John Walker's Electronic House

What I have learned is: Mario Kart is really, incredibly good. And further, I don’t know why. Mario Kart has unfair deaths, where despite your superb racing technique, and complete trouncing of the AI drivers, a giant blue turtle can still knock you off the track one inch from the finish line, robbing you of your hard-earned victory. You throw your arms up in disgust, swear the paint from the walls, and most likely call Princess Peach a bitch. Then you play again.

It’s been a while – new review up on EG.

Right, get your notebooks out everyone. It’s time for another lesson in being not an idiot.

Reading through this nonsensical thread over on EG, Stuart Campbell steps in to explain something that had been misunderstood from his own article and referenced inaccurately. Someone else doesn’t understand and pompously criticises, Stu mockingly points this out, and as per usual in all forum-style conversations, the entire thing descends into tiresome gibberish.

However, it reminds me of a couple of important things to note.

The first thing is: the difference between someone’s being an idiot and someone’s being unintelligent is an idiot has no idea he’s unintelligent. And this leads to all sorts of problems. The person being unintelligent hears something that contradicts their own incorrect understanding on a matter and either learns, or retreats. The idiot takes loud offense. This is problematic, as it means the person being an idiot will only ever shout angrily, no matter the debate.

Let’s create a hypothetical example. Let’s say someone is angrily stating that a well-received and award winning film is actually terrible, and everyone who likes it is wrong. Others reply saying, “I agree! It’s rubbish! Thank goodness you said that!”. I, thinking that the film is rather splendid, and having detailed reasons why, reply saying why I think it is good.

Now, the person hating the film has two choices. They can listen, and make arguments against to defend their position should they maintain it. Or they can make an irrelevant point that ignores anything that might challenge their position. The idiotic response is to choose the latter. So he says, “Everyone else thinks it’s rubbish. You’re the only one defending it. So that proves something, eh?”

Despite this being a frustrating nonsense, and certainly not addressing any of the points made, you have no choice but to respond to it. A simple solution would be, “Well, the most respected critics all defend it with their well-reasoned reviews. Now, can we get back to the points I made?”

“So now you’re saying only journalists are allowed opinions?”

There’s little hope in such a situation. The problem is, the person is refusing to listen, and refusing to accept the possibility that they’re being an idiot. So nevermind that their ‘point’ was succinctly proven wrong – instead they pretend that a totally different conversation took place, and respond angrily to that fiction. I am left in an ever-more confusing and frustrating position, as now if I wish to continue I have to defend the point – that I certainly don’t believe only employed film critics are allowed opinions, never have thought that, never would think it, wouldn’t say it, and perhaps most pertinently, didn’t say it. But the idiotic response has already won, as now I’m desperately defending myself against this most irrelevant of points, and any reasoned logic I once employed is lost in the bottom-wind.

The second thing is: no one seems to be able to recognise the difference between a particular behaviour described, and an assault on their entire character.

In the EG thread, Stu is impolite to some of the people who are rudely dismissing his words, ignoring what he’s saying, and instead pretending he’s making the arguments they want him to have said. They want those responses because those are the ones for which they have practised replies. They neatly fit into categories they recognise. So, as an example, it’s assumed that Stu is slagging off the game Geometry Wars 2. He’s not, and indeed he has very clearly stated that he likes the game. But now the above behaviour appears, and Stu is left having to defend himself against things he hasn’t said, and arguments he wasn’t making. And oddly enough, becomes frustrated and annoyed at having to do this. So he labels the behaviour – he calls it stupid, idiotic, childish, naive, etc. And here is the crux of this point: the idiotic response is to believe this is a description of their character.

Of course it’s a description of their current behaviour. This isn’t a difficult conclusion – it’s impossible for it to be anything else. Stu doesn’t know these people, has never spoken to them before. They write under nicknames, they are an anonymous blue name writing something stupid. However, “You are being a moron”, which is patently true in the above examples, is interpreted as “You are always, and have always been, a moron,” and the person indignantly hollers at this grotesque injustice. (For someone like Stu, who has a public profile, the idiot’s response goes a stage further as they attempt to exact revenge for their own imagined affront, and use the personal information they have on him to insult him personally. They become the perpetrators of the crime they so condemn, in what I shall now label the Idiot’s Irony).

And why? Because in both cases, the alternative is allowing the possibility of being wrong. And god forbid that we should ever be wrong! In fact, in a gross distortion of reality, it is being wrong that is understood as being idiotic by today’s arguing masses. This is such a horrendous mistake, and it breaks my heart. Recognising that one is wrong is so FAR from being idiotic. It’s the very opposite! It’s admitting that one has learned! Being wrong is a joy – it’s a time when you learned something new, gained knowledge, improved your intellect. And yet it’s so fiercely hated that both the above situations are the absolute norm. Idiotic behaviour with the inability to recognise itself. That way, you never have to be wrong. You never have to learn a new thing. You never have to think.

So, as all that remains is the tireless, tiresome drudgery of a ceaseless cough, I appear otherwise to have survived the virus attack upon my person.

Things are getting back to normal, and I’m almost done catching up on missed work. This disease has cost me at least £1000, which is galling to say the very least. Please don’t think a week is normally worth £1000 in my life. This was as case of horribly bad timing. And dad, don’t panic, it’s £1000 on top of what I’d usually earn, and I’m not going to starve to death.

Brian will be back and regular from Wednesday – sorry he was gone so long.

I’ll be in that militantly defensive position over flu for a while now, not allowing anyone to call their snivel or cold anything close, until they too haven’t been able to put their own socks on. It’s a stupid and petty illness that just renders you useless for a really long time, with no serious implications or factors that merit any decent sympathy. Boo to flu, I say.

I want to say a HUGE thank you to some people who went far out of their way to look after me last week. Housemate Hicks, Jo Dolby and Stu Campbell were each incredibly kind, and completely super-lovely, going to the shops for me and buying supplies and remedies, and to Amanda Ricard who amazingly, with her afternoon off, came across town to drive me the 200 yards (up the steepest hill in the world) to the doctors. You people are stars – thank you.

Today’s the first day since Sunday that I’ve been able to sit up for more than twenty minutes.

It’s weird to be this ill, without it being in the least bit serious. I feel as though my head is filled with wet socks, and my arms weigh about twice as much as they should, and it still hurts like crazy when coughing (lots of the time then), but today I’m able to be awake more than asleep.

I’ve found this before with being ill – there’s a moment right after waking up in the morning the cruelly tricks you into feeling lots better than you actually are. With the exception of Tuesday, when I woke up feeling like I was being punched in the head, every day this week has offered a cruel lie of hope. Even this morning had a false start – I got up at 9am, felt surprisingly human, sat down on my chair and then ten minutes later was back in bed and asleep for another two hours.

Now I’m wobbling in my chair, but at least sat up, and have been for a couple of hours. I think I’ll be in bed before long, but it’s progress! And how ridiculous – to be pleased with sitting up for a bit, when all that’s wrong with me is a passing virus. There’s no glory in flu.

I need your help.

My cough is so incredibly painful that I’m going insane.

I haven’t the energy to walk anywhere, but have to do something about the barbed wire encased stinging nettles currently on fire in my neck before I claw my own throat out.

Tell me your remedies. If pharmaceutical, I’ll find arrangements.

Especially something that will let me sleep.

She has been alive for one week, but still three weeks early for the world. She is too small, too unfinished, encased within her plastic box. The air is filled with electric bleeps and the hiss of refined oxygen. Her shrivelled skin is not yet ideal, her hands too small, her eyes unopened. She has no consciousness of her situation, inside her plastic box.

There is the unheard sobbing, endless desperate cries. There is a weakness to the sound, the tone of exhaustion, those dry cracked noises. Unheard by ears too small to understand, and those too far away.

***

She is standing astride the wretched divide of life and death. She rules it.

She is at the apex of living, the peak, the most alive any human has ever been, and will ever be. To be more alive than this would mean to cease being human, to explode beyond. But she was to be the highest human of all, to reign in this place. To ascend. She would become ordinary among the immortals. But she was also to be human, more human and more extraordinary than any around her.

She is also alive in flame.

She is also about to win. She is about to defeat her final enemy.

The WUMP… WUMP… WUMP… is now alone in daring to challenge her.

***

It is a significant day. It is a significant moment in a significant day. It is a moment that is life defining, life changing.

It is smaller than so many memories but far more momentous. It is more crucial, but small enough to miss.

This moment shines.

***

Broken pieces, fragments of ideas. The sub-atomic particles of thought. Stretching narratives. Stolen glimpses. So it goes.

All her life the WUMP… WUMP… WUMP… had ruled her. Had controlled her. Had forced her mind, directed her, bullied her, mocked her, held its tyrannical authority over her, laughed at her weakness and belittled her existence. Spiteful, hateful noise. Cruel noise. Dominant. Her whole life had been a puppet’s dance to its rhythm. It will end. It will not win. It cannot be allowed to win. No more.

***

She is encased in the box, her cries can’t be heard. Her body is too fragile.

***

Now: Victory.

***

WHUMP WHUMP WHU-

Kieron has declared today to be Official Psychonauts Reviews Posting Day. Who am I to argue?

Here is my original Psychonauts review from PC Gamer, a year ago when it was first meant to be coming out, as opposed to the second one last November when it was, er, second supposed to appear. (It finally came out in February this year – buy it, you fool). It’s the unsubbed version, so expect mistakes.

Psychonauts

Get your brain in gear, it’s time to mess with your mind.

Developer Double Fine is the home of hero of the 90s, Tim Schafer. After learning his trade by script writing for the early Monkey Island games, he went on to create what must be recognised as the finest adventure games to have existed, Day of the Tentacle and Grim Fandango. Back then, Schafer did something special to a fine format. He looked at adventure games, and he decided to make a new rule: Everything has to be Game. If an object was present in a scene, then there must be a unique gag for looking at it, picking it up, using it, even talking to it. “I’m sorry, I can’t do that” was not an acceptable response. If the player could think of it, it was to be met with a written reply. Every scene was poured over, explored and experimented with, raising a joy that can only be known when recognising someone had thought of you when they made this. Please, get excited. He’s done the same for platform games.

Don’t be fooled. Psychonauts is not a kid’s game. It’s a game about being a kid. Yes, it is Nickelodeon coloured; yes, you play a ten year old boy; and yes, it’s a platform game. But it’s time to shed your prejudices, shake off your assumptions, and come fresh-faced to a game that’s going to raise you above its shoulders and carry you around town.

I’ll be honest. For the first half hour I was disappointed. Despite a thoroughly entertaining introductory cutscene, introducing Razputin, a young kid gate-crashing a summer camp for psychic children, it was all over too soon and I was left assigning buttons on my gamepad so I’d be able to jump, punch and move the camera without losing fingers (after an abruptly aborted foray into the hopeless mouse/keyboard controls). It felt typical, and it didn’t feel anything special. The initial training level doesn’t engross, dutifully introducing all the basic obstacles and simplest moves in a ‘Nam environment. There are too many interruptions, too much happening at once, and it all feels like the insane saccharine rush of flailing through a Crash Bandicoot level. Please, play past this.

Games only occasionally have the kind of moments that follow. The first came when exploring the cabin area where the children sleep. A few of the vast cast of fellow psi-campers were hanging around, having conversations. Really funny conversations. Mostly about kid stuff, but with that sense of universal importance that ten year olds understand their worlds by. But one was on his own, his head pressed to a building. I ‘used’ him to talk, and he explained that he was waiting to watch the girls getting changed through a hole in the wall. He was that kid at camp. I went to ‘use’ him again, but accidentally hit the wrong button, and smacked him with Raz’s whopping great psi-punch. But I didn’t lose a life, receive a warning message, or watch him ignore my violence. Instead, his head was pushed through the tiny hole, leaving his tubby body and little legs waggling off the ground. I dashed inside, and there was his head, stuck through, dazed and confused. And there, in that moment, there’s a rush. The realisation that something far more involved is happening here. And it wasn’t a fluke. Everything is Game. Punch someone, jump on someone, and there’s a unique reply, natural to their character, relevant to your action. As the game progresses you gain more psychic powers, including telekinesis and pyrokinesis. Lift them off the ground, set them on fire, there’s something new. And we haven’t even left the opening area yet.

The game unfolds in two ways. There’s the campsite, which is enormous, all freely explorable, riddled with hidden extras, and packed with gags like nothing before. It hints at opportunities to come, and these locations change as you progress through the game’s other half, the cranial sections. A psychonaut, you see, is someone who enters another’s mind, Fantastic Voyage style. That opening training level was inside Coach Oleander’s mind – a military war vet, obsessed with the action he’d faced in his youth. A world apart from the next, the insides of mysterious Agent Nein’s brain, a neat orderly. Which is a world apart from the beautiful Agent Vodello, and her 70’s disco reality. All worlds apart from the giant mutated lungfish who swallows Lili, the Tim Burton inspired girl who might be your girlfriend were she not inside a fish.

Each mind has a series of tasks to be completed, which at first are the fairly standard combination of reaching destinations, and collecting items. These collectables include mental cobwebs (to be vacuumed up), figments of the imagination, and labels for the weeping suitcases (emotional baggage – ho ho), which are exchanged back in the camp for psi cards, the tokens that allow you to gain new powers. There’s also arrow heads to be dug up in the camp grounds which are used to purchase items from the camp store. And unlike every other platform game ever, the shop is for real. You don’t have to buy all the stuff it sells – I finished the game without ever finding out what the magnet does.

As things progress, events take a turn for the worse (i.e. there’s a plot), and it becomes a matter of necessity that you enter minds, rather than for the previous summer camp training programme. People’s brains are going missing, leaving the rest of the kids zombie-like, wandering around the place mumbling, “Teee Veeeeee”. Someone has to do something, and with the aid of the retired Agent Cruller, it’s up to Raz. Fairly obviously.

So far, so cute. Original, certainly, and involved. But there’s more than just that going on. The second revealing moment came when inside Agent Nein’s head. Another of the goals is to unlock memories that are locked up in safes. The safe scampers around scared until you punch it open, letting you see a brief slide show of static sepia-toned memories of the host. Until this point these have been funny rewards for a completed task. First picture is a young Nein playing with his mum. The second the mum and dad looking concerned. The third shows his dad looking scared at his mum lying in bed. The fourth the funeral. The fifth Nein and his father unable to communicate. Laughter stops. Jaw drops. This isn’t a game for kids.

This becomes more evident when stomping around Lungfishopolis (the mind of the lungfish – this still makes me laugh out loud) a giant Godzilla-sized version of yourself, punching over buildings, climbing skyscrapers, and swiping aeroplanes from the sky. A breakaway group of lungfish militia realise you’re there to help, and arrange to meet you by the dam. You have to clear the area of enemies first. And as you crash your way through this huge city, amazed by realising that this could be a game by itself, there are news flashes, spreading propoganda about you. One informs the city’s citizens that you are often to be found “popping pills and soliciting inexpensive call-girls.” This isn’t a game for kids.

About halfway through the 15 to 20 hours of play, the sheer volume of brilliant jokes slows, and the game develops a greater maturity. Fittingly enough, it becomes cerebral. For example: for reasons best discovered you meet a man with a very literal Napoleonic complex – a split personality in conflict. Entering his mind reveals a drawing room, at its centre the two halves of his personality sat either side of a table-top strategy game. They are playing for domination. Raz jumps into the game and shrinks down, from where he can move the pieces to play against Napoleon, moving them with his telekinesis power. But there aren’t enough pieces on your side, so you shrink down further, and knock on the doors of the houses within, convincing people to help. Each gives a platforming quest to be completed before they will. Game inside game inside game inside game. (And through the upstairs window of one building, you can see a drawing room, two men sat either side of a table-top strategy game). That’s one surprise spoiled – there’s no way I’m ruining any more. But please believe me when I say that each incredible, unique notion is strong enough to have been a game on its own.

The game just falls shy of a shiny 90% due to a really fundamental issue with its edge detection. Much swearing occurred when huge sections had to be re-climbed innumerous times thanks to a particularly awkward jump, and Raz’s ensueing failure to grip ledges. Brilliantly the game is never so cruel as to kill you, but you will see some sections so many times. It’s such a simple thing, but it’s fundamental – it does so much damage to enjoyment. And blood pressure. There are also a few aesthetic bugs, mostly with the sound, music vanishing, and snippets of dialogue too quiet to be heard no matter the volume settings. Niggles, but important ones. But not nearly important enough to stop you from getting hold of this.

I feel evangelistic about my desire to have you play it. You’re a gamer, and as such this is something you should see. Not only is it exquisitely beautiful, each level receiving a new graphical attitude, the character animations detailed beyond comprehension, but it’s so utterly special. There are more new ideas in here than a hundred Half-Life 2s, and it contains more laughs than any game before. It’s wonderful. Please, have a go.

Exquisite gaming, imaginative and hilarious.

WUMP… WUMP… WUMP…

The skin on her left forearm split open – about an inch long – as the swelling of the blister burst. Others were welling up alongside it, the crisping surface preparing for more little eruptions. Each fine hair had let off a small popping sound as it frizzled to nothing, leaving the skin bare to the face of the heat. The nylon of her left trouser leg was melting, sealing itself to her thigh, the two bubbling together. Her ear cracked as her hair burned away.

***

There is a box. The box is clear, perfectly clear, as if it were the conjuring of a mime. It is sealed on all six sides, and she lies inside it.

***

The fire made a sound, like the crazed rush of a hurricane, fighting its way through a canyon. It roared a ferocious, destructive battlecry as it consumed. It was a magnificent beast, one of her own creation, and under her own control. Each burst, each new thread of flame, was her incantation. A puppet for her amusement.

The liquid skin on her arm now burned, a green-orange blaze, dancing so prettily. The flame danced for her, the servant entertaining her in her throne room. At her whim it leapt higher, then would sweep its way further towards her shoulder and arm, increasing its chorus line. She smiled, splitting open her cheek.

***

No sound can either enter or leave the box. She is naked. The energy for pounding against the box is drained completely, her hands now unable to make fists.

Her face is down, her chin pressed against her breastbone, her eyes open, staring. Both arms are wrapped around her knees, legs hugged to her breasts. She cradles herself, the slightest movement as she rocks forward and backward.

***

Her song, so powerful, drawn from her centre and exploding outwards, is beautiful. Her mouth, able to open so much wider without the restrictions of her left cheek, releases this ballad of joy. Her whole body dances to her tune, painted with the colours that only she has seen, all alight in their radiant flames. The sound still continues, still “WUMPS” within her, but it is fading, terrified. She will have victory.

Everything is alive in colour and sound. Everything performs its life-tune for her, and her alone. None other can see or hear them, none other has the skills to interpret their ways, and she reigns over them.

***

She would weep, but there are no tears.

I’d be interested to hear people’s comments on this so far, positive or negative.

In Her Eyes – Part 5

WUMP… WUMP… WUMP…

It was bigger than her.

WUMP… WUMP… WUMP…

***

She is too hot. It is stifling, and the frantic fanning of her paperback book does nothing to cool her down. Instead it merely serves to encourage the sweat from her forehead to run into the corners of her eyes. An ideal afternoon by the lake now seems less than perfect, and she wonders at her endless capacity to always want for whatever it is that she currently does not have. Throughout the damp June she had moaned for sunnier days. Here they are, and she is wishing for just a single cloud in the sky

just a bit more cold water. But her mother is too angry with her, and she isn’t acting normally. The water is stinging her legs and bare backside, but they are already late and she is covered in dirt from the garden where she had been told not to go, but had gone, because she had seen a rabbit, and it was sitting really still, and she really thought it might let her touch it, and then it had hopped away, and she slipped, and then she was all muddy even though they were already late. Her right thigh was still really sore from the smack, and now the bath water was so stingy too, and the water on the smack was making her cry, but crying only seemed to be making mummy angrier. She couldn’t stop and mummy was rubbing too hard with the flannel on her arms and she cried louder and it felt like it would never end and she wished that she hadn’t seen the rabbit because then they would already be in the car and mummy wouldn’t be so angry and her legs wouldn’t hurt and it would be

***

WUMP… WUMP… WUMP…

The walls looked as though they were on fire. But it was more complicated than that. If someone outside had been looking in, they would have said that the paint must have been burned by flames. But the walls weren’t on fire. The paint wasn’t on fire. It was the colour of the paint that burned.

She had set the colour ‘Apple White’ on fire.

It was beautiful craft. A fine carpenter could work an elaborate curve into the leg of an occasional table. But of course it was only structural. The carpenter was using physical tools to make geometric shapes that were pleasing to the eye. She was merely setting light to the moments of energy released as light’s photons met with the electrons of the paint. Each quantum burst igniting. This was within her control.

***

is seventeen and James is fumbling clumsily with the clasp of her bra. He kisses her neck as he attempts to undo this most simple of devices. She is at once entertained by his struggle and trembling inside every time his lips press against her skin. She has never felt this way, never this scared before, and as she looks around she realises that everyone else’s face shares the same expression as her own. The climate control has now completely stopped working, and the horrific thunder of the turbulence is blocking out the noise of people’s frantic yelling. Terror fills her as she realises she cannot even hear her own hysterical screams. She gasps, as his tongue touches her bottom lip, and his hand slides over her belly. Her face and chest are flushed red, almost prickly. She hasn’t felt this before, this desire, this tightening, making it more than she can bear to breathe, the air seeming too thick to take into her lungs. Someone falls into the aisle, someone else trips as they try to run, they tangle, him in her arms, her in his, holding each other, the moment paused, held in perfection, smooth backs under gentle fingers. She wants this time forever, to never end, with no idea how much longer she can survive

***

WUMP… WUMP… WUMP…

More than alive! It could be as loud as it wanted, but she was more than alive now!

WUMP… WUMP… WUMP…

Brian will be a day late, due to something YOU did. I hope you’re sorry.