John Walker's Electronic House

We here at John Walker Publishing are very pleased and proud to announce the inaugural Best And Most Incredible Human Being In The Games Industry Of The Year Award. In light of some publishers voting for their favourite magazines that they own, and other pubishers voting for the most important people in the games industry that currently work for them, this brand new award sets out to bring recognition to the very best people writing about videogames, working near videogames, or ever having touched a videogame, given the events in the games world of that year. Sponsored by John Walker Publishing, the event will not only bring much needed validation to the greatest writers out there, but also raise money for a very important charity: The John Walker Fund For Hungry John Walkers.

The nominees this year have been chosen from an impressive field, but these are the John Walkers that we here at John Walker Publishing feel have contributed the most to the universe.

The results will be announced at the John Walker Dinner For John Walker, taking place at the John Walker Museum on the 23rd of JohnWalker. We look forward to seeing you there!

Mike C pointed this out to me. Extraordinary.

I love the internet. And I love how everything on the internet lives on forever, despite the actions of greedy lawyers employed by rich morons.

A wonderful article on The Quackometer discussed the continuing claims by homeopathic witchdoctors that their bottles of water can cure malaria. The Society of Homeopaths (which sounds like a false front for some sort of alien cult planning to take over the world) heaved their lawyers upon it, and it’s been taken down until the issues can be resolved.

But because the internet is magic, nothing ever really gets taken down, and you can, and should, read it now.

Silly Society of Alien Invading Forces – now the piece is going to be read by everyone ever, and more people will learn that homeopathy is utter bullshit with no demonstrable effects beyond placebo, and that these pus-sacks should not be given a single penny for their empty pills or bottles of snake oil.

Thanks Mrs Trellis for the link.

So those Game Media Awards really went out of their way to prove me wrong.

In awards sponsored by Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo, the following won:

Best PlayStation Magazine

Winner: Official PlayStation Magazine (Future)

Best Xbox Magazine

Winner: Official Xbox 360 Magazine (Future)

Best Nintendo Magazine

Winner: Official Nintendo Magazine (Future)

Gadzooks. The magazines from which the sponsors make a profit turned out to be the best! You might argue that the other mags are weaker without the licenses, and hence lose out critically, but that falls apart with the merest comparison of NGamer and Official Nintendo.

Elsewhere, I’m really pleased that Tom and Kieron got recognition for being great writers. Because they are both exceptionally good. (I’d love to have seen Log getting the recognition he deserves too, but I wouldn’t like to have chosen between him and Kieron – both inspire my writing). Both Kieron and Tom stand up as bastions of morality in the industry, and fight for games and people’s enjoyment of games, over the wishes of PRs and publishers. They are the opposite of what these awards seemed to represent. I do wish they would have both turned down their awards. (Hey, perhaps now I’ve publically criticised them, I’ll get a nomination for next year : ) But I genuinely congratulate them.

It does rather spoil things when you realise that one of the nominations in Kieron’s category wasn’t even working on the magazine he was nominated for over the last year, let alone writing in it. And that Steve Boxer won anything.

MCV – next year – how about an awards ceremony voted for by people who play games and read magazines?

Tomorrow night the first Games Media Awards are to be presented, in a rather busy London affair dragging half the games journalism industry into its vortex. (The awards remarkably don’t have a website to link to).

Now, I’ve not been nominated in any category, which isn’t too much of a surprise. For all I do, it tends to be the smaller stuff that doesn’t get the fanfares, and apparently there isn’t a category for budget sections. This does, however, afford me the luxury of being able to make moral judgments without having to live up to them myself.

At the time the awards were announced, Kieron described them as prisoners voting for their favourite guard. I’d take this a bit further, and say it was rather more like criminals voting for their favourite judge. These are awards voted for by the publishers and PRs of videogames, and thus people not really in the most sensible position to be voting for who is best at writing about games.

Of course, everyone involved could very well be utterly pure in all their decisions, voting not for those journalists who haven’t pissed them off/refused their game a cover/given their game a bad score, but for those whose writing has impressed them, in their amateur opinion, the most. I fear that even were this the absolute case, it’s going to be very hard for everyone to believe it.

As such – and again I say this with the luxury of not being in the position myself – I urge people who win to refuse their award. It’s lovely to win stuff (I’d imagine), and any recognition – in an industry where a compliment is as rare as a unicorn – is enormously welcome. But this award carries a weight.

Most of all, I just don’t get why publishers and PRs have decided to vote for awards based on writing skill. Shall they next be voting for the best greengrocers at the Greengrocer Awards, because they eat fruit and vegetables?

My motivation for writing this isn’t because I’m bitter not to be nominated. I’m relieved, because I’d be frightened to put myself to the test, never having won anything, and liking the idea of people giving me trophies because I worked hard. But these aren’t the right people to be giving out these awards, and I worry about the damage to perceived credibility for those who do win.

PS. I want to add that I think a number of those nominated are very deserving of awards. I think writers like Tom Bramwell, Kieron Gillen and Jon Blyth deserve vast amounts of recognition, and all three are inspirations for me. I just want them to win other awards.

Happy Orange Box Day everyone.

I was Mr Luckypants and invited over to Valve to play Half-Life 2 Episode Two and Portal a couple of weeks ago, for Rock, Paper, Shotgun. You can read my verdict on both games on the site today.

Half-Life 2 Episode Two

It’s imperative that you play another first-person shooter immediately after finishing Episode Two. Any – it doesn’t matter. Because you need to remind yourself, after the six or so hours, that games aren’t anywhere near this good. Games aren’t so precise, so damn perfectly laid out. Games don’t hide tutorial and training such that you never notice them. Games aren’t built with such ludicrous care that they never leave you lost or frustrated. But Episode 2 is these things with such an air of nonchalance, such a relaxed ease, that it’s vital to remind yourself it isn’t normal. You’ll need perspective.

Portal

The fairytale story of how Portal came into being has all but entered into legend. A plucky group of Digipen paupers created a final year project, Narbacular Drop, that was shown at the annual Digipen event for visiting developers. The handsome princes at Valve saw it, and liked it. Valve invited the team to visit their castle and demo their concept. Before they were halfway through their presentation, they’d all been offered jobs by the king. And then a couple of years later, a beautiful baby Portal was born. And we all lived happily ever after.

Sometimes a new TV show starts, and everyone resorts to a lazy comparison with something from the past. And sometimes it’s completely valid. Journeyman is desperately waterskiing behind the Quantum Leap boat. Except, oddly, it’s nothing like it.

Quantum Leap plot: Man leaps through time into other people’s bodies, to put right what once when wrong, then leaping to the next person, in the next time period.

Journeyman plot: Man leaps through time in his own body, through various periods of a person’s life, putting right what maybe went wrong, or something, they don’t seem sure.

The problem is his helplessness. Dan Vassar’s Kevin is our portal for the programme, and he’s pretty much a bystander in all that happens. Which means so are we, staring at what seems like unwinding inevitability. For example, in episode two he first finds himself no longer on an aeroplane with his wife, but instead on one in the early 80s, filled with people smoking, kids with toy guns, and flirtatious flight attendants – look, it’s the past! He helps a woman who goes into labour, and then finds himself back in the present. Next he’s in the thick of the 80s, and meets the mother again. She’s debating whether to tell her daughter about her father. Then we’re in the 90s, and we’re with the teenage daughter confronting the father. And then it’s ’97 and he’s back on a plane, meeting the estranged and mean father, who has leukemia and needs a transplant. So we’re soon with the daughter again, and bringing her to meet her father again. And done.

Kevin certainly helps – he says the right thing in the few moments he has. But he doesn’t pick the moment, and he certainly doesn’t have time to think about what he might do. In the end he makes spur-of-the-moment binary decisions – be helpful or unhelpful – and the bounces home.

There’s all sorts else going on. There’s his missing-presumed-dead fiance, who appears to be following him on his “leaps”, there’s his current wife and son and their issues, and there’s the rather big problem of his constantly disappearing. And it’s in this that Journeyman has some success. So often in mysterious fantasy programmes, the protagonists’ oddities are madly ignored. Here his wife can’t deny what’s going on – especially when he vanishes from a flight. And gracefully, she accepts the impossibility of her husband’s newfound ability to time travel. Plus there’s the logistics of it, like the troubling nature of heightened airport security for a man who gets on a plane, but doesn’t get off. Or disappearing from the driver seat of your car as you’re going 30mph.

It’s a nice show, with a decent cast. But it’s forgotten something rather crucial – to have a point. So yes, he helps people out. But why? We never knew who leapt Sam Beckett, but we at least knew he stepped into the Quantum Leap Accelerator and vanished. And what’s the dramatic tension of the episode? What if he doesn’t do the right thing in those few minutes he’s with someone? Does he get stuck? Die? We can’t ever find out, because if he did so, the show would be over, him trapped in the past. So instead we have to assume his guesses are correct, as he helplessly stumbles through someone’s life. There’s never any mention of the paradoxes of time travel, never any concern over his changing the past (with him merrily crashing his own life whenever he gets the chance). There’s far more emphasis on the problems his time travel causes his personal life than there is of the journeys themselves. And that’s presumably because it’s impossible to write a proper story when he’s aimlessly flipping back and forth against his own will. So in episode one he – wait, I can’t even remember a week later. And in episode two he inadvertantly gets someone to donate some bone marrow, so some guy who was nothing to do with the episode will go on to do some humanitarian work.

It’s as if the show got picked up on a format that sounded like it had a good hook, but in practise has nothing it can do with it. It’s certainly watchable, but more for the soap of his life, than for the show’s apparent premise.

I’ve been thinking about how I’d like to go A-Beautiful-Mind-style crazy.

Not that I’d like to, because it seems an awful lot of effort, but were I to, which way I’d like the mad to go. I think it’s something we all need to decide, before our brilliant brains go off the deep end.

So I’ve got it down to two schizophrenic flourishes.

A) I start to see patterns and clues in the 20-digit codes used for unlocking software on PC. The letters and numbers are not arbitrary as you might immediately think, but in fact messages for me, so I know what it is I am to do. YU00-MU5T-K11L-7H3M-4LLL.

B) As you walk around any town, you’ll see shop names and pub signs with letters missing. People might normally assume these to have been stolent by students on pranks, or simply to have fallen off or broken. But in fact I will recognise that these missing letters spell out important messages that I must decipher and interpret, in order that I can prevent the New World Order from taking over.

So, how you would like to go?

Dexter now hates all of you, after none of the whining arseholes who blather on about wanting more Dex pics, nor anyone from the supposed Dex-loving World Of Stuart forum, could be bothered to leave him a birthday greeting. Apart from Lu-Tze and my 1 year old nephew, who managed.

You are ALL hated.

I mentioned this before when the pilot was generously made available to the viewing public by the kind folks of piracy. Now it’s real and proper and on television, and there’s been two of it.

Everything is wrong with this sitcom. The premise is so flimsy (two super-geeks live across the hall from a ditzy big-boobed blonde, and want to win her affections), the 1970s dynamic is dallying around sexism (super-intelligent guys compete to win dumb girl’s affections, girl has giant breasts, guys are nerdy and unattractive), and the gags involve missing trousers, walking into doors, and having difficulty moving heavy objects up stairs.

Which makes it hard to justify why I laughed all the way through both episodes. Well, it’s not hard. I just have to admit that either I’m an idiot for not seeing the levels it’s working on, or I’m an idiot for laughing at the bad TV show. In conclusion, I’m an idiot.

It’s written by sitcom writing vetern Chuck Lorre and former Henson cohort Bill Prady (who when he stood for governer of California, stated he’d “solve all the state’s problems in twenty-two minutes and forty-four seconds with two commercial breaks and a hug at the end.”). Two men who know sitcoms, even if they’ve spent most their writing in the middle-of-the-road, with shows like the occasionally sufferable Dharma & Greg, the horribly underrated Grace Under Fire, and one of the best sitcoms ever, Roseanne. So it’s all safely familiar.

The cast is more interesting, with sitcom regular Darlene’s “Johnny Galecki” BoyfriendfromRoseanne and the pretty much unknown Jim Parsons. Both are excellent, with fantastic deliveries, Galecki even getting away with a walking into a door gag thanks to pristine timing. The breasts are played by Kaley Cuoco, who is better known for voice acting in cartoons. Hopefully the hints in the first two episodes that she’s not completely stupid will blossom, and she’ll be given a slightly more rounded character than a Cheesecake Factory waitress who just broke up with her boyfriend. It’s telling from the all-male writing team that the only ways they’re able to create her character is defining her through relationships with men. She’s great in her part, and thankfully is bullish and strong despite the weakness in her lines.

If they can evolve their writing staff to a slightly more advanced state, and write Cuoco a distinct and interesting character, as rubbish as everything about the programme should be, this could creep into 3rd Rock From The Sun territory.