping. Last time I was outside there - a few weeks back - it was grass. Tonight, it’s a solid carpet of cigarette butts. Hundreds, maybe thousands of the things.
OK, it’s a pub, so people are going to be there, a bit pissed, a bit clumsy. But the sheer number suggests that it’s more than that; it means that lots of people are going out there for a smoke and deliberately ignoring every single ashtray. Maybe I’m out of the loop and ashtrays are uncool, but whatever the reason the end result is that when non-smokers go out there - which they do, it’s a beer garden - they’re going to think that smokers are a bunch of inconsiderate wankers.
So when the Scottish Executive announces a new anti-smoking drive such as, I dunno, making us wear bells in public while we’re pelted with rotten tomatoes, or when pubs make their beer gardens non-smoking and effectively ban people from having a cig in the open air, the non-smokers will go “bloody right! Wankers, the lot of ‘em!” Considerate smokers can argue till they’re hoarse (which won’t take long, thanks to the cigs) that the mess is caused by an inconsiderate minority, and they’re right. But nobody will listen.
So thanks a lot, folks. Once again a minority of wankers makes life that little bit more shitty for everybody else.
Mac Mini, anyone?
My Mac Mini’s no longer needed so before I stick it on eBay, I thought I’d see if anyone here fancies buying it. It’s two years old, boxed with original system discs, PowerPC 1.42GHz with a half-gig of RAM, 80GB drive and a combo DVD player/CD burner. Yours for… I dunno actually. Suggest a figure by email if you’re interested…