Hello loves. Sorry this site has been so quiet of late. I’ve been rather busy with one thing and another. And it means that I’m not entirely sure what I want the blog to be about. I’m sure it’ll all become clear when the dust has settled in our new home down Bath way.
Until next time, however, I thought I’d leave you with a little graphical representation of what I’ve been up to recently.
Forza 2. It’s rather wonderful.
Oh dear. On Saturday, The Times newspaper came with a DVD with World of Warcraft and a free 14-day trial on it. Naturally, I couldn’t resist, even though I knew World of Warcraft would do terrible things to me. Like make me want to play it all the time.
And even though it meant having to buy The Times, which, thinking about it, wasn’t the first newspaper I’d have thought to do this sort of promotion. In fact, it’s did a pretty good job of introducing WoW to a new audience, with a mini supplement devoted to the game containing fairly enlightened articles about journos getting their first taste of MMOs, and the following, which I found on the back page:
“Most people wouldn’t comment on a book they hadn’t read or a film they hadn’t seen, yet the same courtesy is rarely extended to video games. If you have never played a video game, you will perhaps come to understand the appeal of this growing industry, which is already worth billions of dollars. What do you have to lose?”
Anyway, this is my first postcard from Azeroth – that’s Tuffnel, my level 10 Orc hunter, on his first visit to the city of Orgrimmar. Ahhh, isn’t he lovely?
A new issue of Edge has just come out and it’s all the better for having a rather lovely article in it by me. It’s about The Crossing, a new game from Arkane Studios art directed (and co-written) by Viktor Antonov, who art directed Half-Life 2.
It looks a little like this:
The piece was one of the most enjoyable writing gigs I’ve done for ages – it’s about how in The Crossing, Antonov has realised two alternate visions of Paris, one a hard-bitten concrete urban hell, the other a modern Gothic megolopolis, and how game environments can tell stories and facilitate play.
Rather nicely, I’d interviewed Antonov before (for this article), prior to Half-Life 2 coming out, and amazingly he remembered it. He said that I was asking questions about games that few people do, so that was gratifying. All in all, I’m rather chuffed.
Games for years have borrowed the structures and rules—as well as the imagery—of athletic competition, but the Wii adds something genuinely new to the mix, something we’d ignored so long we stopped noticing that it was missing: athleticism itself.
After a few goes on Wii tennis, you realise that the interaction on offer is actually almost completely unrelated to that in actual tennis. In fact, it’s a lot more efficient, accurate and, frankly, easier, to play using a series of flicks of the Wii Remote instead of proper swings. My girlfriend found that when she applied the natural timing and actions of proper tennis she found Wii Tennis impossible to play.
Wii Sports is just as much of an abstraction of real sports as button-based games are, though it disguises that fact better with its control method. The motion-sensing makes it easier to take the identity of real-world sports and make simple games out of them.
However, the chances are that you’ll find yourself playing out the moves with great exaggerated swings anyway, especially in company. Because playing is more fun like that – because play is about getting into a role. And that’s what Wii Sports is working – and playing – on.
Some games just creep on you. They might be labelled with a genre that you’re tired of, or generally disregard. They might be styled in a way that turns you off. They might seem hyped up too much, or sold on misleading premises.
For me, Crackdown was guilty of all of these. It’s a Grand Theft Autoalike free-roamin’, drivin’ and shootin’ sandbox, a genre that has barely been able to improve on GTA’s original template, despite its many faults and annoyances.
It’s set in a creaky future dystopian city, filled with stereotyped factions (colourful Latino hoods, sly corporation Chinese, thuggish industrialised Eastern Europeans) – just the sort of scenario I think games need to leave behind – and you play a buffed, brutal, militaristic meathead.
And, when it goes on sale, copies will be laced with a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory-style Golden Ticket to be able to partake in the Halo 3 multiplayer beta. If that doesn’t sound like a desperate attempt to inflate sales, I don’t know what does.
So when the demo came out on Xbox Live, I couldn’t help but download it to confirm I was right. Naturally, I wasn’t, because Crackdown is wonderful.
One of GTA’s irritations is how miserably slow and awkward it is to wander around its cities on foot. Crackdown, which was created by GTA co-designer David Jones’ studio Realtime Worlds, transforms that experience by putting you into the shoes of a massively augmented superhero, who is able, once powered up, to do things like leaping up and over entire buildings.
If GTA is, like the cities it satirises, built around the cars you spend most of your time driving, Crackdown is built around the joy of unfettered bodily movement, up, down and through its concrete geometries. It’s an amphetamine-crazed amplification of the principles of buildering and parkour, and it features on-foot races across its rooftops and over its boulevards to prove it.
Crackdown also features a cooperative multiplayer mode that allows you to barrel around the city with a friend, picking them up in the car they’re driving and throwing them into a river, and fearlessly racing around its characterless (at least in comparison to GTA’s Los Santos, Liberty City and Vice City) urban playground.
In short, Crackdown is pure exuberant fun, a pure take on the promise of videogames to transport you to a body with powers that far surpass reality, and a place that allows you to wield them in any way you see fit. And that’s just the demo. Full game available on February 23.
My, my, Nintendo sure makes dry, worthy things a pleasure to use. On Friday, its Wii console saw the release of Nintendo’s Wii News Channel, an application that displays Associated Press news stories. It joins the Forecast Channel, which was made available in December.
Both use a 3D globe to display location-specific information, and both are infused with dozens of little playful touches, whether it’s the sound of rain when you view the weather at a rainy location, or the way the words in news stories rearrange themselves when you zoom the text in and out.
It’s the globe display that’s the big draw, though. Spun with a quick twitch of the Wii Remote and stopped with a press of the A button, I keep finding myself aimlessly browsing weather systems of places I’d never considered and international stories I’d normally probably overlook. I mean, I never thought I’d spend so long monitoring the temperature in Yellowknife. You know, I think that astronaut was onto something with that “whole earth” thing.
But while it might be good for some kind of democracy in news consumption, one area in which the news channel falls down a little is in prioritising stories. There’s little sense of the most significant things going on when they’re arranged by location. There is an alternative view, which breaks stories up into sections – international, regional, sports, etc. – but these don’t seem prioritised either.
Course, the Wii News Channel is also rather mediated by the fact that it’s comprised of content from the American-centric Associated Press. Stories are represented on the globe by pieces of paper fixed to their locations. As you zoom in and out, the papers arrange themselves by smoothly moving into piles – particularly intensely newsy areas (Washington, of course) are represented by great, tall stacks.
However, the globe view lays such bias bare. Yesterday, the entire African continent had just one story attached to it – and that was in South Africa.
The bottom line is that the experience is great. Apparently, Nintendo will update the channel later this year with a greater regional focus, so perhaps we can expect a better service to accompany this wonderfully engaging way of using it.
For reasons I’ll most likely go into very soon, I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about transitory things and how one doesn’t invest much in something that one knows won’t last. Grappling this morning with my new mobile’s obscure refusal to allow Opera Mini to work, I started thinking about how sadly temporary mobile phones feel.
Replaced by a “free upgrade” every year, it often seems futile investing in them the time in making them mine. As a result, they always have an edge of awkwardness, because I can’t be arsed to iron out the little quirks that prevent them from being perfect – well, good – companions.
I’d really like these plastic shells to stop feeling so temporary. Perhaps phone makers could start designing facsias that are meant to last more than a year, both functionally and aesthetically, that allow you to slot new components in as they become obsolete? Vertu (to justify its breathtaking price range) does this to some extent already, so it must be possible on some level or other.
It should be also easier to transfer your phone’s soul to another – its settings, wallpapers, ringtones, Java games and applications, text messages and contacts, notes, calendar, photos and movies. It’s not enough to simply transfer the rudiments of personality embodied in their SIM cards.
Why does this matter? Well, I think its all too easy for technology designers to forget getting people to hang on and appreciate the present, even as their products continue their headlong rush towards carrot-and-stick promises of perfection.
Nucklous Rope at vi-R-us has sent me one of them internet meme things. Seems I’m to list 5 ‘interesting’ things about me. Well, here they are, friends.
1. I’m currently listening to the Tindersticks’ Marbles. It was released in 1993, which means that I’ve been regularly listening to it for coming on 14 years, which is nearly half my life. Yet I’d never really realised it must be one of my favourite songs until today.
2. When I was a kid, my heroes were Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson of Fighting Fantasy books fame. I wrote to them once, asking them to advise me on how to write my own FF-style book. Steve Jackson(’s secretary) replied on extremely thick and coarse yellowed cartridge paper that I thought amazingly classy. I don’t recall the advice was very helpful, though I did end up writing one some time later for a project set by my progressive, racing motorcycle-riding, multiple-divorcee first year secondary school English teacher, Mr Lawrence. It was about ninjas.
3. My dad played table tennis with Bobby Robson once.
4. Despite the fact I spend unhealthy amounts of time playing and thinking about videogames, I’m not so sure I actually enjoy them. I mean, they’re a bit of a chore, aren’t they?
5. I feel a guilty wave of pride whenever my 18-month-old son expresses an interest in hitting stuff or taking things apart, even though I reckon I’m a reconstructed male.
Sam Jacob – Strangeharvest
Cousin Simon – imnoslacker
Marcus Fairs – Dezeen
Andy Shankland – Eye Rainbow Dinosaur
Tom Armitage – Infovore
I’ve written a review about Oyster card in the latest issue of icon. Oyster card is an RFID-based payment system for public transport in London, and it’s probably most Londoners’ first explicit contact with the big, bad, exciting world of RFID.
Incidentally, Jack Schultze recently posted a series of sketches his graphic design students at Central St Martins had made for a project about signage design for Oyster recently. They’re about the other side of the Oyster experience, a side that my original draft attempted to tackle.
Naturally, just one of the students’ sketches does a much deeper and eloquent job than my draft ever did in communicating the difficulties of making wireless, and therefore invisible, technology legible and engaging for humanity.
Oh, and yeah, they photographed my battered old plastic Oyster wallet for the piece, fluff and dust-filled pockets, ancient picture of me and all. Lovely!
Good old Nintendo localisation – The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess contains a cheeky reference to the common practice of charging people in one region one price and a different one elsewhere for the same goods. I’m not sure I totally let Nintendo off the hook just because they’re wry about it, though… (price of a US Wii = $250/£126; price of a UK Wii = £180/$353, cough)
On the topic of other nice little socio-economic comments in Nintendo games, there’s also the KK Slider comment in Animal Crossing Wild World. “Those industry fat cats try to put a price on my music, but it wants to be free,” says the musician dog, before handing your character a copy of the song he just played for you.
Can you think of any more?