Jazmeister Central

Dream

jazmcdougall@yahoo.co.uk (Jazmeister) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 09:00:00 +0000

This is just a glitch, I do have friends really. No, really.

This is an account of a dream I just had. It was an interesting, involved dream, and not everything made it across to my bedside notepad, and even fewer details were jogged when I read that with my morning tea, so this is like the movie trailer for the agonising three-hour epic I just watched.

I'm also doing well, thank you, and you? I'm back to nights tonight, so back to trying very hard to get lots of things pitched. Any freelancers reading this, might I ask: what the hell do you do over Christmas? It's approaching like a big white cloud on my calendar. I suppose I'll nag some websites, or... hmm.

Anyway, the mental dream.

Dream Log, Tenth of November, Two Thousand and Nine.

I am on a train. I know that this train is running between the streets of Glasgow, but the windows look out onto vast Scottish hillsides streaked with moody rain. The embankment beside the train is sunny, and students are lying in their thousands there, sunning and reading and laughing. The roaring train doesn't bother them.

We arrive at George's Square - I read the gold letters. I am not on a train, nor is there any sign of one. George's Square is about as large as a McDonalds, decked out with exuberance and greenery, black buildings with gold plate. It's more like a little plaza - it faces a waterfront where the sun is setting, although the light in the square matches high noon. In the back of the square is a blueish wrought iron staircase. The steps are too high. I climb them. I am going home.

I live in a house almost exactly like the one in the last level of Braid, except for that this house is atop the tallest, dingiest building in Glasgow and, inside, it looks exactly like my bedroom in the waking world. I don't linger.

I take the train again. The bouncer from the local night-club sits next to me - he's a sweet guy, about seven feet tall, and I've known him since school. Enormous, but gentle. He has a silly expression, like he's been giggling all morning. I get off the train at a lonely platform and make my way alone through the countryside, uphill, along cobbled roads dusty and cobwebbed, and I reach a huge derelict house. It looks like the house from the Narnia books, but sagging, rotten. I go into the main room and sit on the floor and take out my laptop and write. I'm writing a review that I recently wrote in the waking world, and it's coming out word for word.

It doesn't last long though - soon the day is over, and I'm on the train again. I'm aware that a day has passed, and I'm commuting again from my house above the tiny George's Square, this time to the university where Lisa is. I'm not sure if she's teaching or studying, but I'm writing on a notepad on a study table in a hallway. I'm opposite a professor's office, which is open.

On the desk, at which nobody is seated, lies a name-plaque: "Herne Hornes". In the room, a teacher is busying about. I know it isn't Professor Hornes - I know the teacher shares a name, but not a likeness, with one of my teachers at school in the waking world, but I can't remember which.

The teacher is peeing in a punch bowl on the drinks cabinet. He has filled it entirely with pee. Then he takes the bowl and pours it over Herne's desk, and replaces the bowl, and briskly walks out.

Some young guys are congregating in the hallway, and the teacher accosts them. "Hello, have you gents submitted your 'Least Favourite Professor' yet?" He's trying to get them to put Herne Hornes as their worst teacher. He sits next to me and the rest of them crowd around demurely, while he passes out forms, which are signed and return, and then collates them. He mistakenly bundles my Portfolio together with his paperwork. I tell him that he's got something of mine, and he apologises, and when he hands it back, it reeks of piss.

I'm in George's Square and suddenly it's the real George's Square, the big one that isn't a nice residential plaza. There's a train track running right through it, and beyond, I can see the little stair case with the tall steps that leads home. I just need to get there. I cross through the train and it starts moving while I'm in it. I start panicking about being whisked miles and miles away when all I want to do is go home, when suddenly the train is a bus, and it's stopped at the end of the dirt track to my parents' house (which is where I live in the waking world). I step off the bus, and wake up.

Written by Jaz McDougall for publication on the 11th of November 2009. I've never went for my notebook so fast as when I woke up from that dream. By the nine.

Enter the Fanboy

jazmcdougall@yahoo.co.uk (Jazmeister) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 09:00:00 +0000

This week, I bought a PS3. I managed to install it beneath my monitor - it's connected with HDMI cables, while my PC is using DVI cables. This means I can switch between inputs with a button on my monitor - Borderlands, Uncharted 2, Borderlands, Uncharted 2.

Not that I've played Uncharted 2 much. Lots of games are stacking up in my "to play" pile, and the ones I'm playing right now are pretty interesting. Borderlands is particularly intriguing. I'm not ready to voice a solid opinion yet, but it does seem like it's a very shallow game held together by one fantastic mechanic. The networking problems are atrocious, though - I haven't really had a hassle free multiplayer game that didn't end in connection problems, progress lost, etc. Wait for the patch.

I've been off work this last week, and it's been great. I've made some progress with other mags, with websites, and with how I feel about my life generally. Here's hoping I can survive on writing before too long, right? I almost met my quota last month - three perfect quota months and I'm ready to stand on my own two feet, I think. Which reminds me - do you edit a magazine? Do you need a shit game reviewed? Send it to me! I'm prompt, accurate, fair, and still quite naive and easy to exploit.

Links:

Terry Cav"vvvvv"anagh Bares his Wares!
Ludo gets Ludological at Gaming Daily!
REO Speedwagon: The Game!
M_the_C shows his impeccable taste in ambitious games!
Notch cobbled Minecraft together from Zombie/RTS bits!
Michael Abbot Defends Linear Narratives (But Only Good Ones!)!

Swings and Roundabouts (Chewing Pixels)

"For now, the eccentric video game designer seems happy to be playing in the abstract. Giant trails of string loop around the room, tacked to the ceiling. On some, tiny plasticine models of children hang from paperclips, swinging as trapeze artists on micro-ropes that, if ever scaled up for humans to enjoy, would defy both the laws of gravity and health and safety."

Simon Parkin doing his wonderful thing over at Chewing Pixels, this time showing Keita Takahashi at his most experimental in a big busted house. There's an odd moment near the end where Parkin lists off some indie games that he's been playing and, winning Takahashi's approval, finishes it with Street Fighter IV, and of course, Keita lights up at that too, for all his derision of the mainstream. It's interesting to me because there's a definite anti-mainstream sentiment among some independent game developers (and the gamers who love them). Seems about as pointless and hurtful as setting up an all-black KKK - why can't we rate games on their merit? If a mainstream game really is better than an independent one, why stand next to the pasta-and-gold-paint piece of crap and say "THIS is the future of gaming!", I ask? Especially when so many great indie games get mixed up in this debate and swallowed by their refusal to "market" themselves, like it's a dirty word. If you've got a lemonade stand, you still need to put up a sign that says "lemonade". Grrr...

IGF and Melolune (Laura Shigihara)

"After finishing the soundtrack for Plants vs. Zombies I basically allowed myself about 6 months to work full-time on it (I had been working on it part-time for probably about 2.5 years prior to that) and it’s at long last nearing completion."

Yep, lead composer for PvZ, Laura Shigihara, submitted something to the IGF. Click through to listen. This should be interesting, I'll keep an eye on it.

5th November, 2009 (DF Devlog)

"Gulsheb escaped from the depths during the third year of recorded history and wandered the mountains for six years. Eventually she tired of this life and convinced the humans living in the hills below that she was in fact a manifestation of Tob, their goddess of deformity. She was a towering, bloated one-eyed thrush with a fat, bulging trunk in place of a beak, so it must not have been that difficult. The villages united under her rule, and she directed a sixty year expansion. Then the war with the elves began."

Toady One is still quietly making the perfect game, his "personal mission", and it looks like he's added in fell beasts that take command of villages, towns, regions, and empires. The plan for this game is quite grandiose, with each world generating an intricate history from scratch that any dwarf can comment on. It can only get better.

Today, I'll be trying to figure out what's so compelling about Haze, and trying to get back onto night shift for starting work on Wednesday night. If you have a PS3 and you're on the Playstation Network, add me as a friend. My ID is "jazmeister", and I'm accepting everyone.

Written by Jaz McDougall rather early on the 8th, for publication on the 9th of November 2009.

Scoring

jazmcdougall@yahoo.co.uk (Jazmeister) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 09:00:00 +0000

A friend of mine recently put out a general inquiry on twitter - what is Game X like? Is it good? Now, I happen to have reviewed said game, so you could say that I know exactly how good it is. However, I've also been paid for my opinions and observations of it, so dishing them out willy nilly is a quick method for devaluing my product. I trust this guy, though, so I sent him a terse, private message: "I gave it XX% in a review recently." My friend felt that it was more than enough to go on for making his purchasing decision. All done, everybody's happy. That's what scores are for - to sum up the review in a little, easy to distribute number. But just because I gave Blood Bowl 80% in PCG (see above) doesn't mean that you're going to enjoy it. You need to read the damn review. So what are scores, really, and why do we need them?

I've posted a bit about this before. The Reticule has a three-grade scoring system - it's either not good, good, or really good. They also have a "really really good" badge they distribute. RPS and The Escapist don't score games. Gaming Daily uses a percentage, but it looks like they're changing to a four-grade shebang. IGN does an out-of-ten-with-a-decimal thing, so that's really a percentage too.

When I have to use scores, I prefer a percentage. You can really think about it, especially when the mag defines what each score bracket means. PC Gamer has this to say of games scoring 46-60%: "A very ordinary game, quickly forgotten. Think twice even if you find it cheap." The next one up, from 61-75%, reads: "A decent effort that, but for a little more polish, coulda [sic] been a contender." So, for me, scoring a game 60% is saying that it's right on that line. If you get a 65% game in a bargain bin, buy it, it'll entertain you. 55% is a waste of money.

From the consumer's point of view, then, scores below 60% mean nothing. For a developer, getting 57% shows that they need to take it seriously next time - they need to hit it out of the park and develop their features. If Braid had stuck to the Mario-with-time-bending of the first world; if it hadn't attracted David Hellman's art or bothered to license the music from Magnatune; if it didn't have any pretentious shit on signs or hidden endings - Braid might have scored a 60%. Could have been a contender. If I'd written that review for alternate-universe-shit-Braid, alternate-universe-lazy-Jonathon-Blow would have read it and known what he had to do. If I'd scored it 20%, he'd have thought I was being unfair or needlessly cruel, and may have given up games entirely. As a critic, my job is not only to inform the consumer, but to have a dialogue with the artist - this is what I think, this is what is great, this is what sucked and here's why. You need to know your stuff for this - not just

The third person we review games for is the publisher. People get hired and fired on the basis of scores. Should we give a game a high score to give the devs a break? No. It's easy to blame the reviewer, but really, the publisher is the one making an obnoxious, inhuman decision. Say you want red sauce, but a publisher tells you that, if you use white sauce, everyone at DICE gets to keep their jobs? Should you use white sauce? No! Fucker! I want delicious tangy red sauce, with antioxidants and stained tablecloths! Don't base your decisions on arbitrary things - do your job and fire people because they got drunk and peed in the water cooler.

So reviews are complex, and scores are simple things. The Angels and Demons idea, where you score the bad elements separately from the good and let the reader compare, has promise, but it's just lots of work to quickly and easily represent something that is involved and complex by nature. We sweat over our reviews - we're speaking to you, the Gamer, and you, the Developer. We take them seriously. Just fucking read them.

Written by Jaz McDougall for publication on the 6th of November 2009. I really want some white sauce now.

Nine Reasons that Day Shift is brilliant

jazmcdougall@yahoo.co.uk (Jazmeister) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 09:00:00 +0000

As you may know, I work night shift in a petrol station part time to supplement my earnings as a freelance writer. I work three days in a row, then I get three days off. At the completion of my last shift of three, I'll get home from work, sit at the kitchen table, and make a tough decision: do I want to switch to day shift for my days off? Here's what that implies:

Day 1: When your body is expecting to sleep at about 8am, stay up for the entire day and sleep at night time.
Day 2: Frolic and caper with frabjous glee. See the list below the cut for why this day is awesome.
Day 3: Start out as per day 2, but stay up all night and go to bed on the morning of Day 4.

How many times do I sleep during this four day period? Three times. While I'm up for the whole of the first day, I'm so unbelievably tired that my ideas are shit, my sentences are poorly constructed, and I'm likely to find all sorts of mundane things far too funny. In short, it's a torturous day of mounting delirium, where you're increasingly likely to phone Tim Edwards to bawl that you love him, and not very likely to do much valuable work at all. (Except sci-fi fantasy, of course. You just need to clean it up once you've had a sleep.)

For this week, I'm on holiday. It means I'll be focussing on my writing entirely, but it also means I can just switch straight to day shift. Here's ten reasons why that's awesome.

The Morning Routine
Getting up, showering, eating breakfast, talking shite - this is something I don't get to do with the family at large. While there are drawbacks to living with your Wife and your Parents, you really reap the benefits if you're up early enough to make everyone tea and toast. Doing all these robe-and-slippers activities in the morning means that you're much less likely to stumble down the stairs in your underpants while the Occupational Therapist is meeting with Dad, or get the mail before you've fixed your bed head.

Office Hours
There are times when I've went to bed at, for example, noon. I've got no emails. Today is a slow day, I think. I won't have any work. Then I go to bed, and wake up at six - a half hour after Future employees leave the building - to find a few emails asking if I'd like to do stuff. Now, instead of working on it all night, I've got to wait until the morning to say "k." before they can send me the link to the download, post the review code, activate the seven crystals, what have you. This way, I can catch emails and reply to them throughout the day, and if it's a little thing, even submit something before they leave the office.
This also means I can visit the bank or the post office without having to overhaul my schedule and nudge my sleeping hours.

Other People
Not many people wander into my bedroom at three in the morning. Those that do are usually just in the business of meowing at you for food. It's lonely working nights, but it's even lonelier working nights at home. Nobody on twitter, steam, or in the blogosphere (except the occasional American) - just me, filling up my own google reader and twitter feed. And inbox, occasionally. Day shift allows you to phone people and have them respond, to send an email and get one right back. I'd never have guessed how much I needed social interaction until I worked nights, which I've been doing for almost two years.

Lunch time
Taking a short break for something delicious and easy is, again, something I don't get to do that often. Your body shuts down at night whether you want it to or not, so your appetite takes a hit. Sure, why not stick this in the oven for an hour. I mean, it's not like I have to go anywhere. Rushing downstairs to make a sandwich, wondering when that download is gonna finish so you can get to work, and enjoying a fleeting game of TF2 adds to the excitement of being a games writer. There's no impetus for rapid movement when your world is lit up by monitor alone.

Light and Noise
Which brings me to this fucker. You know how you like to listen to music? I can't do that here. Sure, I can use headphones, but I can't reeeeeeaally crank them because it makes a tinny rattling noise that wakes up my Wife, who usually has work or gaming first thing. And I can't turn on the lights. I don't know about you, but I write well when I have lots of loud music blowing my head off. And natural light? Can't beat it.

Google reader
When you go to bed at 12pm and wake up at 6pm, you're waking up to 349 unread items. When you sleep at 12am and wake up at 6am, you're waking up to about 50 unread items, and you can handle the rest as they arrive. Same goes for twitter.

Head Space
On night shift, your head is always in the wrong place. In the morning, I'm tired enough to be a little silly. In the evening, I'm asleep. At night time, by brain is wondering why I'm still up. Not conducive to my best writing ever.

The Evening Routine
Winding down the work for the day, sticking things in the oven, grating a little cheese, setting up for the long evening of TF2 or a great big singleplayer game - you don't get to do that when you're unconscious.

TV
"Don't Tell The Bride", 1:45 am.
"Bizarre Animal ER", 3:15am.
"The Worlds Strictest Parents", 4:15am.
Yeah, no thanks.

Bed
When you sleep for six hours somewhere between 8am and 11pm, and your wife sleeps outside of those times, you're never going to actually be in the bed at the same time as she is. Not an uplifting prospect for a romantic man like myself. I moved my whole life to a strange country for her, and then she did it for me. It matters to me that we get to lie in bed at night, and we don't. This week, we do. Back rubs and crying ahoy!

Written by Jaz McDougall for publication on the 3rd November 2009. I am so making toast and tea for everyone today. I'm up super early after last night's out-cold-by-8pm fiasco. What can I say, I'm a Rocknrolla.

IT'S EMO TIME

jazmcdougall@yahoo.co.uk (Jazmeister) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 16:02:00 +0000

Not really emo time exactly, although a trusted source whispered into my ear that the seminal Sunny Day Real Estate are back together again and touring right now. This is big news for a guy who stood by and did nothing while Emo music was raped and pillaged. I pretty much gave up on making music, and stuck with the writing - a decision that's paying off. My buddy Ralph, for whom surrender is never an option (even in the face of certain intoxication), has been hitting drums with expert precision for The Whisky Works. They're actually doing a big UK tour next year, and... wait, this isn't what I wanted to talk about.

I wanted to mention that I bought jazmcdougall.com, and I'm being super lazy about doing anything with it. The plan is to have this blog there, and maybe some cheeky email on the side, get some hosting up there... it'll be awesome. Super busy though. That's not what I wanted to talk about either.

I really wanted to talk about kids. Now, Super Meat Boy is going to be great, yada yada, and the fact that Ed McMillen did this video doesn't make him any better or worse than the majority of adults:

If you go to the Youtube comments, someone calls this girl "smart". I mean, of course she's smart, but you don't go around calling people smart, do you? Watch the video and watch how Ed shows the girl his game. I mean, this is something all developers do, but because it's a little kid, there seem to be these unwritten rules.

For example, "You can talk to me like I'm an idiot." Kids are basically aliens. Their brains, while not entirely formed, are definitely working - my thoughts as a child were just as complex and in-depth as they are now. What's changed is my ability to communicate those thoughts, and to analyse them based on context. I now know that you shouldn't pee on people's cars, even if Dad doesn't mind when you pee on his work van. I now know that you shouldn't show people your penis - they don't want to see it. I now know that you don't drink water from puddles. Adults get so wrapped up in their experience and knowledge of context that they can think kids are stupid.

Kids are so not stupid.

My parents got us Mario Paint when we were young, and they sat with the manual and tentatively clicked around with the little toy mouse, and they tried to open up the game a little more for us. My brother and I sat back, itching to get to it. Mum and Dad went off to do things like chopping wood and making dinner and paying bills, etc, while we set to the important shit. In an hour, we'd figured out the music, the flyswatter game, the hilarious screen-wipe animations - we were having a blast. We just figured it out.

You know when you have a nephew over and they're pouring soap into the toilet and you snatch the box away from them and ask, "Why did you do that?!" You know when they say, "I don't know..." and you say, "How can you not know?!" and despair for the youth of today?

That's a vocabulary problem. That's the kid being entirely new to our culture. That's them wanting to say "I didn't think it was a problem, I just didn't know it was a bad idea and I tried it, I'm really sorry and I'll never do it again now that I know its not cool." Not a lot of words, not very difficult words, but there it is. Kids aren't articulate. You need to give them a minute sometimes, and you need to let them do their own thing, and be clear and fair and calm with them. "Abe, if you put soap in the toilet it fucks up the sewer system." Then you need to make it absolutely clear that they aren't a bad person. "Ice cream?"

Links time!

The RPS Verdict: Borderlands

"Kieron: We really sound like we hate this game considering we all love it.
Alec: I think it’s more a matter of circling, unsure how to define why we like it.
Jim: It’s genuinely entertaining, isn’t it?"

I love these, even though it's a terrible review device. Borderlands sounds awesome.

New DF Tools (After Action Reporter)

"[...] a fortress viewer that lets you explore your fortress like it’s an isometric pixelart game. If only we could play Dwarf Fortress in this kind of view!"

I can't half wait for the day when Dwarf Fortress looks as lovely as it secretly is. Until then, of course, I'll keep poking away at my fort. You do play Dwarf Fortress, right?

New York (James)

"This is where you start in Deus Ex."

Deus Ex is actually one of the few games that give you an opportunity to do this kind of thing. The only other I can think off at the moment is Fallout 3: you could visit the things and stuff and be like "DOOD I'M IN THAT FAMOUS PLACE FROM FALLOUT 3" and get dirty looks. Anyway, Tom went to New York and took pictures. Another in a long line of envy-inducing PCG outings, although I think this was strictly not-business.
I must stress that Liberty Island is so totally in New Jersey. Even if it's technically a little blob of NY, like a sort of civic pseudopod, it is so totally in NJ.

Reality (distractionware)

"I actually make games full time – and full time as in, well, all the time; all day, every day. I quit my job two years ago and I’ve been trying to find some way to balance making the games I wanna make and being able to afford doing it since. My savings from work are long gone, and I got a loan about a year ago which has since run out."

There's a donate button. You should so totally donate. I did, but then again, I'm awesome. You might not be awesome. Oh well. Sucks to be you, then.

Oh, and I found a secret preview for something totally unrelated to Terry's upcoming VVVVVV. Don't ask me what it is! It's a secret! Don't click here either!

People Buy Games, Don't Play Them!
Cobbett Is Pretty Damn Funny!
Telling Famous Black People Apart Is Hard!
I Hate Beards: IGN Does Not!

Written by Jaz McDougall for immediate publication on the 22nd of October. This stupid review code is STILL downloading. Wait, you didn't think I was really gonna let you play the secret preview did you? That shit is aaaaaaaall mine.

Up: I was sure we already had that dimension

jazmcdougall@yahoo.co.uk (Jazmeister) — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 08:29:00 +0000

Yesterday, I went on a date with my wife. We went to Pizza Hut, saw Up in 3d, and walked around Borders. It was like being back in America, actually, from the free refills to the upmarket cinema to the... well, Borders, really.

Up is something I'd like to review a little later next week, but for now, let me tell you about 3d. It's a pair of thick-rimmed glasses with clear plastic lenses. You put them on your face. Suddenly, you're wondering why we haven't been doing this for the last fifty years. You know the Disney title card, right? With the castle? Everything there has depth. You're looking out over the water at a towering castle, while the words "Walt Disney" floating all up in your grill. Conveying depth is the obvious trick up it's sleeves, and it does that very well, whether wowing you with vistas longing for times when "Epic" meant "Really fucking huge", or impressing upon you just how tiny an object in the foreground is. Carl, our protagonist, hopping cracks in the kerb, for one. The floating house as it approaches the most terrifying bank of storm clouds I have ever seen, for another.

Anyway. Totally worth it for the - you know, I'm not sure if it even costs more. I'm sure it does. Just as well too, because I swiped the glasses. Right! Let's get into the links after the jump.

There was a young lady who swallowed a fly (Simon Parkin)

"In a sense, a child, by definition, shrinks Scribblenauts’ scope. The game’s potential solutions are necessarily limited by vocabulary, so players with a smaller vocabulary have fewer options open to them. But, free of the dry, efficient logic of adulthood, a child’s imagination also opens the game up in ways beyond most adults’ reach."

Simon has a rough idea why Scribblenauts arrived with a big deflating whoosh instead of the anticipated bang.

Spelunky Journal: Part II (Indigo Static)

"There are cavemans that will run at you whenever they see you. They tend to run off cliffs and sometimes jump in the spot for no reason whatsoever. Spiders begin always upside-down hanging from a ceiling, and they won’t drop until you are exactly below them. The bats however will drop and start to fly around when you come near them, no matter the angle."

I knew that. You knew that. The fascinating thing is, Diego Doumecq is just finding out. Start with part one here.

The Death of an Adventure Game (Man vs Horse)

"There was some difficulty establishing depth with the colours in each row of buildings becoming darker and then lighter again as the scene moves away. Paintshop’s blur tool helps a lot. There was a lot of trial and error involved in getting the colours right overall as well. Moving from the building on the left to the station, through the tunnel on the right, I tried to apply some of Valve’s colour theory, subconsciously demonstrating a sense of hostility and menace by leading the player into the coldest part of the image. Does it work?"

In all my time trying to get artists and programmers to bring my glorious visions to life, this guy was on the other end. Ludo unveils some old artwork for a dead adventure game.

Take a Break vs Rockstar Games (The Daily Scoundrel)

"It’s all about our poor little children, being corrupted by an evil force that is not legally available to them. Which means… could it mean… that Take A Break’s army of mums have actually contributed to the breaking of UK law by purchasing this sick, twisted product for their children to enjoy?"

Le gasp! Lewis "Furious Denby" Denby was inexplicably reading Take a Break magazine when he discovered, like a ridge of mould on a freshly buttered and toasted roll, a batshit argument against GTAIV. Apparently, it promotes violence against women. Funny, I thought it promoted going on a million dates with women before you can have your wicked way with them. GTA IV also punishes you for drink driving and for driving too fast. Okay, it rewards you for driving too fast, but it punishes you for crashing into things. Well, okay, it punishes Niko, but it rewards you with the flying Niko lulz. So where's this big hooker-beating-up mission the Take a Break guys were playing?

Take a Break... actually... playing... *chortle*... a game... they've condemned... *snigger*

Now some quick self explanatory linky-poos:

Curtain falls on Alice & Kev!
Risen sounds fucking awesome!
Halo was shit!
Derren Brown: Not Messiah 2.0!

Written by Jaz McDougall over the course of an entire night, for publication on the 16th October 2009. Yes, I wore my 3d glasses in the queue outside the cinema. No, no-one dared look at me. Yes, they were all in 3d.

Writing Full Time

jazmcdougall@yahoo.co.uk (Jazmeister) — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 08:16:00 +0000

2009 is coming to a close, and come next Summer, I'll have been a published writer for just over a year. Lewis's excellent series on games writing opened with a sentiment mirroring my own personal imperative: I need to up my game.

I'm a big fan of planning things out. Even as early as when Craig Pearson first commissioned me for The Last Remnant, I was doing calculations to work out how many articles I should aim for in order to safely quit my job. I realised that all I needed to do was write a two page spread every week (it sounds so simple). Obviously, magazines come out monthly, so you don't need to be Tom Francis to realise that I should write for more mags - four mags at the very least, and that's making the rather large, unwieldy assumption that every mag will always give me exactly two pages worth of work every single month. Yeah, right.

Now, Craig, being the Keeper of the Ways, Great Cowl of Night Secrets, and Editor of the Reviews Section, is the kind of person that will suddenly have a game on his desk and, remembering his oath to fight crime and help the needy, send me an email asking if I want to review it. I don't need to initiate this action at all, and in fact, I doubt I could send him an email saying "I want to review this" and expect to influence his decision in the slightest. But while Craig will just send me reviews on a platter, the rest of the team are usually too busy thinking up their own amazing ideas and chasing lazy freelancers (oh and yeah, playing games in hurried snatches) to pick up the red Jaz phone. It doesn't work like that. If Tom has an idea for a great Now Playing or Reinstall, he can't tell me "Hey, go play Mirror's Edge and have a great time and then write an article about it." I have to do that on my own.

Good news: I successfully pitched an article. Coming up with an idea for an interesting article is something I'm doing all fucking day long, but fitting it into something appropriate for PCG needs sit-down time that, what with Lisa's immigration paperwork and Hilaria's computer and my job and so on, I don't have. I'm actually using it right now to update this dusty blog. More good news: to actually write this two-pager, it took me about twelve hours, and the fee was just about what I make for a week's work at the petrol station. If I was doing the bare minimum work, I could work one day a week. Of course, I'd rather be able to buy new trousers and eat like a king and buy a treadmill and a PAL Wii and netbook and a wacom tablet and a go kart and a pony and, gee, I dunno, actually get around to having a honeymoon with my wife.

I'm looking around and wondering who to pounce on next, and at work last night, I started thinking about Edge magazine. I haven't talked to Edge yet, but when I was down in Bath and I had to get to a photo shoot (gulp), the kindly Futurite who escorted me was none other than suave, dashing Rich Stanton. We talked about Dragon Age and rural bandwidth issues. This means we're obviously destined to be great friends - but can I exploit this potential friendship for maximum cash?

There's also the byline issue, but let me tell you where I stand on that. Edge doesn't say who wrote what, and Kieron Gillen is always poking fun at them for it. I gather he has professional issues with it - he's used the phrase "In the end, your byline is all you have." You know, I think this is the right stance for him to take. He makes his money now by having the reputation of a great writer, and if he'd been writing for Edge this whole time, he wouldn't have much of a reputation off the back of it. So I should probably care about that too - Jazmeister Central veterans will remember that my ultimate goal is to write a fat trilogy of fantasy novels and make a billion pounds a week with them. But here's why the byline isn't an issue:

I already write for a mag that gives me a lovely, italicised byline, as will most of the mags on my "to woo" list.

I love writing words for money.

Last week at work, a customer told me to suck his dick, gave me the finger, and mooned me. The next day he came in to buy cigarettes and tried his best to convince me it was just a dream. I had to call the cops to remove him.

Last night at work, a customer who didn't want to pay for his fuel and couldn't prove his identity started spoon-feeding his sob story to another customer, and she told her friend, and soon all three of them were calling me names in the doorway. I had to call the cops to get him to shut up, and he still didn't pay.

This shit happens every single night. My hands shake every time. Cops and medical staff don't put up with this for a second, and while I can punish someone afterwards, I can never stop abuse from happening in the first place. People assume I'm trying to ruin their evening, when the simple fact is, I have a set of protocols to follow, and if I deviate from them, I'm unemployed.

Yeah, fuck the byline. I wish my only problem was not having a byline. Will I be fully self employed by Xmas? Probably not. While Santa's filling socks with iPods, I'll be filling Mum & Dad's drunken faces with crisps and cigs. But will I be doing that next year? Hell no.

I'll be squeezing out another 400 words on Mass Effect 2.

(Probably for a preview.)

Written by Jaz McDougall on the 14th of October 2009 for immediate publication. I accept ego massages and six-page commissions as guilt offerings. Be nice to your cashier, he has a record of your credit card number.

Emergency Lulz Alert

jazmcdougall@yahoo.co.uk (Jazmeister) — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 21:13:00 +0000

The first advert that's worked on me in years. I don't make a habit of doing gimmicky online things, but this just tempted me. The image is my usual profile picture, but only my right side, flipped. Scary, no?

Written and uploaded by Jaz McDougall on 5th October 2009. What have I done?

Veiled Worlds

jazmcdougall@yahoo.co.uk (Jazmeister) — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 08:00:00 +0000

New fiction blog live now!

I'm originally a fiction writer. The love of invention, of the impossible limits of imagination, not only propelled me safely into the Writer skill set, but informed the very fascination with video games that fuels my career today. I owe a lot to just noodling around with personal fiction. And you know what? It's been too long without writing some.

Veiled Worlds is a site that I'll be updating monthly with a short piece of fiction of around a thousand words. It launched today, on the first of the month; I have a few things scheduled, but the monthly post rate fits my pace perfectly. Well, okay, so I actually could write thousands of words of directionless fiction a day, but I'd rather spent that time writing hundreds of words for money. Writing lots of fiction is playing a dangerous game; you risk disappearing up your own arse. The aim is to post prose "as is"; discuss in the comments, by all means, but there you go.

I'd also like to mention that I'm accepting submissions for it. Send me a .txt file (no word docs, no inline text), do /this/ to denote emphasis (don't use html), and like I said, keep it around a thousand words. If it's more, split it off. This should be your own high quality work. No fan stuff (within reason), make sure to spell check it, and don't be afraid to write for an adult audience if that's what you want to do. The only requirement is quality. You can email me at jazmcdougall@yahoo.co.uk, and try not to sound like a Nigerian banker. Don't, for example, express your urgent need in the subject line. If you're an illustrator, web designer, or, you know, if you have any special skills to balance out the dearth of writers, and you want to get involved, just jump in and email me.

Oh yeah, spread the word!

I want to be a

jazmcdougall@yahoo.co.uk (Jazmeister) — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 08:00:00 +0000

Hi! This last week or two, I did a lot of playing around with flixel. I'm trying to collect all the error messages, and got off to a great start by not installing AS3 in any way, shape, or form. If you don't know what AS3 is, I can tell you that it's some sort of programming language that flixel relies upon to work. Yeah. I've also been playing around in Game Maker a lot.

I also re-read a lot of old emails. It's been around a year since Craig Pearson started filling my head with impossible dreams, and I was re-reading the email conversation. Turns out, I made a nervous joke about my competition entry (the letter I wrote) being full of errors because, as a fantasy writer (so long since I called myself that - still fits) my spell checker is full of shite. As in, I'd make a mistake like "Baggageg" and it'd be the name of some servant of evil in a years-lost novel. Crap joke, really, but I made it, because damn it I was nervous. And he slipped this into his reply:

"Half-assed fantasy writer, eh? You could be a games writer."

So with that laconic, somewhat flippant judgement, I'm suddenly a tumult of aspirations. I didn't know anything about the publishing process - this month, I'm standing behind a counter scanning magazines for customers, watching them walk off, and remembering the quiet joy of typing those very words.

It's weird how things turn out, yeah? I'm thinking a lot about fantasy again, and hopefully we'll see something spring forth from that - on the other hand, my journalism is taking off too, and it's paying more than writing about alternate dimensions and secret robots, so maybe we'll stick with that until we're self-sufficient. Yes.

Lisa got me the new Monkey Island special edition, and I've been playing the hell out of it. I don't think it's a great accomplishment just to record some forced dialogue and sexify the visuals, but the original game's mighty humour and stirring setting shine through like a motherfucker. I really do find this game funny! I'd forgotten. Plus, Guybrush's vocal isn't that bad at all. Yeah, it's cool. Anyway, I'm playing the shit out of that.

Also enjoying my ever-increasing TF2 abilities. It's definitely rewarding to just be really good at something. This is why people still play Tribes 2; it's a rush to excel.

Right, two weeks again, so two links, and a bonus video: the Big Egg.

A Tale of Two Cities (Stephen Fry)

"A couple of months ago someone asked me what I was up to and I mentioned I was making a documentary about Richard Wagner. “Oh, I would have thought you liked Beethoven,” they said. I was too polite to pick them up by their scruff of their necks and shake them violently back and forth, but I mean WHAT? “Why’ve you got a Norwich City shield on your Twitter avatar? I thought you liked cricket.” “You just quoted Family Guy” – I thought you liked The Simpsons”, and so on and so on. I mean, really."

Stephen Fry writes for his blog in a very conversational style. I love it, actually - infinitely more tolerable than his incessant twitter feed. I've always broadly liked him as an entertainer, but his blog is the first place I've witnessed this supposed "fierce intellect" he's got. Rumours: founded. This is a pretty nice little diatribe on people who assume you hate something because you like something else. Assuming is usually bad, really.

Persuasive Games: Little Black Sambo (Gamasutra)

"We might conclude that Scribblenauts is a game whose very goal is to make us think about the words people utter, and responses we expect. In this sense, and in direct opposition to the responses Kotaku's coverage has procured, the discourse Scribblenauts' "sambo" produces is precisely the purpose of the game. It is a game meant to make us think and rethink our words, their uses, and their implicit behavior. And the outcry and confusion shows that it is successful. "

I had to comment on this, even if better men than I already have, because I utterly agree with this articles conclusion that, if we bitch that games aren't taken seriously by the mainstream society, we have to take the issues like this seriously too. Like Ian Bogost says in the article, we can't brush it aside with "It's just a game." We need to face it, and discuss it. You could look at it like Scribblenauts is taking a word like "Jew" and spitting out some racially incendiary object, you could also realise that they thought they were just taking a word that meant "gourd" and pooping out a gourd.

But what would happen if the word "Sambo" lost all connotations? Wouldn't that be like disarming the enemy? What if there were no words that meant "black person" that also meant "you suck"? Would that remove racism? It's tempting, but no, that's just a version of NewSpeak tailored to my personal outlook. We need to express concepts like those to fight them. We need to be able to draw a picture of an ugly racist, and write down the ugly racist words that he said, or we'll forget what he looks like.

Written by Jaz McDougall, over the course of a few days at the beginning of the week of the 21st of September 2009, culminating on the 24th, for publication on the 28th. Ew!

Good, occasionally good.

jazmcdougall@yahoo.co.uk (Jazmeister) — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 08:00:00 +0000

My experience of radio has been, ultimately, exploring the few bright blips of uninteresting music between the murky expanses of static and alien transmissions you'll usually get this far north. The stations are:

Moray Firth Radio – Local station running pop music with a country/ballad slant, plenty of DJ's that try too hard and a ton of regular callers. Crap.

Radio One – Pop and very safe banter by day, wild eclectic shit by night. I didn't know I liked dubstep. Can be mind numbing though, and absolutely intolerable once the weekend hits.

Radio Two – Sedate music with excellent content. I wish they'd just talk, for fuck's sake, it's ten times more interesting than Radio One.

So yeah, that's my selection. I did find a classical station once, but it's always got awful reception. I sometimes just listen to it anyway. One night, I was messing about with the aerial and the tuner, and found something new. It's called, "The BBC World Service". I first heard those words listening to the Goon Show. I don't know a thing about it, but I'd always imagined it was some kind of wartime legacy.

It's actually the best fucking radio station ever.

When I start listening, usually about 11:30 pm, I'm listening to whatever entertainment piece is on. Last night it was hilarious fake news about uncovering corpses in the Blue Peter Garden and some bullshit science. Not exactly fresh, but it made me laugh.

Then the first milestone of the evening: the shipping forecast. This is a mad block of words that follow a very strict structure, almost as if they're communications between Mentats. Oh One Oh Four, Visibility Moderate, Fair, or Good, Occasionally Poor. Then they start making no sense at all. It's awesome.

A customer will walk in and look at me, start babbling happily as per usual, and then stop, frowning. They look at the radio, then at me, suddenly betrayed, uncomfortable. (protip: that's when you pop them in the nuts.)

Then it's a series of specialist news reports, dramatic poetry readings, and just general digest. This is pretty wide ranging, although clearly still for mainstream consumption. Sandwiched between a mobile Country Walking expert round-table and the live coverage of the Britain in Bloom awards in some sort of West Country/Cornwall/Pirate area somewhere in England, there were two very interesting features indeed.

The first was an interview with a geneticist who'd managed to cure red/green blindness in monkeys. Or chimps. Can't remember, too much science. The point is, they used a virus (which normally attacks a cell and inserts its own DNA) to insert custom DNA into cells. They had it attack a subset of the red sight cones on the affected chimp's retina, and resequence them to become, magically, green sight cones. Shut up, I don't know what they're called.

The scientist reckoned he could do the same to humans to give them, you know, boring normal sight. Or infravision. Fuck yes.

The second was an interview with a guy called Ben Alexander, who'd found a specialist rehab centre that could deal with his MMO addiction. The piece didn't mention which game he was regularly injecting himself with, but maybe I'll pretend to be a journalist and actually find out.

The BBCWS is fantastic just because it's variety, it's education, it's exploration, it's a ton of specialists and consultants and specialist correspondents. It's like some sort of audio-only discovery channel. The other night it was a study on how the NAACP has changed since the Luther-King glory days. I just wouldn't think to read up on this stuff, but I'm glad it's been inserted into my brain.

Also, "moderate", "fair", and "good" are actually the same thing, nubs. LURN 2 REED.

Written by Jaz McDougall on the 19th of September for publication on the 23rd. I have a new sexy invoice!

Weeks and Weeks in Briefs

jazmcdougall@yahoo.co.uk (Jazmeister) — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 08:00:00 +0000

Well, it's certainly been a while. I've had a productive few weeks since my last update, and I'll aim to go into detail in the coming weeks. Below, a general summary of my doings:

(I've been having some formatting issues, so let me just insert this lengthy poem by Dylan Thomas:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.)

I made a game called "Bunker" for Ludum Dare 15. It was great fun to make and I learned a lot. I'm thoroughly determined to start messing around in another engine, like Flash. I ultimately want to make eccentric games with a very personal appeal, because I fucking love vidja games. I'll post more about that ambition, and the way it fits into my other ambitions, soon.

Issue 205 of PC Gamer came out. This is the issue that began to gradually corporealise in the whirling locus of the PCG office while I visited them. I wanted to write about working for them as soon as I returned, and I did indeed churn out several drafts, but I think it's better that I attempt that later this month, now that the excitement has died down.

I played World of Warcraft a little bit after my brother sent me a trial key. You can expect some blatherings later on.

I've recently watched The Tale of Despereaux, Get Smart, Pathfinder and District 9. Expect tentative reviews of these lengthy, unskippable cutscenes.

I've been listening to the BBC World Service at work, and I'm not sure if there's a post hidden in there or not.

And my link for this, er, week:

The WoW Landscape Seven Months Later (Keen and Graev's Gaming Blog)

"People log in and they get in line to ride the rides. They used to enjoy the restaurants, the atmosphere, and the shops , but they’ve seen them all and done it all. They’ve realized that the game and their fun all boils down to how many of these rides they can experience in a day. I’ve been logging in to ride the rides for four days. I’ve really enjoyed them. In fact, I’ve had a blast. I’ve been riding the Tea Cups because the lines are too long for Space Mountain (everyone loves Space Mountain). As much fun as I’m having, something about it bothers me. I don’t like waiting in line to ride the rides; no one does. And it’s not even just standing in line to ride them (waiting for a group) – it’s that there is nothing else to do while waiting in line. WoW has essentially become all about riding the rides and as a result waiting in line. That is the extent of the game now."

A great point. In general, this is a great blog written by some seasoned MMO players; they know what they're talking about. The theme park analogy is perfect. Of course, I had rather more fun with my experience, but I'll get to that.

Written by Jaz McDougall a day before publication on the 14 September 2009. Edited a bit on the 18th.

Minecraft Online: Age of Buildening

jazmcdougall@yahoo.co.uk (Jazmeister) — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 08:00:00 +0000

Gaming news first - I've been really enjoying a bit of Minecraft recently. I talked about it before, here, and I still get a lot of hits for that page. I guess people just aren't talking about Minecraft, you know? I ended up on a server that had some cool mods on there - fancy ways of limiting new users to a little fenced area, with advanced admin and construction powers available via a tiered membership (free, of course). I noticed something odd, though. They were all flying.

Minecraft is certainly intended, at some point in the future, to be a competitive castle-building RPG thing, but the currently playable alpha only showcases "free build mode" - no health, no resources, just infinite building and blocks. Lava is just red, opaque water here. Building is for purely aesthetic purposes. It's part of the charm, of course, and painstakingly hopping around massive cathedrals built block-by-block, possibly as part of a community effort, is pretty humbling. Still, flying and noclipping would make the sky-sculptures easier...

So I downloaded the World Of Minecraft client. Wait, isn't that the name of my blog post? Yep, turns out the rather obvious pun provides a rather necessary client wrapper with a name. You can grab the client here, but you need to register a (fairly anonymous) account to see the download link. Shit, I didn't just direct-link the download link, did I? Crap! Still, visit that page to read what to do with it - I'll let you puzzle it out on your own, just to be fair. The upshot? Flying, wallhacking, super speed, favourite servers, and full-screen. In Minecraft, hacking matters about as much as wearing an offensive tshirt - it's not hurting anyone, unless you're getting where you shouldn't be.

I went to see my Auntie Klee this week. Lisa had already walked up - it's a relaxing fifteen minutes, on a gentle incline, that winds through verdant forest - the road nips into Klee's driveway for a cup of tea before continuing further into the bowels of our estate. Klee is from the west coast of the USA, while Lisa is from the east. When I got there, they were drawing and painting, and then Klee gave us a mountain of olives.

Going to visit Klee is something I used to do a lot while I was waiting to immigrate to the US, shortly before marrying Lisa and starting this very blog. My visits were always characterised by feeling welcome - not that I was unwelcome anywhere else, of course. I guess Klee has things organised so that she's usually doing something in her food garden or cooking some thing or playing a game - it's very much the way I'd like my own life to be. They're not hard-and-fast self sufficiency nuts - they do buy cola and use facebook - but Francis and Klee appreciate the benefits of growing their own vegetables and maintaining their own plumbing. They seem to be living the dream. They don't have a laser, but they do spend an awful lot of time just doing what they love, whatever that happens to be at a given moment. It's really inspiring.

Klee is also a gamer. Without invading her privacy too much, I'd like to mention that she is awesome at Mario Party. Yeah, go on, shrug, roll your eyes. Casual party game, right? Wrong. Klee prefers Mario Party... 5? I think? A particular edition (there are at least 9) that includes a particular map that she always plays. Her self-styled objective: to team up with Francis and defeat the machine. She is sublimely capable. It is nothing short of a tactical and resource-management tour-de-force to watch. Taking part, you're one of her trusted lieutenants in a battle against the very best AI Nintendo has to offer. These guys are dicks. They fudge dice rolls and mess up your key strokes. All you have are coins, orbs, chance, and mini-games.

We always end up talking about society and how to fix it, which segues nicely into this week's link:

Walsall (Garry's Blog)

"If you ask a scrubber in Walsall what the problem is, they’ll probably tell you there’s too many Polish people, too many Muslims. They’re what’s ruining the town. You go to the job centre, there’s not one Muslim or Polish face there. There’s plenty of pale white lads wearing addidas tracksuit bottoms and baseball caps, leaving their cider cans outside while they go to sign on."

It's a little bit rant-ish, but Garry of GMod fame certainly has a point. Living in NE Scotland, there's a lot of weird, provincial racism. We're a country with a fairly ruthless and ineffective educational system: it champions a few gifted academics, and poops out the majority as insecure, under-qualified, unmotivated sociopaths (like me). In my case, I was lucky - playing CS:S in my pants and having a knack for writing seems to have landed me on my feet, but what if your closet painters and secret accountants just never get comfortable with their inner talents? No wonder we, as a country, sneer jealously at the smattering of immigrants for outshining us at work. It's something I feel strongly about, pointing fingers when you should be fixing your own shit, and this blog post definitely helped me articulate my feelings a little more.

Wow, I actually ran out of space! 900 words is pushing it, I'm afraid. Thanks for staying subscribed, guys - Jazmeister Central will jostle with meaningful prose once again, I promise. It's been great not updating this past week, I really needed the break just to play some fucking games. More later on what I played.

Written by Jaz McDougall about a half hour before publication on the 24th of August 2009. Cup o Tea? Check. Slice o Cake? Check. Happy 80th Birthday, Granddad!

Bad, Good, and Immediate Futures

jazmcdougall@yahoo.co.uk (Jazmeister) — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 08:00:00 +0000

That's better. Blogging about last week on a Monday might seem perverse, but I can always make it a Weekend in Briefs. As long as I make some sort of joke about pants, equilibrium is preserved. This weekend, I've basically been working and playing Fallout 3. I had a rare productive evening last Thursday, so I managed to get a lot of writing out of the way. It means I can play some games, and you know, like, write about them. Which is great!

I added another mod to my Fallout 3 mix since Friday: Fellout. It takes away the green. I mean, it talks a lot about all the changes it made, but yeah, it removes green. And makes it dark at night. Cool!

Also gradually working on my Street Fighter 4. What I'll do is, beat someone in a moment of utter transcendent joy, then gradually lose all the resulting battle points over the course of the next hour. Playing as Dan really helps; people don't expect very much of you, and he can block as well as Sagat can, that's for sure. Just not, you know, fight as well as Sagat.

This week, again, I've been thinking about this blog. I've reached an unfortunate conclusion; I can't eat my hat and wear it too. If I want to sell interesting, well-written prose to people, I can't write it for free on my blog. I was going to do a Gordon Freeman in Fallout 3 thing, but you know, that might be worth money. I'm not in a position where I can justify that anymore. It's just irreconcilable. This means I've got a lot less to offer here; I know that people read Jazmeister Central because it's free, good writing released at regular intervals, but I don't believe in that system any more than I believe a word David Cameron says. Writing is worth money, even when it doesn't cost anything.

Which means I need to consider what to write about here. I'll rebrand my features, I'll keep the quest log, and so on, but this may be the closest to a hiatus I've yet come. Remember to check out my Twitter, Youtube, and Flickr favourites from time to time. You can get those RSS feeds here, here, and here. I use them as handy clipboards for cool shit on the internet, and it often doesn't make it here or anywhere else that I can really talk about it. Maybe that'll change.

Oh, speaking of which, my link this week:

Future Pastoral (BLDG BLOG)
Geoff at the BLDG BLOG presents some of Nathan Freise's stunning... well, he calls them "Architectural Prints" but, materials aside, they're paintings. Peektors. They're pretty gosh-darned pretty, with sort of rural areas speckled with enormous half-built condos and futuristic office blocks and whatnot. Like we'd live in islands of architecture and laze in the sea of green. It dingled my dangle, anyway.

Written (and re-written) by Jaz McDougall between Thursday and Sunday for publication on 17th August 2009.

Overhaullout

jazmcdougall@yahoo.co.uk (Jazmeister) — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 08:00:00 +0000

I saw a Mudcrab, yesterday. Horrible creatures.

I've been messing around with Fallout 3, and I've essentially found everything I need on page 104 of PC Gamer, Issue 204. Duncan Harris writes:

"Xodarap's Fallout Overhaul merges various mods to build a harder, more meaningful life for wasteland wanderers, adding fatigue, hunger, thirst, tangible injury and, by extension, a real sense of struggle."

I've become more and more interested in harder games lately, and while this seems to be the forte of independent labours like When Pigs Fly and Spelunky, mainstream efforts are getting easier and easier. Except Street Fighter 4, obviously. I decided to take this opportunity to beef up Fallout 3, and had a preliminary wander with an old character to test out the handful of excellent mods.

Marlon is my oldest surviving character. I think my first was called Eleanor, and she was your traditional patchwork RPG protagonist. On paper, she'd have been a research and hacking expert with a polite demeanour, and as Fallout 3's corrupting opportunities presented themselves, she grew more and more varied. Mastering pistols - that's just a necessity, right? And lock picking, par for the irradiated course, really. But bludgeoning, Ellie? Really? Making your own tools for bludgeoning? Science gone wrong.

Marlon is a character. He has nothing but distracted antipathy for his Father, and not much more for anyone else. He is good with a sledgehammer, kills anyone with a weapon or a stash, and has never been to Megaton. Currency means nothing to him; he's interested only in the utility of what he finds. You won't see Marlon hoarding precious MacGuffins because they're "worth" a hundred caps - he gets the Enormous Sledgehammer Discount. He's fun to play, especially if you keep him moving and use plenty of grenades and cover. The first time a Super Mutant turned and ran from me, Marlon was so pleased, he actually let him live.

Well, he thought about it.

I stopped playing Fallout 3 for a number of reasons - more games came along, I'd seen the same places too often, and I'd attempted the main quest with very little momentum far too many times. Games for Windows Live made it difficult to play at times, it'd insist on using my gamepad at all times, and Fallout 3 is just visually depressing. It's not the perfect game. I loaded the following mods:

Xodarap's Fallout Overhaul - Download it (registering just needs your email address and works for the Elder Scrolls Nexus et al) and just install the "STANDALONE" esp (drag it to your data folder). This has a host of implementations, from tweaking levelling speeds to adding in hunger and thirst, messing with weapon damage and accuracy and adding new perks. It turns the game upside down. Not literally.

Green World - This adds trees in there. "WHAT?!" Shamus Young argues the case with trademark level-headedness.

Also some texture packs that I can't seem to find. They're not ESPs, just new materials dumped into the data subfolders, and they don't have readme files, or... anyway, they don't affect the mechanics, so let's just call that Pretty Screenshot Tax.

And that's it!

Finally, the XP I deserve.

I started up Fallout 3 and loaded my most recent save game for Marlon. I'm in a Vault (motherfucker, don't you ever forget), and the lighting is very poor. I'm told that I'm hungry, and well rested. Oh. And then I get a billion experience points. Oh! Marlon is level 11, which means that in the new system, he's level 13. I'm not sure why, but it seems to be fairer? I pick some skills and perks, noting new ones like "Fighter" and "As The Night", as well as altered criteria for some of the perks. A few moments later and I'm knee deep in some larger, angrier Mirelurk - irradiated Mudcrabs, essentially - and his buddies are swarming from every side. I seem to be attracting nastier enemies. All I have is this 10mm pistol, so I get to shooting, and voilà! Shooting one in the face registers, brilliantly, as a hit in the face. Mirelurk Hunter Head Crippled! Damn straight it is. I make quick work of them, and notice that I'm almost dead. Now that was a fight - brutal, high stakes, high attrition, Marlon wins. Just like it should be.

Then I head for the exit. I'm not sure if you could always force the locks, but Marlon gives it a go, and fails. I fight another horde of the crab monsters, and encounter a "Mirelurk King", who looks like a Zora on meth. I've never seen either of these type of Mirelurk before, and after sinking most of my stimpacks into the battle, I'm almost afraid to go to the surface. Isn't that what fallout is all about?

Of course, when I arrive up there, I blink for a second at the tufts of grass and lush trees. It doesn't look perfect - trees can overlap with buildings and each other, and you can walk through them - but it looks 85% perfect. Immediately apparent is the increased strength of the basic weapons, and the increased threat represented by the roaming robots and huge insects - a pair of Yao Guai rush Marlon, he kills the first with a few shots from his pistol, and the second tears him to shreds in mere moments. This character, this brazen relic of a bygone Wasteland, didn't last five minutes in the glaring sun of a new Fallout 3.

Next week, we'll see how Gordon Freeman handles it.

Written by Jaz McDougall a healthy fifteen hours before publication on the 14th of August, 2009. I'm sure that, with time, Marlon will get used to the new wasteland. He just got excited and forgot about his grenades, is all.

Week in Briefs

jazmcdougall@yahoo.co.uk (Jazmeister) — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 08:06:00 +0000

I'm trying to gently nudge this into a Monday slot without doing two in a row. I realise now that this blog gives very little insight into what I'm thinking about and who I am. Let me re-introduce myself: I'm Jaz McDougall. I live in the woods. I have a business writing about games. I like to make games, too, but it's harder than actually writing about them, so I leave that for the weekends.

In truth, I'm pretty busy. I spend a lot of time reading, sending emails and instant messages, posting utter crap on twitter, and going through hundreds of screenshots. Playing games and writing are the two things I want to be doing all of the time, but in reality, they get about half of my time between them. Sometimes, that's only 2 hours of writing and 2 hours of gaming, if you figure I work 8 hours a night and sleep 8 hours a day. That's a very small amount of time, and if you figure that the time I spend writing is proportional to the amount I earn, things are actually looking pretty good.

The ultimate goal here is to write freelance exclusively. This will take a little time yet, but once my writing income is stable, I can hand in a generous notice at my job and start getting used to day-shift again. It's exciting to be this close to a lifestyle that's always been shunned as some impossible fantasy - not specifically, but the idea that I don't really have to go anywhere special every day, the idea that I only need to do things I can confidently do off my own steam, the idea that I can be an expert authority on something with a set of atrocious grades and a lifetime of debt - it's very exciting. Life changing, even.

Broken Crockery (Lisa Blower)
This week I read a short story by Lisa Blower, who seems to be utterly unconnected to the ~~first page of google~~ internet. It's written from the perspective of a young girl from Stoke, which is a place in England that I've never been to. It's actually really moving, and the way she sets up this gradually building wall of little idiosyncratic facts and feelings manages to introduce every character and element via the seemingly undirected rambling of a young kid.

I'm reading Clive Barker's Sacrament again, because it's probably one of my favourite books. If you like Barker, there's usually this moment where you go "why haven't I read/recommended this to my partner/child/friend?" Usually, you read it for a bit and realise, "Oh right, the horribly disturbing themes and/or graphic descriptions of violence. Bugger." Of course, Mr Barker is now working on his Abarat stuff again, and was recently spotting actually holding the finished book three, "Absolute Midnight". Which is about time, I'd say. I can't wait to go back to the Abarat.

Oh yeah, this week brought is Question Party and Translation Party. Go play.

Written by Jaz McDougall a scandalous 5 minutes after his deadline for publication on the 12th of August 2009.

Professor of Cunning at Cunningham University

jazmcdougall@yahoo.co.uk (Jazmeister) — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 08:00:00 +0000

It's probably not going to be Mexicans with Uzis. Cousin William don't grow that no more.

We use the word "epic" to describe little things worthy of praise, like sandwiches and Youtube videos. Let William and Sly remind you what it really means, as you scale the forested peaks of a vast haunted wilderness.

Playing as Sly, a swift russet fox, you'll leap gracefully between treetops and jutting woodland ruins, rush through long grasses and hidden passages in search of mushrooms, and gather glowing "fairyflies" to activate all of the twelve runestones. These standing stones were made by William as a mode of travel, primarily so he could get to his stash of mushrooms deep in the magical forest. Riiiiiiiiight. It's a case of nosing around until you find 5 fairyflies - little glowing motes that circle you happily - and touching one of the dormant stones.

But wait! Where's the risk-reward system?!! Relax, guys, there are little scary slug/snake heads, called Darklings, lurking in the long grass that can spring up and snuff out a fairyfly each time. They're tricky to avoid unless you've already spotted one, but they don't move far from that spot and can be dodged with quick jumping. Darklings usually inhabit little pits where you'd normally get stuck and jump fruitlessly towards a lofty platform, and a few zaps could send you trudging back through the forest to replenish your fairyfly supply.

HOW DO YOU LIKE ME NOW

When you finally activate a runestone, you can use it to teleport to any adjacent active stones. You also get a white aura that, for about 15 seconds or so, allows you to kill Darklings. It's the Pacman trick. It's great, because the design doesn't need combat shoe-horned in. Running and jumping is a joy to begin with.

Aside from battering Darklings, there's plenty to do. There are plenty of mushrooms hidden around the gigantic map, for one; you can find them in remote locations, partially hidden by the grass, and you can try pressing against solid walls to reveal the odd secret nook invisible to the camera. Sometimes you'll find a key. There are sixteen chests, and each holds a couple more mushrooms. There are also hidden levers, a delightful hidden ability, and blue shimmery bridges. Sly inhabits a serene, melancholy world, and exploring it very relaxing.

The music, composed by sole developer Lucas Paakh (Kajenx), reminded me instantly of Secret of Evermore, with its reverberous piano. It does the huge, misty forest justice, although it repeats often. The look of the game is solid, with layered scrolling backdrops that multiply the scope by awe-inspiring magnitudes. It's not really that challenging, although you'll be hard pressed to find all 170-ish mushrooms, but you'll quickly understand that this was designed as an experience. The music is grand enough for the map. The map is broad enough for the movement. The movement is aerial enough to make it fun hunting down mushrooms and dodging Darklings for an hour. Everything fits.

Love can build a bridge. Love is a blue gradient activated by a switch.

Almost everything, I mean. The final runestone is guarded by a... boss. I don't know why it's there. I didn't ask for it. I certainly didn't enjoy it. You're trapped in a little area that looks a bit like the really simple floor-and-two-platforms setup of basic Smash Brothers maps. A runestone sits dormant. Fairyflies appear off-screen. And a giant Darkling blitzes across the level repeatedly, left, right, left, right. You need five fairyflies to activate a runestone, and yet one touch from this boss eats everything you've got. Even if you can get dodging down, you still need to become psychic enough to predict its streaking movement before it robs you of those four fairyflies. It makes very little sense and is a frustrating end to a very honest, simple game. William and Sly could do with asking itself, "What am I?", but I can't argue with the hours I've lost to it, memorising its contours and humming its tune. I email Lucas and told him this:

"I think William and Sly is really good."

Collected

This post was written by Jaz McDougall scant minutes before publication on the 10th of August 2009. Eight million Darklings were severely fizzed in the making of this production.

Attack of the 5ft10 Man

jazmcdougall@yahoo.co.uk (Jazmeister) — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 08:00:00 +0000

This is the best idea ever. I used to do something called the Week in Briefs, where I'd find myself sitting in just my pants after a shower or something, and decide to just blather on about what happened last week. I also used to do something called "timesink", which was just a list of links. These links are always good, by the way, but I doubt many people click on them, because it's too much effort. Finally, I used to write something every Monday called "The Jazitorial", which was a way to post something pretty vacuous and have a bit of a day off. I was posting every week day back then, and they were good times, but when I made the change to the sacred Penny Arcade days, the Jazitorial seemed like a waste of a good Monday. I kept it alive for a while by putting timesink in there and doing a bit of a "Monday Papers" thing, but it was still filler.

So what I've done is, I've merged all three. It turns out that it's hard to find things that belong on this blog: it needs to be something interesting and entertaining, but ultimately something I wouldn't be able to get paid for elsewhere. This is almost the rest of the best, then; you'll get stupid ideas for articles about Worms DS, and reviews of a single NIN track, and so on. That doesn't seem fair. This blog has been my internet home for three years now, and while it started as an anonymous, cryptic weekly/monthly/quarterly update for my family to knowingly decipher, it's transformed into an author's diary and a log of travels and a games blog, and now it's a sort of fledgling version of these neglected blogs you find lying in the wake of successful careers. Obviously, it's great that I'm seeing some success, but my blog kept me writing damn near all the time; I wouldn't be as good a writer without this big blank space to fill up. Over the years, it's made me more gooder than ever before.

So welcome back to the Week in Briefs! This is Friday, so let's talk about last Friday. The coolest thing about last Friday was that my Brother was visiting. I live with my parents (because I'm the coolest), and so it was a bit of a reunion, especially when Lisa went to work and for about five minutes it was just the four of us: my Mum, my Dad, and my Brother. The moment passed without comment (except from me, duh) and it was quickly just Harry and I hunched over SF4. We unlocked a guy called Akuma. He's pretty demonic, and has red blistering fire around him whenever he does the slightest thing, so it was fun to beat the crap out of him as Dan. Harry's always pressed for time, and he gets up late, and I sleep really incredibly early, so we didn't see an awful lot of each other. We remedied this by having some cool things to do. We played a hot-seat game of Blood Bowl, which delighted us both even though he CHEATED so he could best my Orcs with RAT MEN. He won 4-1. Dick.

He also brought a tv series called "The Lost Room". I'll talk about it next week, but it's very interesting and I'm glad we got to see it all.

Last week, I also enjoyed a bit of buzz as the PCG subscribers starting getting their latest issues, and gradually began discovering that my face was in it. Since the supreme joy of writing that article, much cooler things have happened, so I'd almost forgotten about it. Lots of people dropped me a line on twitter to say that they liked the article, congratulating me, etc, so it was a big ego boost. The article itself was good too, I'd forgotten a lot about it, and I'm glad they picked the picture that they did, because it was my favourite. Good times.

Early this week, When Pigs Fly was released. It was actually available when my brother was still here, and we played through it turn about and had a good old rofl, I can tell you. I also showed him William and Sly, which is something I'm yet to dig into here at JMC, but he seemed to like it a lot. We couldn't seem to get the epic game of TF2 going, but it worked out because Lisa got to play as much as possible without having to entertain me. A+++, would invite again.

A few links now, just to give you something to do all weekend.

The Pulpiteer (Brainy Gamer)

Michael Abbot gives a great pitch for a game I first heard about from my Dad. It was another one of those "Pfft, yeah right Dad, let's not forget who the games journalist is here lolol" type occasions. Who's laughing now? Not me. I'm just desperately lusting after Little King Story. I mean, let's face it, for a critic, I'll definitely line up at the trough with the rest of them, so all it had to do was not be broken, but it looks like quite a sublime piece of craft. I might have to get it.

Murder on the Killing Floor (EGTF)

This guy was one of the first people to read my humble blog of his own volition. This is his excellent tale of how a troupe of rowdy interlopers totally ruined his carpet.

Hands-On Preview: Borderlands (RPS)

The dashing Mr Meer gets your mouth watering with tales of Borderlands, the unexpected new game from Gearbox. You know gearbox, right? Last time I really encountered them was Opposing Force, where I laughed at having to turn a Valve and then operate a Gearbox as part of a puzzle. Oh, dear sweet lulz. Anyway, this is typical RPS-quality. You can't find better free talky-words about Borderlands anywhere else.

The Interview (ultrabrilliant)

Andy Kelly, who I once blurted "Hello!" at during my tour of Future towers, recently had a job interview. Except, you know, in EVE online. It's a great account, but also a nifty insight at the workings of the EVE universe.

Holy crap, it's 9:10. Blogging complete!

Written by Jaz McDougall a scant half hour before publication on the 7th of August, 2009. All "Week in Briefs" are constructed in a state of semi-nudity.

Flight of the Blunderpig

jazmcdougall@yahoo.co.uk (Jazmeister) — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 08:00:00 +0000

Yeah, laugh it up.

I spent a while playing When Pigs Fly, which is a lovely game made by Anna Anthropy. Have a go, and at the first point you feel like quitting, come back here, and read the rest of this article. There are a few things I could say about this game, and most of them are kind, but I will say that it's an absolute fucker for difficulty. My first try took me a half an hour. Let me ease your pain: use the Z key to fly, not the space bar.

When Pigs Fly is difficult because it's simple, doesn't relent, and teaches you every lesson the hard way. You play as a pig who finds herself stuck below ground. There's an obvious metaphor here that doesn't draw too much attention to itself, and works rather well, but Anna explains it very clearly on her blog post announcing the game. Unable to jump out again, your last reasonable course of action is to grow a gorgeous pair of fragile wings, all the better to navigate the labyrinth of hazardous pits and lava pools below. There aren't many tricks to learn; like Mario, you're just getting better and better at the single mechanic. Movement is interesting: upward momentum is an effort to maintain and stabilise, thanks to gravity, while lateral impulse is only slowed or reversed when you think to tap the opposite arrow key. It sounds simple now, but you'll forget - you'll be focusing so hard on that tight corner that you'll forget to let go of the Z key, and jab Piggy's head on a stalactite.

And it gets devilishly hard. At first, the games critic's hat would say, "Hmm, look how nicely these checkpoints are placed. Each screen is a distinct obstacle bracketed by two checkpoints. What elegant desOH YOU FUCKER." It starts to become like one of those loop-of-wire-and-hopefully-quite-a-steady-hand puzzles, as you're trying to hover above a pit of lava and stay below the ceiling of stalactites, and if you manage that and botch your landing on the platform at the other end, it's back to the start of the room.

Still, I don't like complaining about difficulty in games like this, games that so obviously intend to be difficult. Playing it, you get into weird cycles of self-abuse, first making a harmless mistake, then by the third attempt starting to rush things, perhaps trying the same approach vector multiple times and calling yourself an idiot for it, then promising you'll take it slow and, when that doesn't work either, you'll just close firefox. "Fuck you, pig!"

Ever since Zelda, blocks like that have made me want chocolate.

The level design - a topic that Prof. Anthropy's been covering extensively on her blog of late - is hoisted to a position of supreme importance, then: you're one tile high, and three tiles wide. Any gap, bottleneck, pot hole or ascent smaller than 3 tiles wide is going to cut your fucking wings off. It's complicated by the pointy stalactites/mites that will kill you if you touch them with any part of your body, but essentially, you're trying to fit through gaps. There are harder rooms than the above, but it's a great example of how the game makes you think you've got plenty of room, when a moment of furrowed brows will tell you that you don't, actually.

The overall game structure is good, too. Apart from the usual progression of different tile sets and elements to denote progress, you're always descending in the first half of the game. Every room, you start high, exit low. Sometimes you'll drop down into the next room, and there's a sense of moving back to the left and even getting very lost. The background gets darker and the foreground gets lighter, and you start to wonder when you'll end up in Bowser's castle, when you reach the middle. This is a screen full of water, and you're in this little tunnel free of hazards. There's a window, and a submarine goes past, and if you die on this screen, you might as well sell your computer.

From there, it's up, up, and away - the puzzles get harder, but you're finally climbing, and it bolsters your resolve if you're feeling a little abused. The cracks of sky you get to see from now on aren't blue, they're pink. You reach a sequence of rooms that will tax your patience, your control, and the bluer wavelengths of your vocabulary. This is a horrible comparison, but it's a little like a boss fight. These two or three screens are the squiggliest routes, the tightest squeezes you've yet faced. If you've kept your death count fairly low, these are the rooms that will double it in the space of a few minutes. Triple it, even.

When you make it past them, the final four rooms are easy as pie, and almost as rewarding as the final ascent.

"...and swore 24532 times. What exactly is a smeltmonger, incidentally?"

I keep coming back to this game, to do the backwards mode and see how easy the earlier levels are with my new skills. There's a lot that creeps up on you here. The tiles are really nice The music is very retro; that horn synth gives it a really light hearted feel, like you're watching a slapstick. Broadly, though, Amon's track is what keeps you believing in those dark, lonely areas, those jagged tunnels at the brink of triumph. It's fun, it's varied, and quite lovely. Speaking of which, Daphny's voice acting is pretty funny! If anything sells the slapstick vibe, it's her squeaks and squeals as you vapourise your pig for the fifth time in three seconds that'll have you laughing out loud with your friends. Peculiarly, of all Anna's games, this is the one I've played with a crowd, and it was very worthy.

You can mute her with S, you heartless square. Now go back and play.

Uplifting

(I've officially stopped doing the 8/10 joke)

Saikyo Very Much

jazmcdougall@yahoo.co.uk (Jazmeister) — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 08:00:00 +0000

DAN IS DISAPPOINT.

I have a sickness. I can only play as this guy in Street Fighter 4. I don't know how it happened - I started with Chun Li, true to my roots, and I'm not a fan of Ryu clones, but there it is. This is my guy. And you know what? He's the best character in the whole game.

It all started with this video from EvilDaedalus, the guy that did Mass AI:

If you're not sure what's happening, this is our hero Dan, commonly held to be a joke character, fighting people online in the Games For Windows Live community. There is a strong tendency for players to pick Ryu, Ken, or Sagat - pretty much identical characters - which can make online play very frustrating and dull. On the sound advice of this video, I went out to try my hand at Saikyo Power.

Do your worst, strange man with glowing red eyEUUUUUUUURUGGGHHHHHH

Unlocking Dan is a question of playing through arcade mode as Ryu to unlock Sakura, who is a school-girl Ryu clone, and then playing through arcade mode as Sakura. I'm not familiar with the Street Fighter, um.... story, so I can only assume Dan and Sakura are part of a rival dojo, or something. I refuse to Google it; SF4's story sections are so horribly bad, I'll never ever mention them again. Some of the lines from the final boss when he beats your ass have typos in them.

Anyway, with Dan unlocked, there are three things you should know. The first is that he has four taunts. The second thing is that Dan can do everything Ryu and Ken can do, so remember to use the dragon punch when people are above you, standing over you gloating, or charging at you.

Try not to look at it. OH YOU LOOKED.

The third thing you should know about Dan is every victory is sweeter, while each defeat just rolls off your back. "So you beat Dan. So what?" As you get better at playing the game, at knowing when someone will try to throw you or sweep your feet, use a super move, charge up a focus attack, or what ever else those kids are doing nowadays, you start to feel like Dan is a handicap, like you have to play as him to give the opponent a fair chance. When someone is playing as Akuma, for example, who employs a vast range of energy attacks, teleports, and is essentially some sort of demon Ryu clone, they really hate losing to Dan.

Showing Akuma the true meaning of pain.

In fact, Street Fighter 4 wouldn't be in my drive if it wasn't for Dan. The ability to totally infuriate your foe is what keeps me coming back to Team Fortress 2, after all, and Dan is about the only character with a truly annoying taunt. He is a pure fighter, with a normal range of single punches and kicks, one or two special moves, an easily avoidable Super move (he doesn't move around during it, so if you just step back, you can watch his whole combo from a safe distance), and a short, small fireball attack. It actually makes something like a "poof" noise. His Ultra move completes his modest skill set with a flamboyant power that will literally kick the shit out of any offence. Just ask my brother.

PCG: Now Playing

jazmcdougall@yahoo.co.uk (Jazmeister) — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 08:00:00 +0000

Oh look, I've gone and done it and been published again. Shit, um - you wouldn't have 5.99, would you? You do? Then go to the shops! And buy PCG 204! Dick! Should be on page 94, if my sources are correct.

The Dumbest Person on Earth

jazmcdougall@yahoo.co.uk (Jazmeister) — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 08:00:00 +0000

I'm going to be judgemental. In fact, I've already judged this person, and as you might infer from the title, my verdict is poor.

He's one of these "harmless" people, which means he doesn't mean to hurt anyone. That's a confusing statement, because most really harmful, mean, nasty people aren't actually intending to hurt you either; they're just so self-focussed that utter misanthropy is just as innocent a self-indulgence as scratching your balls in public.

Sorry, I'm listening to this, and it's making me angrier than I actually was when this happened. It's sort of a funny story.

Last night, at about three, I'd just done my temperature log and chased some cab drivers out into the cold, when a guy pulled up in a little green car. His face reminded me; he was the guy who had this to say while fumbling with his wallet:

"There's so much to do, isn't there? You've got to open your wallet, close it again... it all takes time, doesn't it?"

This with the voice of a public school reverend (they don't know what public schools are in Morayshire) explaining how amazing and wonderful God is. He starts prattling soon, and mentions that the dog in his car is called Scruffy. I look over at Scruffy, who shoots me a look that says:

"This guy talks to me all the fucking time, and it's doing my head in. I just want to chase some things, you know man? For real."

He talks about how the dog's owner (?) is a carpenter, and makes tables without tools. My friend informs me that Scruffy's table-shaper guy doesn't like computers and that he thinks it's all going to "drop off". Bwuh?

"I don't think that's true at all, sir. I think computers are very much here to stay."

Yes, he urges, mouth opening wider for each syllable now, computers are everywhere now, and isn't it sad the way they've ruined our planet? I'm speechless, and he continues. He reasons that, in the end, you've just got to leave it up to God to decide. Ah.

An Aside

Christians are people who have decided that, upon reading the Bible, everything in there is either A) utterly true or B) essentially, more or less, sort-of true. They may account for translation, which is good. They may account for metaphor and poetic license, which is better. Ultimately, I can't say that I can envision any chain of sentences that could convince me of the Bible's legitimacy as the work of a One True God, direct or not, but it doesn't hurt me that people believe in it, and it's actually really great to talk to a Christian who is also a real person with real thoughts (the alternative, someone on autopilot spouting rhetoric, isn't exclusive to any religion or culture at all, although they seem to have entirely saturated Scientology).

Sometimes, people are dicks. When these people are Christians, roll a d20. On a 17 or higher, the way in which they are dicks reflects very badly on Christianity as a whole. This especially annoys me because the way in which they'll attack or condescend to me is such a profound comment on their opinion of my intelligence and spiritual status. Being told I'm a good Christian even if I don't know it, for example. You have to, you know, be all into Christ for that. Just sayin'.

Socks Paired - Back to the Accounts!

So I tell him, making sure to keep an even timbre, that I don't believe there is a God, and he gives me the "OH YOU'RE FROM AFRICA!!!" look. You know, like, I've got two noses or I can juggle my eyeballs. How interesting and quietly terrifying! This man isn't doing Christianity any favours, so let's just re-assert that his main class is "Idiot"; Christianity is like his crafting skill. He informs me with great self-satisfaction that he "doesn't hold a grudge against me for that". Thanks. You don't hold a grudge against me for something that has nothing to do with you. Good.

He asks me about the dog food we sell. He asks if it's good. I tell him I haven't tried it. He missed the joke completely, nodding, glazed, "yeah..."

Then the talk turns, suddenly, to chemicals. Ewwwww! Chemicals! Made of elements! Forming molecules! Binding, bonding, breaking, reacting, catalysing.... eughhhhh. They're everywhere, like bugs. Our friend informs me that he can't buy the dog food we sell because his dog might die. I tell him all dog food has to be safe for human consumption. He tells me that they spray "vegables" in supermarkets with "spray chemicals", and reinvents the principle of organic food. Before my very eyes. He makes quite a valid (slathering, glassy-eyed, maniacal) point about livestock being vulnerable to growth hormones (he called them... what was it? Oh yeah, chemicals.). He said it was important to protect animals because they can't tell you if they're sore or scared. Yes! I agree.

Then he leaves, gets in the car with the dog, and lights up a cigarette. Nice job genius.

Things the Sims Still Isn't Doing Properly

jazmcdougall@yahoo.co.uk (Jazmeister) — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 08:33:00 +0000

In my head, this was just a list of four points. Now that I'm writing this for web publication, I realise that I need a little interesting paragraph up top here. Of course, all the good shit is in the main article. What is this, anyway? You come here and I subject you to yet more forms of advertising? Am I just trying to manipulate you? What an evil, subversive paragraph! Man, fuck this paragraph. Well, if I'm going all WEB JOURNALISM on you guys, I might as well sex up the content a little. Read on after the jump for the content hidden behind the jump, after the jump (after the jump).

Top Four Things the Sims Still Isn't Doing Properly 2009

Talking

I don't know about you, but I'm always talking to the people around me. If I'm eating at a different table, I still talk to the one other person in the same room, even if they're eating a meal they prepared separately from mine. I shout to people in different rooms. I call my Wife when she's at work. I chat to her online when she's in-game.
Solutionization: Sims should constantly strike up conversations on the way to their objectives.
Cool Beans: 4/5

Garbage

Garbage piles up everywhere if you're a giant slob. It's not just crisp packets; it's the wrapper those fillets came in, and old magazines, and shitty paper cd cases, and forgotten twisted bookmarks, and plastic shopping bags you were saving, and self-help books. Sims now get extremely pissed off if you leave a minutes-out-of-date newspaper on the coffee table*, which is ridiculous.
Solutionization: Sims should have a personal garbage threshold before they go ape-shit, dictated by traits, and generate it a lot faster.
Cool Beans: 3/5

Property

Lisa and I share a bank account, meals, books, and a bed, but we don't share computers. We also tend to sleep on the same sides of the bed. A person attaches to an area, to an object, or whatever, and they can tell if someone's been messing with their shit. Currently, sims will share computers, switch sides of the bed, switch beds, and sit at different seats every time they eat.
Solutionization: Sims should find their own thing when possible, stick to it, and pine for one when they have to share. You could even have more traits for people who like to sleep alone, etc. iMagine!
Cool Beans: 3/5

Writing

In the Sims, you get like $15 for every "couple of chapters" you "send off to the publisher". The number of people who write for a living, let's call them "writers", far exceeds the number of people who get a book published. It's pretty hard to do it.
Solutionization: Why not have them combine the "writing" skill with the strength of a particular interest, and have that determine their royalties in a particular market. Alternatively, we could just change real life to be more like the Sims 3.
Cool Beans: 5/5

And that, Ladies and Gents, was Science.

*I get pissed off if you leave a brand new newspaper on the coffee table, because it's ready-made garbage (excluding local papers, which at least provide timely news you can't find online, and those scant sections of broadsheets that [a] provide interesting insight and new information while [b] not being a thinly veiled justification for the Iraq War). Today's headline in the Sun, for example, is "Amy [Winehouse] 'died' in my arms". She's not dead, by the way. She just, you know, once had a drug-spaz-event. In the past. The distant past. Recycle that shit immediately kids! Don't let it sully the lacquer!

Ultimate Killer Head Ram

jazmcdougall@yahoo.co.uk (Jazmeister) — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 08:00:00 +0000

Action games, especially modern, big budget ones, are sometimes described by less-than-fans as power fantasies. I think they are usually complete, holistic fantasies. Look at Max Payne, for example; you're not just awesome with guns, you're also a rugged loner with a long flowing coat avenging your dead wife on a raining rooftop. Disparage them however you like, but that feeling is worth something to me. The Burnout games are similar power fantasies that, despite being of a nature that it's very easy to attack if you prefer brutal platform-puzzlers that end in a confused player swallowing back heart-wrenching sobs, I crave. I'm not just a skilled driver in a powerful car, I'm also a rebel – I dare myself to drive into oncoming traffic, and anyone gets in my way, I just side-swipe them, wrap them around a bench.

Street Fighter II Turbo was a great game because it was very simple. Not simple like Mario – Mario was a great game because it was vast and challenging. SFII:T had a kind of 80s charm that set it apart from Mortal Kombat and the like, because it was rugged loners with long flowing headbands duelling on raining rooftops. It was a power fantasy; you take one of the characters out of the box, dress your self-image in their hyberbolic appearances, and adopt their causes as your own. I'm a humble warrior on a quest for enlightenment via the cleansing fire of battle. I must focus, and be calm, and study my opponent. You battle a dozen foes of terrifying strength and skill in a number of locales, from Las Vegas to Thailand, in a gauntlet of spinning kicks, blurred offensives, and teleportation.

You had your punch buttons and your kick buttons. Each set came in three flavours: light, medium, and strong. If you move away from your opponent just as they attack, you'll block. If you press up, you jump. Each attack has a different variation depending on your position: stand, jump, crouch.

Every character has special moves. These are fancy fireballs and over-the-top attacks, like E. Honda's "Hundred Hand Slap". You can alter the strength or speed of these attacks by interchanging the strength of the punch/kick you use to execute it.

Fight until you run out of health, knock out your opponent twice to win. That's it. That's the whole game. It was great fun because playing against someone on the same couch was a contest – I have quicker reactions, I have better technical knowledge, I have the greater strategy. A fun competition with diverse attacks and things to know and watch out for. A total blast. If you want to be pedantic, all games are power fantasies. In Chess, you are a King commanding an army, sacrificing troops, nobles, and even your Queen to save your own skin, and no less ruthless a killer than Niko Bellic. But chess doesn't pump it's fist at you when you win or give you achievements. The win is implicit and obvious – it's actually conceded by your foe. Street Fighter II does cast you as a muscle-bound misanthrope, but it's primarily about competing, and being evenly matched, and so on. Okay, and fireballs.

Street Fighter IV is different. It's a game where you adopt a fantasy and must protect it, and it's hard. Your moves are now supplemented with "Super" and "Ultra" moves; the former a reward for skill, the latter a compensation for receiving a massive beat-down. Neither are necessary for competition - a true master will already be able to land his punches and avoid yours – but both are fun, especially the ultra move, where the camera zooms in for a quick pose, a one-liner, and then the attack launches. If you KO your opponent during this chain of impossible blows, the background is replaced with a drastic, explosive celebratory effect, and fireworks go off, and you land with a gentle smirk while your opponent crumples limply.

It makes it hard for the touchier gamer to have fun unless they're winning. Like me. Now, I've played a million games, and I'm not a sore loser, but when I lose at this thing, does it ever it annoy me! I can't stand fighting someone with cheap, unblockable throws. Abel and Zangief have given me trouble (Abel, one of the new characters, once beat me on the easiest difficulty by chaining the same throw four times), and while Sagat is also difficult to beat, it's just technique. He does his Tiger Punch when I'm in the air, his fireball when I'm far away, his throws when I block, and his close ranged moves when I'm trying to throw him. That, I don't mind losing to.

"Parp!"

What I resent is being mopped up by the super-powered moves of a computer-controlled character, like I'm a henchman in the computer's own power fantasy. And that's so weird - that you can be sitting, twisting and testing your controller with rage, as CPU-Ken piles a hundred kicks into you as part of a canned animation that you know will result in your death. It's the inevitable fate of a game where all characters are equal, and yet the player must have the tools to look like Bruce Lee in Dragonball Z. I guess I'm not really complaining - there's a lot of fun to be had with this in multiplayer, which I'll talk about yet, and plenty to unlock and whatever - it's just interesting what happens when a game tries to satisfy two opposite needs: to fight fairly in a balanced game, and to use a move called "Tiger Genocide".

World of Minecraft

jazmcdougall@yahoo.co.uk (Jazmeister) — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 08:00:00 +0000

Minecraft. I was explaining it to my Dad, and he was like, "so it's Lego." Being a successful games journalist and everything, I was like, "Pfft. It's not like Lego, it's like, it's more, it's..."

Hmm.

It is like Lego.

It's a Java game that runs in your browser. I first played it months ago, when it was a single-player oddity. In that version, you could place or destroy blocks by looking at other blocks and clicking your mouse buttons. Then there was a version where the map got generated by some exciting process – words like "raising" and "eroding" would titillate beneath a loading bar – and you'd be exploring hills, valleys, cliffs, forests, caves, rivers, and lava lakes. All in blocky, shite graphics, of course. It was cute, but limited.

Then Notch, the developer, introduced multiplayer. This was a Good Thing: we've all played Lego before. Never before have we built so many things in such a cramped space, with so many anonymous people from all over the world. Sky bridges connect floating castles and literal hanging gardens, over ravaged canals and lava spills, little houses, grand towers, faithful works of pixel art, writing, swastikas, swastikas, swastikas...

There was a problem with griefers. Minecraft has an exciting planned feature list, aiming to turn it into something of a cross between Worms, Quake, and Oblivion, but in its current state as an "open alpha", it's just an aimless builder. While this proves unfathomably stimulating and relaxing, it's also exactly the sort of thing thousands and thousands of 4chan.org users can gatecrash.

My first server was relatively pristine. Some young kids were talking in the chat, holding little meetings about where the moat should go and how high the tower should be. They'd etched the cardinal directions into the sky – when I asked where they were, they had me follow the huge floating "N" to their castle. They gave me the tour. They were making an inn, within the castle. One was cutting a secret tunnel from the basement that would eventually lead out into the forested hills. It was blissful, and fun.

I made a lighthouse beneath the north mark. It was tall, and elegant, and tapered. An excellent phallus, if I do say so myself. Then some guy joined and was looking at my lighthouse. I gave him the tour. This is the best part of Minecraft: "Come see what I made!" Of course, I'm a busy man, and I had to go eventually. I came back an hour or so later to check on them.

It was chaos. Someone had flooded the entire map with lava. The castle was mostly submerged. Huge garish towers of leaves and dirt splashed expletives across the sky. The place was marred. Only one of the original players I'd spent a few hours building with remained to tell me what had happened. He said it was "hackers". Of our architecture, only my lighthouse remained, in sad ruins filled to the brim with lava. The North mark had been converted into the word "NIGGER". Even that had been marred by somebody, so it actually read "NIGGE:¬". With a disappointed sigh, I prepared myself to never play this game again.

The next day, Notch released a patch that prevented that sort of thing. Then, water flooding was all the rage. Notch released a new block – the "sponge" – that would soak up water in a little radius. It worked. Water wasn't a problem any more, even in honest irrigation (it's hard to build an underwater palace when it's, you know, under water).

Then he released new blocks. Minecraft has an inventory screen; hit 'b' to bring up about 20 blocks, and customise your palette with the number keys for quick access. It includes sixteen colours, blocks of solid gold, and glass for windows (and pyramids, and snowflakes).

A few weeks later, and I realise I haven't been keeping up with Minecraft. I log on, and my client starts to update. I join a server called "free build (no greifing!)", and when I spawn, I'm looking at a new block, all around me, like a prison.

I try to destroy it, to forge a way out, and I can't. Interesting. I walk a little way, and there are corridors. They're winding and confusing, doubling back and then suddenly pressing in one direction, only to terminate fruitlessly. It frustrated the hell out of me.

"jazmeister> is there a way out of this fucking maze, or what?"
"console: yep"

O-kay. I decide just to stick to one wall and follow it like those enemies in Zelda. What the hell. It'll either take me back to the start or take me outside, right? I twist and turn, trailing an imaginary hand along the wall, and I'm suddenly in a different section of invincible corridors – I get excited, tempted to go off and explore them, but decide to just stick to my plan. I'm glad I did. Around a nondescript bend, light.

Worth it?