Archive for July, 2007
Quick review: The Darkness (Xbox 360)
When Deus Ex: Invisible War came out, I was pretty excited. I loved the original Deus Ex - it’s still one of my favourite games - and the prospect of a new game with better technology had my credit card twitching long before it came out.
And my god, did that game suck.
The game itself was fine, mostly, but what ruined it for me was the loading. It seemed that every time you walked through a door, there’d be an interminable loading screen before you could do the next bit. I reckon for every hour I spent playing the game, I spent 55 minutes watching loading screens. It was like a really good episode of, say, House stretched out to 37 hours because it cuts to an ad break every time Gregory blinks.
The Darkness is a bit like that.
Loading screens ruined the game for me. They are quite witty, but the novelty wears off after a while and you get into a rhythm like this:
- Get assignment in subway station
- Get train to other subway station
- Swear at the loading screen
- Go up the stairs
- Swear at the loading screen
- Realise you’ve gone to the wrong subway station and head back downstairs
- Swear at the loading screen
- Get on a train to the other subway station
- Swear at the loading screen
- Go up the stairs
- Swear at the loading screen
And so on.
I’ll cheerfully admit that I’m spoilt by games that have nailed the loading thing - Crackdown, Halo 2 - but surely today’s next-gen console technology means we don’t have to sit through this stuff until the end of a level? It’s particularly frustrating with The Darkness, because it’s based on atmosphere. Every time the loading screen kicks in and you unleash a volley of expletives about the developers, you’re out of the game.
It’s a real shame, because the rest of the game is largely great (despite some minor issues - the city streets are empty of non-player characters when the baddies aren’t around; the hell levels are a pain in the arse to navigate; the map’s useless and once you’ve killed bad guys there’s a lot of wandering around empty stages) and the darkness powers are hilarious and gory. Overall though - for me at least - it’s Invisible War all over again: a potentially great game that really got on my nerves.
Anyone got Resident Evil 4 on the Wii? Any cop?
Car owners! Considering leaving the safety of your driveway?
Then why not get a ball hammer and wallop every single body panel until there’s not a square centimetre of undamaged car left? That way, when you come out of Tesco and it’s been pranged again, you won’t be annoyed - because you did it first!
(Big scratch from some supermarket arse this morning, huge dent in a wheelarch from a multi-story arse yesterday. Gaaaaah)
I know a chap who uses his cameraphone to take pics of the cars next to him when he parks at Tesco, so when the inevitable happens and they scratch the crap out of his car, he can show the pics to the police. Seems like a fruitless exercise to me.
Die Hard 4.0
Is brilliant. Particularly the bit where the baddies attempt to download the contents of every single database in the whole wide world onto a laptop. You fools! You’d need two laptops for that!
It is good, though, in a big dumb fun kind of way. Although as soon as you notice the product placement (Alienware, BMW, Gears of War…) you end up playing the “which product’s going to recur next?” game.
[insert usual rant about "30 mins of ads and trailers before a two hour movie being particularly annoying when you've got a slipped disc and can't sit still for long" here]
Glasgow Airport irony
The Glasgow Airport attack has thrust two men into the media spotlight: Bilal Abdulla, a doctor at Paisley’s RA hospital and (apparently) one of the two would-be bombers, and John Smeaton, the man who interrupted his cigarette break to punch said bombers.
Which means that in Scotland, smokers are protecting the public from doctors.
Heh heh heh.
*coughs up a lung*
I’m in ur airport, burning mah Jeep
The reaction to the bungled attack on Glasgow Airport has been interesting, and by “interesting” I mean “depressing”. Online the hardcore nationalists are blaming the English, others are blaming Asians (all of them, from what I can see) and a few others are suggesting it’s a false flag operation by the government to keep the population docile - although to be fair, the attacks so far have demonstrated a truly amazing level of incompetence, so maybe there’s some truth in that after all.
It’s not all doom and gloom, though. On MetaFilter it’s been pointed out that if any terrorists want to get stacks of publicity and lots of new recruits to their cause, they should forget about Glasgow Airport and drive a burning jeep into Paris Hilton.
In among the casual racism - overheard: “Airport… Asians… Enoch Powell…” - people are already demanding a crackdown on this sort of thing. But a crackdown on what? Leaving aside the fact that the car bombs didn’t go off because the terrorists apparently got all their bomb-making knowledge from bad Hollywood movies, most of the ingredients in their bombs were everyday things: petrol, patio gas cylinders, nails. It’s very depressing to think that any Asian family popping to Homebase to get a gas refill for the barbecue in the next few weeks is going to find the DIY shopping experience even less pleasant than it usually is.
I agree with the various bloggers, such as Devil’s Kitchen, who point out that while it’s easy - and important - to mock the failed bombers (why couldn’t the papers have run a pic of the bombers with the screaming headline, “TWATS”?), there’s no reason to assume that any future attacks will be entrusted to the paramilitary wing of the special school. And that’s scary.
It’s scary for two reasons. The first is that it’s perfectly possible to make incendiary or explosive devices with everyday objects - with a bit of lateral thinking, I could turn the contents of my shed into an arsenal - and there’s bugger-all you can do about it (although I’m sure that won’t stop someone from writing to the Guardian suggesting that patio gas should be banned for anti-terrorism and pro-environment reasons). And the second reason is that no matter what you do, there’s always a way for a determined terrorist to cause carnage. Sure, Glasgow Airport will probably put some of those anti-truck concrete barriers in front of the terminal, but how do you stop someone walking in with a bomb belt or an explosive in their rucksack? And of course, airports are pretty tough targets compared to shopping centres, to city streets, to buses…
What we need here is intelligence, in the security services sense. Better intelligence won’t stop all atrocities from happening - not when Brits are making bombs from old barbecues - but it can help prevent some of them, and if attacks do happen it can follow the terrorists’ tracks to find accomplices, chains of command (if such things even exist) and so on - so if terrorists are part of a network, that network can be found and smashed before it attacks again.
Of course, that would cost money. A lot of money. The sort of money you’d spend on an ill-conceived, multi-billion pound ID card programme or something.
Hang on…