Richard's Online Journal
Future Gaming Blues
Some actors paid to pretend they're having more fun on the Wii than I ever got out of it, yesterday. (Yes, Zelda and Mario were great.)
I want to be excited about all the big gaming technologies being announced at the moment. Really, I do. Back when virtual reality was being mooted, it was the most exciting thing I’d ever seen. I couldn’t wait to try it, and while it turned out to suck, I still say the headache was worth it. The jump from 8-bit to 16-bit? Revolutionary! Worthy but failed ideas like games controlled with speech? Sure, bring it on! More recently, when I first saw the Wii, I got excited about that, even if I haven’t plugged it in for over a year now and don’t even know where most of the cables are any more. I like progress. Honest!
But the recent batch of new technologies? They leave me so cold. I’ve tried most of the 3D stuff out there, from the passive glasses you get in cinemas to Nvidia’s fancy-pants electronic ones, and frankly, you can keep them all. I don’t mind 3D for a few minutes, as part of a theme-park ride, but that’s all it is. Any longer and I get hideous headaches, and I can’t see how spending extended periods of time tricking your eyes and messing around with their focus can be remotely safe in the long-run. Yes, the effect can be okay. When they can do it with some kind of holographic box instead of flickering glasses and other nonsense, sign me up. Until then, I’ll stick with 2D screens, thanks.
Motion based gaming? Can’t get excited about that either. It’s the Uncanny Valley of interaction. Like 3D, it’s fine for a few minutes. The first times you try it are pretty cool. After that, it’s just problems glued together with hype. The character refuses to follow your commands. Your arms get exhausted from waving at things. Most importantly, and this is the game-breaker for me, there’s no proper haptic feedback. I don’t care how much your controller buzzes in my hand, it’s not going to persuade me that my character’s sword has actually made contact with a blade. Inevitably I find these games end up as thrashing simulations, in much the same way that a Hitman game’s carefully scripted AI goes beserk when you accidentally knock over a wine-glass and everyone in the area decides that YOU MUST DIE. It’s every bit as abstracted as pressing a key to swing a sword, with the difference that you won’t walk away with tennis elbow. Unless you’re playing Bayonetta on Easy mode in which case ha ha masturbation joke. (Actually, Bayonetta is really fun).
In fairness, I haven’t tried either Natal or Playstation Move, so maybe they’re the exception. Reading Eurogamer’s write-up of the games, meh. I realise that these are necessary intermediate stages between sitting in front of consoles and the Star Trek Holodeck, but I want more than nicer looking versions of stuff the Wii already lost my interest with over the last couple of years. My suspicion is that Natal will do the most interesting things, not as a full controller replacement, but as an extra input device that can read physical interactions while playing games the old fashioned way. I’m hoping for a Final Fantasy game where you can speed up boring conversations with a dismissive wave of the hand, or to see Fable 3 featuring a slappable Peter Molyneux.
The third big technology I can’t stand? Mobile gaming, specifically the iPhone. The Nintendo DS is a great little console. I don’t play on mine much because I get travel sick, and generally have a more powerful system either on my desk or in my bag for playing games, but I do like it. I’m almost considering buying an XL for the bigger screens, even though in my heart I know it would be a waste of money. It’s a console I want to play on more often, even though I know that in practice, I won’t get round to it.
The iPhone though, bah with a side order of humbug. I love my iPhone in general, but I’ve yet to find any games that have lived up to the excitement. The controls are so terrible. On-screen buttons? Hell no. Even without playing them, the existence of Ghosts and Goblins and Street Fighter IV on iPhone is nothing short of a cruel joke. Motion sensitive controls? Aside from most games I’ve tried forgetting the importance of being able to see the screen, I find it usually goes wrong at exactly the worst moments. Tap to select? So fiddly, so imprecise, and I really hate my fingers getting in the way all the time. Even in games I like and already know, like Beneath A Steel Sky, it drives me nuts.
Please realise: I’m not writing off any of these things. I’m willing to be impressed by any or all of them. Hell, I want to be impressed by them. I’d love to be able to think of 3D as something other than the latest gimmick to sell us new TVs and monitors, and for Natal to wash away those awful memories of the Eyetoy and silly third-party Wii games. I’ll be trying all of them, hopefully more excited as a result of later announcements this year, and I have a great big hat ready to be eaten. (It’s made of chocolate, just to be on the safe side.)
But I’m not excited yet. And given that we’re talking about the future of gaming for at least the next couple of years, that… that depresses me a little right now.
On a positive note, that Monkey Island 2 remake looks pretty nice…
What Is Google Wave?
With invites flying around the web, everyone’s asking: what is Google Wave? The real question is: what isn’t it? Because Google Wave is more than just a website. It’s a platform. It’s a revolution. It’s a magic machine capable of bringing life to desolate planets through terraforming. It raises the dead. It divides by zero. You cannot be told what Google Wave is, you must experience it for yourself!
But that’s not all!
If you dip Google Wave in water, it produces copies of itself. Do not feed Google Wave after midnight! Google Wave is not a toy. Google Wave answers the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything. Google Wave even produces the question. With Google Wave, all your problems will be over, especially if those problems involve the absence of Google Wave in your life. Google Wave tastes of cherries, unless you don’t like cherries, in which case strawberries. Or cherry and strawberries, for the user who wants it all. Google Wave is the sensation multiple orgasms aspire to. Google Wave is not merely the Alpha and the Omega, but the Google Wave and the Google Wave, for all else has been rendered meaningless before its literally indescribable brilliance!
And it’s still in beta!
Google Wave is the only thing in the world capable of beating up both Chuck Norris and Jack Bauer without breaking a sweat. It is no relation to the Mexican Wave. If you wave at Google Wave, the universe itself crashes. Nodding is acceptable. Shaking your fist is right out. Stop being mean to Google Wave! It died for your sins!
With Google Wave, your work will be done for you, but your boss will never know. It will find you a date for the weekend and hide the body afterwards. Google Wave can time-travel. Google Wave will usher in first contact with the Vulcans. The history of all things was merely a prelude to Google Wave. A footnote at that.
…or maybe it’s just a mix of wiki, e-mail and Google Docs. But from all the fuss about it online at the moment, that can’t be it, right?
Not that I’d know. No bugger’s sent me an invite yet.
Snap Happy Cameras
On a press trip to Las Vegas at the start of the year, I started getting deeply annoyed with my trusty old Canon Ixus Something. On the last day, after fighting to take snappy pictures for much of the week, I pulled up Amazon and decided that it was time to upgrade to a dSLR. Something cheap. Nothing too flashy. I just wanted something that would take better pics, and offered a few settings to tweak.
That was all. The Nikon D40. One purchase.
I’m not sure how I ended up with two bodies, one the D40, the newest, the upgraded D80, four lenses, a proper tripod, two flashes — one new — around 50 AA batteries, two carrying bags, two manuals, a stack of software… Bah. I’m blaming the pixies.
I’ve played too many Broken Sword games. I can’t see something like this without wondering if there’s gold inside. Or at least a map.
Clearly, I’ve got something of an obsessive personality. I know this, it’s one of the reasons I refuse to even dabble in things like gambling or serial murders. Still, it’s been quite a ride. I’ve been teaching myself from the absolute basics and picking up the rest through simple trial and error. The goal isn’t to take great photos, or sell them for kazillions — not to be blunt, but I don’t want another hobby turning into work — but the personal satisfaction of getting those cool shots when I want them.
If I can find some easily blackmailable person in the high office, I’d love to take said camera for a good poke around places like the Corsham tunnels — the end-of-the-world nuclear bunker not far from here. Or pull a press trip to somewhere deeply photogenic, where the presentation is accidentally delayed due to the presenters crash-landing on a magic island full of mystery and smoke monsters. Something like that.
Until then, Bath Abbey is a great place to practice. The staff leave you alone to take photos, people don’t grumble that you’re there for science rather than religion, and there’s lots of pretty stuff to snap. Two quid ‘voluntary’ donation. Don’t even think about walking past without donating it. Those people have laser-beam stares…
I don’t know how much it costs to spin the hands and start yelling ‘THE END OF THE WORLD IS NIGH!’ to the terrified masses below, but it’s more than a fiver. I asked the spoilsports several times…
It never fails to stun me that regular digital cameras are so bad. Any of them will give you a decent shot of a landscape or similar, but take them indoors and you just end up with a hideous smear of lights, blurred vision, and friends in death masks surrounded by the suffocating blackness. Something as simple as bounce flash fixes it, for the most part anyway, but forget it. You can get little mirror things that stick onto your pop-up flash, but they’re not very good. Just to take a proper picture, the average mortal (yes, I know professionals can get a decent picture out of a milk bottle if they want) needs an insane amount of technology. A couple of hundred quid for the camera. Another hundred quid to angle the damn flash up. Tripods. Remotes.
Just when you think your spending days are over, they suck you back in with the prospect of a wide-angle shot of the Grand Canyon, or a fisheye shot of whatever the hell people think fisheye lenses are good for. Silly fisheyed freak people. Almost as bad as the HDR-to-hell-and-back kids. Shudder…
Note to anyone who’s ever posed with a booth babe. Yes, they really are this excited that you exist.
Don’t even ask about getting started using things like Aperture mode instead of switching it onto full automatic. I think you get bonus points when you stop humming ‘We Do What We Must Because We Can’ every time you switch it over to that mode. More, when you manage to cut the perfect slice out of your photo on command.
The rest, that’s where the fun is. I actually enjoy the post-production bit more than the photography most of the time. It’s fun to take the source image and see what you can do with it, either subtly or by piling on the effects. I invested in a copy of Capture NX and now take every photo in RAW format for more flexibility, and picked up a copy of Nik Color Efex for its amazingly cool features. Both tools are heavily used down at the office photo studio when images come in ruine– ahem… ‘not entirely perfect’, so that’s good to know. The most surprising one of the set is Noise Ninja, which not only works pretty well, it’s priced as a throwaway investment. I haven’t actually pulled the trigger on this one, not yet, but I’m impressed by the files I’ve run through the demo version.
Why do you feel so self-conscious when photographing other people in the street? Oh, yeah. The easily breakable chunk of technology in your hand.
The downside of it all is the phenomenal complexity of taking a ‘good’ shot in anything approaching the traditional sense. Lighting, the mathematics of exposure (1 trenchcoat +1 policeman = 15 years), and working out why the camera’s suddenly decided to start filming nuclear blasts instead of the well-lit room in front of you are all a real bloody drain. I’m not even close to being able to set everything manually yet, but that’s definitely the plan when I’m a bit more confident with the basics.
Flickr’s a fantastic resource for all this stuff, incidentally. Almost any good picture you encounter, certainly most of the ones from the camera specific groups, will offer an option to see an image’s full shooting data, from the mode it was taken in, to all the twiddly little settings. It’s so much easier to visualise things like that, even if the source file has been post-productioned to buggery and back between landing on the sensor and slorching its way up onto the interweb. Hell, it’s a good reminder when it’s my own photos. When you keep roughly 5 out of 200 snaps, the details get lost.
MASTER TIP: When photographing fire, don’t zoom in so far that you melt your lens. PRO TIP: And take the lens cap off. It helps.
This is the part where I was planning to offer some tips, if you’re planning to descend this path of high expense and ultimate pointlessness. Then I remembered, I don’t know what the hell I’m doing, so anything I might say would be about as much use as a Ken Rockwell tutorial. So I won’t insult you by pretending differently.
(Pssst: The Nikon 50mm f1.8 is love…)
I Can Write Microsoft Adverts Too
“So, that weak observational comedy. What’s up with that?”
I haven’t said anything here about Microsoft’s embarassing adverts in which a one-joke comic stumbles around being paid three million dollars to pretend to be Jerry Seinfeld’s best friend, mostly because of one thing. Criticise the adverts, and the same comment comes out of the woodwork every single blessed time:
“They work because people are talking about them!”
Newsflash: Bullshit. An advert works if it changes the perception of a company for the better, if it shifts product, or better fixes the company in the viewer’s brain. All else is the marketing equivalent of ‘there’s no such thing as bad publicity’. Here are three other adverts that would have gotten the same amount of chatter:
1. A large piece of poo slowly spins on a potter’s wheel. Emblazoned on the back, the word ‘Vista’.
2. “I’m a Mac.” “I’m a PC.” “And I’m John Gacy.”
3. Bill Gates re-enacts the opening of Barbarella.
People have been waiting for the Microsoft counter-attack against Apple for so long, ‘talk’ is pretty much irrelevant. Bill Gates is recognisable enough to mean that Microsoft doesn’t need the name boost. It doesn’t particularly matter how many boxes of Vista Microsoft can ship, not when 99.999% of the PC industry buys its product anyway. And somehow I don’t see many people rushing out to buy Vista as a result of seeing these stumbling adverts. So what’s the point?
You got me. I have no idea what marketing message they think they’re pushing with these badly written head-trips, but I doubt it’s in line with actual reality. The first one, set in a clown shoe store, literally goes nowhere. You can almost hear the money being dangled when Seinfeld stops yammering and starts up with the whole “So, Bill, as a super-endowed supergenius…” bit.
As for the second, Christ almighty. The whole concept of the joke is the two of them getting back to their roots and finding out what real people want, only for the two of them to show nothing but contempt for the ‘real people’ they’re staying with and bail. Microsoft: Out Of Step. Great slogan. Really makes them likeable.
But what would I know? Answer: Plenty.
The good thing is that according to the usual sources, the whole advert campaign’s been a miserable failure, and they’re now dropping the whole Seinfeld angle. Good. I don’t know how much they overpaid PR company for this embarassing farce of a $300 million campaign, but I like to think I have some suggestions for Phase 2.
And by Phase 2, I mean ‘starting from scratch’, of course.
The Top Five New Microsoft Campaigns
1. From Screen To Silver Screen: Microsoft develops a sense of humour and does what it’s done at COMDEX for years, doing Gates and Ballmer versions of movies in the cinema at the time. They’ve done this for The Matrix and Harry Potter and a couple of others too, I think. You won’t have seen them, because the legal attack dogs did a splendid job of pulling this slice of Microsoft’s humane side as far from the internet’s gaze as possible. These wouldn’t just glom off the big names, but do proper self-deprecating things with the stars of various movies, the actual sets, and Bill and Steve and co with proper costumes and dialogue. Hellboy having trouble with his PC? Gates shows up as Abe Sapien, only to get shot in the face as one too many UAC prompts show up. “We’re fixing that…” he groans, dying. Do one of the old ‘If The Starship Enterprise Ran On Windows’ gags, ending on “It may not clean up the Klingons, but we can certainly help with your taxes.” Have Gandalf mistake a Vista CD for the One Ring, and make Frodo go on an endless journey to deliver the warranty card. A whole year’s campaign, keeping people interested and getting them laughing with Microsoft for once.
2. Challenge Vista: Do the whole Mojave Experiment thing in reverse, by which I mean ‘not patronising and stupid’. The main character, a die-hard Vista hater character or some respectable celebrity like Stephen Fry, who delivers non-strawman reasons why people think it sucks. The hardware. The device drivers. Through the adverts, we see that those aren’t in fact a problem, not with anything particularly slick or showy, and definitely without bullshit, but with a simple, snappily cut demonstration of Vista easily deflecting viruses, running on outdated hardware, and all that other jazz. If Microsoft wants to win critics over, that’s the way to do it. And it’s not like there’s a lack of material. This would be combined with a boot-CD or other cut-down version of Vista with the slogan “Vista: See For Yourself”
3. Om Nom Nom: Spend the money on cake instead. Seriously. The Seinfeld adverts were pure Microsoft masturbation, leading the way for another inevitably doomed rebranding exercise for a product that everyone who buys a PC pays for anyway. When you own the world, you don’t need to worry about bad publicity as much as everyone else. $300 million buys a lot of cake. Yummy cake. Scrummy cake. Cake!
4. The Vista Challenge: A puzzle within a series of adverts, with the winners getting free Microsoft stuff. Why? Simple. Individual copies of Vista don’t mean a damn thing, and there’s a solid crossover with the people who play things like ARGs and the ones who buy things like Linux. In watching the adverts, you still get to worm a bit of advert into their ears, even if they spend the whole series bitching about it.
5. And Of Course… Bill Gates re-enacts the opening of Barbarella. Some things, the world just needs to see. This is one of those things.
I’ll just hold on here for that cheque and phonecall, Microsoft.
No hurry. Whenever you’re ready.
You Can Leave Your Hadron
According to some paranoid types, the activation of the Large Hadron Collider next week will create a black hole that will destroy us all. Some people are sending them death threats. There’s a certain irony to this, I think.
I say, why panic? As far as I’m concerned, the LHC is a win-win situation.
If nothing happens, which is exactly what’s going to happen, it’s a great boon for science. If the entire Earth goes pop, well, realistically, did you have any exciting plans for the week after next? I don’t. I’ve got a dentist’s appointment. I’d much rather be one of the lucky few to see the utter devastation of the planet in a drawn out moment of cosmic horror, especially if I can do it safe in the knowledge that BT got it first. Indeed, I plan to hit Google Maps and camp out on the other side of their main building for the activation, just for the chance of seeing the company I spent all frustrating afternoon fighting with over the phone turned into quantum spaghetti before my joyous eyes. Then I will laugh, like this, for every femtosecond it takes to join it in the great celestial game of Sardines. Aha! Ahahahaha! Hahahahaha! Ohmygodthepain!
But let’s backtrack a little.
If you are worried about this non-event, here are some tips to help you through it. First, don’t tell anyone about your fears. If we’re wrong, and the bazillion-to-one odds don’t come through in our favour, nobody’s going to be around to say ‘I told you so’. You can safely call them idiots, and make bets involving farm animals and sexual favours, with the only risk being that black holes turn out to be some kind of parallel universe. It still might be worth it. Alternate world elephants might be hot.
Second, on the day the Collider is due to be switched on, cover yourself in tomato sauce, with a light dusting of parmesan. If you’ve got to be turned into spaghetti, it may as well be tasty. You may get some odd looks during the day, but you’ll make a black hole very happy later on. How often do you get to say that?
Third, and most importantly, be sure to look in the right direction during the disaster. If movies have taught me anything, the friendly space aliens only bother rescuing the ones who look out at the devastation with a single tear rolling down their cheek, not the oblivious ones reading about whatever nonsense Amy Winehouse snorted the night before. It’s a slim chance, but since you’re making plans based on a disaster that’s not going to happen — idiot — why take the risk? Cute dogs are optional, but on the whole, avoid them. Preparing in this way is very likely to land you in an ironic Twilight Zone situation where the aliens mistake the dog for the superior life-form. Cat owners should be especially careful, because the aliens would be right.
Finally, don’t think about death. Think about the show you’ve got a front row seat to — something no human being has ever witnessed before. Wouldn’t you rather your last thoughts be ‘My god, I wish I had my ca’ rather than ‘What the fu’?
If I’m wrong and we’re all dead next week, I’ll post an apology.
At least, as far as you know…
UPDATE: We’re not dead!