Coming back

So, basically I've been in not the best health lately and haven't spent any time at my PC... Then I was on holiday for a week and coincidentally I was quite lazy all through my illness AND holiday! So the blog has taken a back seat...

I'm pretty much back in good (well, better) health again and maybe even not so lazy... So the posts are on their way back aswell!

On a related note, I'm going to host a couple of relevant posts from my wife who will explain the delicate side of gaming from a ladies point of view and if there's any of you that have ideas for articles or reviews or cheese flavours - Send them to me!

See you soon.

Dimensional shift oncoming.

So, I got a bit carried away recently with an extraneous purchase... I had to justify it to myself, and the amount I saved was one part of that, another was that I like to be amongst the forerunners of new PC tech' so I'm then equipped to talk about it and more importantly (for my job), to sell it. It's a fantastic excuse, er, I mean "reason" for effectively spending over £300... *cough*

As I mentioned in a previous post, I preceded this purchase with a Graphics Card upgrade. For those that care, I'm now running an nVidia 285 GTX with one gigabyte of it's own stupid fast memory. Once that was fitted, tested and running smoothly I just had to wait for the real kit to arrive... Now there's a whole dull back story to this, that involves distribution channels for PC hardware that's immensely dull but can also be immensely impractical. Really, the way that this industry works leaves me as confused as a Redneck in a Sauna with his naked Mum and Sister...

Back to the point; The real upgrade here was a new monitor and matching 3D Glasses. As a consumer it would cost you lot somewhere in the region of around £350 to £400 for both items combined. I realise I could have gone the cheap way and bought a TV Guide when they next show Jaws 3D for the complimentary Red and Green Paper Glasses, but hey, I felt like fighting against the Credit Crunch in my own geeky way...

To give you a very quick rundown over how this all works, I'll try and keep it in terms that we can all understand... And do bear in mind, I'm glossing over all the technical details, not only because no-one wants to read technical white-sheet style crap, but because I'm lazy and don't want to do anymore "research"...

The glasses are actually kind of mini LCD screens that "blink" 60 times per second, per eye. As each eye blinks separately, the monitor is told to display 50% of the image in synchronisation with whichever eye is open. So when you combine the two lots of "blinks" at that speed (120 times per second), you get a solid image that appears to quite literally stand out from the screen. The reason it has to do it at 120 images per second is to stop users brains from exploding in the typical Scanners (check iMDb) way. You see, most older forms of proper 3D caused the majority of users to get massive amounts of retina strain, causing severe headaches. This obviously wouldn't be acceptable for anyone who's payed £400 for the latest tech-toy!

What you all REALLY want to know, quite obviously, is "Do I look a tit wearing the glasses?" and "Does it all actually work?". The answers, amazingly, are "No, not too much of a tit; just a bit..." and secondly "You're goddam fucking right it does!".

Right now there are quite a few upcoming technologies for 3D display, however this one here happens to be the most efficient right now. It's very easy to setup, it doesn't make your brain do an impression of a melon falling off a roof and most importantly, it genuinely works. The other techs' that are on their way or are being implemented just now are mostly built into the screens themselves, but there are many more problems associated with this; cost being the most considerable. I thought that £200-£250 was expensive for a 22 inch monitor but when the 3D screens become readily available we can look at way over twice that cost, possibly even three to four times that...

There is one minor problem right now... There isn't a single game out right now that is actually designed specifically to use this setup. However, there are a LOAD of titles in development for it, by pretty much every developer you can name and more importantly, through some clever programming nVidia have managed to make this third dimension work on older titles. There's a large list of games that all work with it on the nVidia website, and that list gets bigger every time they update the driver. Some of these games are absolutely spectacular in proper 3D.

Another big bonus to the whole idea is that it also works for 3D films, of which there are an increasing amount coming out; thanks to the iMax chain of cinemas. You can also make 3D pictures and photos using some clever software. This leads to the inevitable however; 3D naked people and probably also 3D naked people fucking... The Porn industry is almost always the deciding factor in whether a new media type becomes accepted as the standard or not. DVD was given a massive boost by porn, as was home video before that. I'm somewhat scared by the idea of large 3D peni (i prefer that as a plural of penis, than penises. Don't ask...) waving around the screen, but well, it'll undoubtedly rock many peoples boat! To be honest, I can't really see 3D porn taking off, but I've been wrong before...

To get to the crux of the matter, should you consider buying this? Well, I have two answers, one for those of you who're spending like it was 2005 and another for those of you who're waiting for the sky to fall on their heads due to the imminent end of the world through not having enough money/equity/whatever...

1 - If you can afford it and need to upgrade your monitor anyway, go for it, absolutely. I like getting technology early and so should all of you. The early adopters are the heroes of the modern world. Without people taking a risk on new technology we'd still be listening to cassettes and watching black & white TV and eating dinosaur poo (I made that last one up...).

2 - Yes. Do it, even if you cant afford it, sell your current monitor, your cat and family members if necessary. We're almost at a zenith on current display types and really we need 3D to come along and shake up the system. Do we need more hi-def? I'm already grossed out when I watch a talk show in hi-def, seeing the people's spots in pixel/pore perfect resolution, larger than my own hand... Hi-def is more than high enough; it's time we came up with something that has a greater impact on our viewing. That something is the third dimension.

We've been living in three (four if you're pedantic) dimensions since the dawn of time, can't we start watching things and playing things that way? What's the point of having two eyes with depth perception if our number one pastime isn't made better by two eyes instead of one? Go on people, reach out, sample the future. Just imagine, 3D genitals! Coming soon to a screen near you, smell and taste-o-vision! (maybe not...)

The Internet, in it's entirety.

I think this about sums it up, the collective knowledge of the whole planet:

Cats, nudity and anime. Is there anything else to the internet, really?

Dying 2 do it all over again! [pt2]

* - continued...

Now to me the Left 4 Dead 2 announcement should have been fantastic news, and Valve were a company I had a lot of respect for, not least because they don't normally rush a game to market, especially a follow-up to such an influential and important title. However the alarm bells started ringing in my head. It completely seemed to me like they'd turned into more little milk-maids of the game world, grasping L4D's udders and milking it for all it's worth.

I was upset and amongst the first group of people to post on forums, criticising Valve for their new found "biz" skills. I joined an online petition for Valve to release this as a simple add-on for their game, giving us faithful players the value that they had themselves promised us many times. You see L4D was meant to have additional story parts added to it as free downloads. New weapons, new maps and possibly even new enemies to eviscerate. I felt betrayed by the only big gaming company that seemed to care about their fans. I even enlisted friends to join the petition.

You see, I was a tit. I've come to realise that even though I criticise other people for finding the negatives before the positives, I actually do it myself. My first instinct is usually a brief hint of optimism followed by a larger dose of quiet pondering to whatever bad side there could be, and then elaborating on it. Thankfully I usually then go onto a further stage of analysis that's mostly hopeful.

A year. I really thought that twelve months wasn't enough time with a single game. Other than my wife (obviously) and music, there's rarely anything that extends beyond a couple months in entertainment time. Say we pay £30 for the average game, which most people get at least fifteen hours of play from; that's £2 per hour. There's not a lot you can do for that price. Fun parks take tens of pounds every hour from you, a film costs £15 for up to two hours. Really, it's amazing value. Sure you could say the PC or XBox costs much more initially, but that's actually irrelevant as most people get their value from that in the sheer quantity of other things to do than games.

I've since watched some more clips of L4D2 and read a whole lot more. I've re-discovered my faith in Valve. They've made so many little changes that we'd be playing a slightly different game every couple of days if they were to add them all incrementally. What I would like to see mostly, are a bigger variation on the Special Infected (boss zombies) and more maps. Valve have also released the official L4D authoring tools, allowing everyone and their goldfish to build maps and change whatever they like. They've made numerous fixes and improvements to the gameplay and have basically got rid of 90% of the server browsing functions (it actually works now). Valve really do have our interests at heart, and after I realised this I took my name off the petition/group-list that is berating them on facts we don't even really know yet.

So with a renewed enthusiasm, I decided to do a little preparation to my PC for what I'm sure is going to be the game of 2009. I upgraded my graphics from something stupidly powerful, to something ridiculously powerful. I purchased a new widescreen super duper ultra high refresh monitor, and the one really over-the-top accessory that's more like a kilo of cherries on top of the cake; 3D Glasses.... They however, are a topic for another post. I'll just say "goddam!"...

I keep checking on all the new zombie films that are coming out, and there's probably five or so every month now, and actually one or two every few months that look fairly decent! It's now getting to be as big as the rest of the horror genres combined. We see AAA blockbusters released that are just glorified zombie shoots. Will Smith in I am Legend being one of the more entertaining. Yet for all these great films, I'd trade them all in for the hope that Left 4 Dead 2 doesn't disappoint.

I'm not going to talk about the game in any vague detail, as there are hundreds of other and better informed sites doing that every day. I posted this because I realised that a simple game had the power to get me more riled up than my own countries politics and current affairs. It got me more excited than any news about a favourite bands album. Games truly have become the number one form of media based entertainment. It's about time we treated them in a mature way. Not stamping our feet when we get something we weren't expecting. If we stop acting like children maybe the developers will stop giving us products for children. Maybe in fact, we can have our cake and eat it...

Left dying to do it all over again! [pt1]

Of all things Zombie, my single favourite is Left4Dead; the multiplayer co-op survival horror first person shooter (fps) from Valve. It's quite literally genius. I've played it for eight hour sessions at a time, with only small breaks to get a cuppa or let nature's course (and the previous cuppa) run through, so to speak... I'm going to come back to L4D in a minute, but I have to inform you all how bad I have this Zombie bug.

On one hard-drive alone, I have a directory of just Zombie films. At the last count, a few months ago, it was at a hundred and twenty, plus... I've probably obtained roughly one or two more per week since then and easily have a hundred and fifty now. I've watched all of them barring maybe three. Every single one has it's own quality, even if in many cases that quality happens to be a total lack of quality; they can still be admired even for that though, and of course for having zombies in them.

It all started when I was about eleven or twelve and watched Evil Dead 2 with my parents. For the first time I could remember, I cried, not in fear, but from laughing my pre-teen ass off. It made me jump, shriek, jump again, then laugh. A full ninety minutes later I was exhausted and delirious. Stunning. After that baptism of blood it took many more years before I realised I'd become a closet zombiephiliac.

Later I started to admire the earlier Italian zombie films, initially the Fulci films and I then found my way to Day of the Dead; George A Romero's third film in his series. I also laughed at that film, but a completely different kind of laugh. I wasn't guffawing at the Abbot and Costello style slapstick of a man getting his ass kicked by his own, and still attached, Zombiefied hand, but at the sheer gruesome spectacle I was witnessing. At the time it was Tom Savini that blew me away. Seeing a man pulled in half, hearing his voice reach almost ultra-sonic levels as his vocal chords stretched, tore and finally rend apart, all on screen. No dark filters or night time lighting to hide shoddy effects. No, this looked as real as my own hand in front of my mouth.

As I got over my teenage years I began to understand what it was that Romero was actually doing in each of his films and my love for them grew. There were deep social and political issues that he dealt with, that in complete honesty no other director would touch. Around the same time I began tracking down more classic Italian zombie films and finally over the few years I've broadened my collection; figuring that if there's one genre I can have every single entry of, that would be the one. Really I should have picked something more artistic or classy. Then again, I'm basically a geek...

It's at this point that I came to play L4D. I was excited when I first read about it; multiplayer game's where you band together to fight a common enemy appeal to the social and competitive gamer in me. Soon after the screenshots, I was playing the beta version a couple months in advance of the full game being released. Only two small maps and a couple of guns, yet I played that fifteen minute snippet over and over, more times than I could possibly remember. I had Gears of War, Assassins Creed and many other excellent games at the time, but that little demo whipped 'em all, like a fat girl in black leather, called Miss Payne. Or something...

After what felt like aeon's, the full game came out; I'd pre-ordered and pre-loaded it from Valve's Steam gaming network. I started it up, kicked off the single player campaign and relived a combination of Evil Dead and Day of the Dead (with some 28 Days Later thrown in for good measure). It scared me, excited me, amused me and made me rush through to Audrey's office every ten minutes to tell her how I barely survived a fifty strong zombie horde rushing me at a breakneck pace. Me backing away, throwing a Molotov cocktail down on the ground to snag any zombies trying to get to me through the flames. There were hundreds of moments I played through, each one of them like a classic heart-stopping moment straight out of any of my favourite films. Pure and simple genius. The game is a classic.

Forward the clock on a few months, Valve are at some games show with a big announcement. I wouldn't say I get excited when Valve announce something, but I get erect. Actually, I do mean excited... Anyway, I scan through the posting, bypassing the title, eagerly lapping up all the details; being able to sever a zombies foot and watching it hobble slowly towards you. Completely amputating it's legs and watching it drag itself along by the hands before bringing your axe down on it's head to finish it off. Further into the announcement the magic word appeared; "Chainsaw". Jesus himself appearing in front of me and giving me a lifetime worth of bread couldn't have had a bigger impact. Though maybe if he gave me a shitload of cash or magic powers instead of bread my reaction would be different. After satiating myself on all the announced Zombie goodness, I read the title; Left 4 Dead 2.

* - to be continued...

More law? Jude Law? No law.

Moores law; PC technology will improve at a factor of two times every two years. Similar to the level of hair recedence (word?!?) that Jude Law has: 50% less every two years; coincidence? I think not... In actual fact, it wasn't Moore who created this "law". Much like Bell and Edison, he simply refined an existing concept(ual statement) and took the credit for it and attached his name to it, much like leeches stick themselves to juicy people... If you look at the below graph, you'll find it mind-numbingly dull. It is in fact a law that is massively exaggerated and is only vaguely accurate. PC performance changes far more erratically than every two years. The law is only really concerned with the doubling of transistors in a chip and the clock speed. If you're not so interested in computers, then clock speed is how fast time moves. On wheels. Maybe a skateboard.

Recently there's been a monumental shift in computing that completely negates pretty much any law dictating speed increases. Graphics Cards can now be used as General Purpose Processing Units. The common term is actually GPGPU, the centre G standing for Gorgeous. Did I mention that I find silicon and circuits very erotic? Doing common computing tasks like encoding or decoding video, is about 10 or more times faster using a powerful graphics card than a powerful CPU. Well, maybe encoding and decoding isn't exactly a "common computing task"... That would be more along the lines of googling "cheap tarts" (and getting a Sainsbury Lemony type...). So these last two years have seen the effective power of a PC increasing by maybe 15 to 20 times even though the actual transistor count may have only doubled.

I find that part of the problem with PCs is the constant hardware upgrade cycle. It's producing the laziest programming since the dawn of computing; that hallowed moment when some foresighted genius realised that with all of humanities learning and capability to create essentially god-like power, would be best served by allowing us to look up pictures of cats and breasts. However to not wander from topic, you only have to look at the Demoscene coders to realise that with these uber PCs we now have, we're barely pushing them.

Let me give you an example... I've got an over-clocked quad core with four gigabytes of ram, terrabytes of hard-drive space, a graphics card that can probably calculate the combined gravitational pull of the entire solar system in a few seconds. Yet the games themselve improve by very small increments each year and with regular but very small steps in the graphics department. I'm still playing games that looked great three years ago, yet by Moores law they should be eight times better than they did then. The demo coders believe in pushing a small amount of processor, memory and graphics use to it's absolute limit. It's dull to those of you with lives, yet the things these people do with less than a single megabyte of combined memory really put to shame the run-of-the-mill developers releasing "Generic War Game 11".

I'd like to see these coders combine their talents but keep their ethics on programming, to see what they can really do with these uber computers we almost all use on a daily basis now. We should be at a point where games look as good as Pixar movies. Yet because developers are sloppy in their understanding of what the PC can actually do, we're still playing the same looking Marines vs Aliens(tm, me) goddam games we were years ago, and the big difference now? Daylight can turn into night. Wow-fucking-eee. Still it could be worse, the last big thing before that was a lens flare. Games industry types kept going on and on about them for about two years, but what are they exactly, for those of you who don't read technical documents on this kind of boring crap? Well you know those irritating circles and lines you see when you look at a light with your eyes slightly screwed up? Those, cool, huh. *cough*

We see a similiar level of improvement in game graphics on the consoles to the PC's, yet they have static hardware... How can that possibly be if Moores law dictates a doubling of hardware performance every two years? Well, the console only developers, who actually push the graphics of those systems TRY HARD! It's like magic, really, they look to themselves and each other, combine their collective talents and work at improving something through increased knowledge. The shame is that PC developers berate them for sticking with end-of-life hardware, but there's nothing substantially better here on the PC than on those aging boxes sitting under your TVs.Where do the non MHZ/speed based improvements factor into this, I ask, not knowing the answer... Recently-ish some slightly mentally deficient people created a computer dress made of tiles of circuit boards that are powered via other tiles of solar power cells. Is this monumental piece of technology that's pushed our understanding of the world, getting added to Moore's Laws equation? Actually, I hope not. It's silly.

So, what's my point? It may be that I've found a new law. It's going to state "PCs will double in performance over some unquantified period of time, and mans hairline will recede in a similiar period". Jude's Law indeed...

Sony; making me blue all over again.

Blu-Gay*, or -Ray, whichever... I just read that Sony are delighted, they've sold four times as many Blu-Ray discs these last twelve months as they did in the previous twelve months! Sounds impressive, no? In fact, no. The format launched in Summer 06 and had almost no take-up with customers due to the prohibitively high costs, so the first year or more can be completely ignored when you rate it's sales performance. Realistically it can only be considered as a format since Sony's PS3 came to market. This leaves it with about two years of sales. Quite obviously the second year of a two year sales history is going to be considerably larger, unless we're talking about Franz Ferdinand album sales...

Going deeper into their numbers bullshit, you can attribute a huge amount of the last years sales to Discs that were sold as a bundle with the PS3 itself... Another 1.7 million sales go to Batman: The Dark Knight alone... So if you add the bundle sales, which are probably a few hundred thousand to the Batman ones, you're left with only a couple hundred thousand sales of Discs alone. That's hardly going to set any sales records or get the managers at Sony hard in their pants thinking about all the extra money they've (not) made...

In actual fact there are a whole bunch of completely unrealistic idiotic engineers/designers working at Sony. I'm not going to go into their sometimes absurd hardware decisions, instead I'll just remind you of a few media decisions from their past...

Mini-Disc. Still popular and going strong, a real competitor in the public opinion to Audio Cd's! Hmm... They're still used by a select few, but only for making up compilations or for open air recording. I say it again, "hmm". My point being perfectly illustrated by the complimentary diagram of a mini-disc to the right...

UMD. Universal Mongoloids Disc, to give it my fully considered title, is a nonsensical and absurdly noisy pile of crap. Shouldn't media be as close to silent as possible so you can actually hear what's on it as opposed to the clattering of a cheap mechanism?!?

BETAMAX. We can thank Sony for fucking it up on this one. VHS was actually poorer quality but had lower construction costs. Well done Sony for again pricing a product out of any normal human beings budget. VHS vs Betamax is a fairly similar format war to the Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD one that's only recently been lost by HD-DVD, with the exception that Blu-Ray is VERY much more costly to produce than HD-DVD was... Nice one again Sony, you fuck-tards.

Surely at this point in time, they should have been working on Digital downloadable media instead of a tangible grab-able product that's going to be obsolete before it gets mainstream acceptance?

Whatever way, look hard at Sony, and if you discount the Walkman and some better than average TVs, it's a company with a history of failure. I'm privy to certain sales numbers, and during the late 90's (actually, maybe the early 2000's) every single section of Sony was losing money apart from PlayStation; which kept the rest of the company afloat... Is this a company with their customers in mind? Do they make well balanced beneficial decisions? Does the PS3 look like the George Foreman Grill? No, No and most definitely YES!

* - Apologies for the awful and politically horrific opening joke. I've since punished myself for it by beating myself around the head with a turquise sex toy.

...but is it Art?

This is a debate that I've had many, many times... Are games ready to move into the big boys realm of media/art where people are profoundly touched (like choir boys?) or affected by them? For me, the answer is occasionally yes. However, I do have to emphasise the occasional there...

For no good reason I'm going to split games into groups which I'll half-heartedly analyse for artistic merit! Thankfully most games fit into a very small group of niche categories.

Shooting. These appeal predominantly to guys and every so often an occasional girl (who wants to be a guy, no doubt). Age is irrelevant as I've seen all groups from eight years old up to 70 years old get involved in some old fashioned virtual gun play. There's very little scope for a game that's based on the concept of pointing a shooty thing at someone/thing and then killing them/it, to be artistic in itself. Some games do use art as a way of making themselves stand out from the crowd. Recently Madworld on the Wii could be considered "artistically striking", and in common terms that would be enough to label it "art". In fact, for me it is enough. I used to consider myself an artist and did all the studies and work involved in becoming one, yet most pieces that people currently call Art, I call crap. There are many games that have more feelings in their depictions of characters, better technical skills in anatomy and expression, are more thought provoking and excel in every other individual component that can be used to define art. Actually, I say "many" games... Really I mean "some". When I say some, really I mean "a few". In fact, when I say a few, I mean "a couple". The point is though, that they do exist!

Strategy. The art in these games is on a similar level to drawing landscapes. Actually, wait a minute... It IS drawing landscapes (and tiny little people)! It's sure as hell my least preferred form of art, but it is still considered as art; mostly by dull people, but apparently they have opinions as well, so I'm told...

Football Management. No, actually I'm joking... The most artistic thing related to these games is which font they use to display the database. Excell spreadsheets are not art, as far as I'm aware, neither is Football Manager... Unless you're some kind of astounding moron of course!

MMO's and RPG's. These have a massive amount of (in my opinion, generic) Art used in them. Both in the creative process and in the final product. I'm not a fan by any stretch, but I absolutely concede that Fantasy and Sci-Fi art is a massive percentage of the worlds complete paper based artwork. So even if there are about six hundred million variations on a lady Elf with big cleavage, and then about the same amount of large helmeted warriors, it's still classified en masse as art...

Other Genres. I can't really be bothered going into more than this currently... Maybe some day I'll add to this and start listing micro-genres aswell, such as "Native Indian Axe Throwing Simulators", but for now I'll stick with what I've got!

Something else to consider, is that the concept art used to build games, is all drawn/painted/designed by genuine and sometimes even talented artists. They draw a picture. That's art in itself isn't it? That picture then gets turned into a three dimensional model, usually made of clay; which is also art. The model then gets scanned into a computer and turned into a virtual three dimensional model and gets tweaked at that point. Like an artist going back over a picture he's not happy with, improving the end result. Now that one scanned item or character, which is already characteristic of three forms of art (Drawn, modelled and digital), will get added to tens of thousands of others to be placed in the game world, which is then populated by all of these items of art... So really, if it looks like art, is made up of art and can have the same effect as art, is it not art?

This process is similar to the Sistine Chapel. One overall end result, or piece of art, comprised of many separate and smaller pieces of art. The Chapel was of course painted by many more people than just Michelangelo; there was a whole team of artisans working on it under his instruction (much like game developers working under a project leader). Consider also that the chapel is made up of many smaller "works of art" that combine to form the complete "masterpiece". As I previously mentioned, games are made up of lots of little pieces of art also. In many cases lots of pretty rubbish pieces of art, but still the analogy is there...

Where the disagreement really stands is in the perception of what Art is. We live surrounded by various forms of art, in buildings, furniture and occasionally even fashion, though maybe not so much here in Scotland... Our TV's broadcast Art at us occasionally, we read it in books, we rent and watch it sometimes and we even view it in (very VERY rare) adverts. Most things that have a creative process involved in making them can be termed art by certain people, so maybe the problem is really that I've not been talking to the right people? There are undoubtedly many people who consider games artistic, yet I have a fondness for the media and want to see it accepted by more than just it's existing fan base as something truly creative, so I prefer to debate it with heathens, I mean "non-believers"...

On top of the points already made, the single biggest factor that weighs in on this argument are the waves of "indie" games that are starting to take a bigger and bigger slice of the games market. Some are truly bizarre, ugly, poorly executed and can even be in very bad taste, yet there are others that are so captivating because of the artistry involved in them that there can be no debate at all as to whether they're art or not once they've been experienced. I've no real notion to tell you what games in particular I'd classify as Art, as that's down to each of you and your own opinions... I'd suggest that you go and look further into the matter for yourselves though!

Actually, let me suggest one single title that's both indie in it's enthusiasm and freshness, but also mainstream-ish... Beautiful Katamari. Just. Rolling. Awesome. Ness.

You should go and google the Museum of Bad Art. Genius in a bottle... (paint remover).

Some kind of phone hex?

Phones... Mobile Phones... The saying "Can't stand the evil ugly petulant over-used crap little bastards!", springs to mind... Maybe it's not a saying for you lot, but for me it's a life statement. They've seemingly become the most important lifestyle accessory for the masses. Vital communication tool or status symbol for those lacking in real things to do?

Over the last few years mobile phones have improved so much, gaining so many features and accessories that's it's becoming harder to classify what their actual function is. The theory that I had when I got mine at first was "form of contact in an emergency". Your car breaks down (*train for me, and yeah, it broke down every damn day); you phone someone to come and collect you/fix it. You're running late for a meeting with someone; phone ahead and give warning you're going to be late. There are many functional reasons for them, if I try to look, however it seems that their only real purpose nowadays is for girls to tell each other what shoes they're wearing that day, what happened in the daily soap operas and to send mostly crap jokes to each other. There's always the bitching conversation that's most commonly found on UK trains where some poor absent person gets repeatedly insulted by their apparent best friends. Nice...

On their plus side, they now have pretty decent-ish cameras built in. They're getting more powerful graphically and can handle some ok-ish 3D game graphics. Which would be lucky for those of you with no partners, adult magazines, videos, TV, or the Internet (how'd you get here?!), as around 90% of the games are themed around breasts or sex! Although maybe not so lucky if you're a woman, unless you happen to be the type of woman that likes women as well! However, lady or not, the graphics are so downright crap on the "adult" games that you may aswell get your porn from a magazine recovered at the local dump, covered in kitchen leftovers and shat on by all the resident seagulls... Back to the good points: They have good-ish sound quality as MP3 players and the batteries seem to be lasting just as long as they ever did, considering all the extra stuff the phones themselves do. It is a bit strange however that for being the ultimate device in communication, that the games themselves seen to have a complete lack of ANY worthwhile online features... Maybe I should be speaking to Sony and Nokia instead of whining to myself on here!

The games though; there's a fundamental and MASSIVE flaw. The controls. Really, we're expected to press those tiny little bunched together clicking things and hope in vain that we're pressing the correct ones... If the manufacturers want them to be considered as games machines, give us D-Pad style controls. Cars that expect to move anywhere all have wheels, shouldn't phones that expect to play games have a worthy input thingy? It's a crushing experience, and one that my better half has considerably more expertise and time with than I, as her previous job was testing those (mostly) boob-laden games for eight... hours... per... day... Oh... my... god!

My own personal grievance with them, and which is the only thing about them that genuinely affects my life, is that people try to phone me! Argh! For fuck sake! Really, don't they realise? It feels like the "pop in"; that visit that a family member or friend does, turning up at your door unannounced and empty handed (not even a bottle of wine!). The mobile phone call is the vocal equivalent.

So excuse my rant, and I should apologise for this not being an article type thing; but there's very little of interest or of humour to do with mobile phones. Well actually, I do remember a guy at an old job I did, who had a set of cards with various phones on them (mostly of the mobile flavour); the Unique Selling Point of these cards were the ladies who were, ahem, "using" the phones... I really doubt they could hear much with the speaker up/in there! Cue all the vibrate jokes...

The humour part: People use Bluetooth to transfer things from Phone to PC, the PC end is called a "Dongle"! Dong le, geddit? Ho ho ho... I'm reminded of the Watchmen (tm) every time I hear/read the term...

Also pretty funny is the opening picture; that's a real product. Honestly, what complete fucking mentalist designed that thinking that the general public would buy it?!?

* - As a footnote, I'd like to state for the record that I didn't actually own the train, as such...

A heroic proton types; does it write a classic?

So I've been playing Prototype for the last week-ish... It's a pretty good game; nice graphics, good sound, excellent controls, good central character, decent story (for a superhero game) and all the other pretty good features that make it above average. The character is also a hoodie! How cool is that!? However the game isn't what I'd call amazing. The graphics could be from an eighteen month old (but good for 18 months ago) game and the game play itself is very akin to Assassins Creed. Even the controls are very similar, and Altair's a bit of a "historical hoodie". I've probably spent around five or six hours playing through the story, and what's unusual about that is that I've played at most three single-player games for more than two hours in the last few years. I have no patience for them. Even the genre breakers and classics; I get bored. Prototype however, no sign of boredom yet. I'm surprising myself playing this game as I've surely played technically far better games and put them off after an hour... Are classics really classics then?

My games library is pretty much a concise A to Z of triple A titles from the last ten years. I've completed GTA:Vice City, Tribes Vengeance, COD 4 and a bunch of driving games. Half-Life 2 lost my interest after Ravensthingy. I just don't really finish games anymore, which continuously does surprise me as I used to finish several games in any given week... None of the games that I do finish though, are what you'd call "hardcore gamer all-time classics" (or any actual term that I can think of). Yet I'm undoubtedly a hardcore gamer. I'm not sure that I really understand my own gaming preferences...

So what is it that makes any single game a AAA title... Let me run through the obvious features that apparently make a game awesome!

• Graphics? Quite obviously not. Gears of War had some of the best graphics on offer for the PC at it's time of release; yet it got uniformly slated by PC consumers and several reviews.

• Audio? Definitely not. The only games that you ever hear mention of the audio in are either part of the Halo franchise or Horror games. It really is that under-valued. Unless you count all the Guitar/Band/Audio games that are mostly out on the consoles.

• Story/script? Hmm... To go back to Gears of War. There was a story. Something about aliens and soldiers. Actually, let me refresh that memory... Halo, Crysis, Half-Life, AvP, etc, etc, etc. Probably 75% of all FPS games ever released are goddam motherfucking aliens versus goddam motherfucking soldiers.

• Playability? Well, I found World of Goo much more playable than Crysis. Crysis was meant to have bucket loads of playability... Where was it?!?

• Controls? I'm actually laughing at this part of gaming on the PC; if you've read my other posts here, the one about WASD highlights a tiny part of the problem in PC games' controls. Let me restate that whole post in one tiny sentence... "Fuck WASD!".

After having played "so much" (ho ho ho) of Prototype, I'm re-evaluating what I believe makes a G R E A T game...

The things I'm enjoying about it are the character, the controls (Assassins Creed also managed to syphon several hours of play out of me) and the story unravelling continuously in-game. Really, the AI is distinctly average and the character models are also fairly non inspiring, but the whole game just gels so well, that it's easy to just keep playing and find out the next piece of the story or open the next power. Why didn't Gears of War grip me like that? It's also a massively powered third person game, but it's so "butch" and the characters are the most cliched stereotypes that are around in contemporary games, that it's almost impossible to relate to. It's similar to watching an early Arnie film: plenty of action and big men with big guns (Ooooooer!) being all manly with and against each other. Unfortunately I have no latent homosexual tendencies, so maybe that's why this is all lost on me, along with American Wrestling, UFC, Football, pub bonding and Rob Halford from Judas Priest.

Well, I've wandered off topic, as I always do... What I'm essentially getting at is that Prototype, contrary to not being revolutionary is the best "this gen" game I've played since Assassins Creed, which was the best I'd played since GTA (mostly Vice City, though I like 'em all). Did I mention you can consume women (and men as well, for you Wrestling fans) whole? It's genius, they explode in a shower of gore and then you look exactly like them! Did I not mention my 'TV' tendencies? No... Ah well!

Sounds like...

My first memory of what I would call "good" music in games was probably International Karate. I was around 11 or 12 and listened to a lot of strange music as a child. I should say it was strange music FOR a child, not strange to listen to. I'd grown up with hardly any television and an awful lot of cassette tapes with music like The Doors, David Bowie, Pink Floyd, The Kinks, Cockney Rebel, The Stones and many other 60's/70's psychadelic-ex-hippie-style music! When I was around 7, my scene became dancing in a retarded style in our living room window; much to the amusement/chagrine of our neighbours... Somehow, on that foundation of fantastic music, my musical taste built into a fantasy themed Heavy Metal obsession!? It was a handful of years into my Iron Maiden era, that I first played IK on my friends portable black & white TV. The melody and structure of that chip based tune on the MSX quite literally left my jaw agape and many years of listening to game music on badly recorded cassettes began...

The next times that I was as impressed with game soundtracks were upon hearing the soundtrack to 720degrees, the Skateboarding arcade conversion, and then The Last Ninja on the C64. The soundtrack to 720 was given away with some 8bit games magazine around the time the game was released, as the B-Side of the Outrun soundtrack. I listened to it over and over. It became so ingrained into my subconscious that I unknowingly wrote two or three songs about 12 years later that you could say "borrowed" a little from that cassette... It was Skate Punk before modern Skate Punk existed. It preceeded all the Extreme sports themed punk/metal that would soon follow in it's wake. This may have been the Nostradamus of the music world (bearded and full of shit?). Look at that man, would you believe a word he said? Now that I look again at him, I think he's actually the man with the finger in his eye from my last blog entry, sinister looking fucker! I should also add that bearded doesn't necessarily mean full of shit, but then again, I DO have a goatee beard, and this blog... Well... Ahem!

The Last Ninja however, took the idea of a games soundtrack to almost cinematic levels; obviously excluding the technical limitation of chip driven sound at the time. The game had at least seven fully seperate pieces of music for the six levels and the loading screen. Each one of them was masterfully programmed and had a genuine taste of the far east. I can actually still listen to it, twenty-three or so years later, and still be impressed and actually enjoy the tunes. I liked a little bit of Jean Michelle Jarre at around the same time, and hearing his music nowadays stimulates my gag reflex! So my conclusion is that JMJ doesn't age well (and is a bit of a cock), whereas TLN is eternal.

For me, it was a sad day when the first band driven and orchestrated soundtracks appeared in games on CD. Two of the only exceptions I can think of, where I genuinely enjoyed the music were Command & Conquer and Interstate '76. The latter was a damn fine driving game, inspired by the road battles in Mad Max. The soundtrack was a re-imagining of classic 70's funk and was absolutely fucking fantastic! Aside from those two games, I can't think of anything that I would actually listen to outside of the games themselves.

There's a massive underground scene for "Chip" music, still going strong on PC's and retro computers/consoles. People playing gigs to a few hundred rabid fans, using only an original Game Boy hooked up to a P.A system. It's not what I'd choose to go and see, but it's certainly a refreshing change to all the production-perfect pop crap that blights our lives nowadays!

I've been writing music for 20 years now, and of all the stuff I've done in the past; the tracks I can listen to the most are the ones where I had the most technical limitations on creating the tunes. The old Atari ST songs are (in my own very biased opinion) my favourites, composed using two samples; bass drum and snare drum with a synth sound editor. Then the Amiga songs with simple one pitch samples and up to 8 (wooo!) tracks and finally the stuff that has aged the worst is the stuff I wrote on guitar... How odd, or rather how typically predictable that the one thing I consider myself the best at, is the one that I like retrospectively the least.

I suppose, thinking on this a little more, that it's really a reflection on my opinion for the whole music scene in general. I'm discovering and re-discovering nothing but old bands. The new bands almost categorically bore me... Long live the old!Amazing; this is actually an O.A.P friendly blog thing site whatever!