John Walker's Electronic House

Do you know who is the saddest person of all the people?

I do.

He’s the guitarist for the female singer on the late night talk show. They’re not a band, they’re just the guys she’s currently hired to play the tune in the background while she’s famous in front of it.

But the guitarist, he’s a proper rock star!

Which he exhibits by bending over backwards with his tongue poking out the corner of his mouth, then stomping around with his head banging, as he strums the twee rubbish.

He is the saddest person of all the people.

Hello my blog, remember me? No, me neither.

I’ve just completed four weeks working in the offices of PC Gamer, which followed a week off, which followed a week and a half out of the country visiting Valve and E3. I’ve been quite busy. Apart from the week off. During which I worried about not being busy.

Ending four weeks in the office – twice as long as I’ve worked in any office for ten years – I know how Terry Waite must have felt.

Except of course unlike Terry Waite, I have They’re Back due at the beginning of next week, and a big feature for the following Monday. It’s a bit like if Terry Waite were released, and then told he had to spend six hours a day chained to the radiator in his own house for a couple more weeks.

I think the point I’m trying to make is that I have it a lot worse than Terry Waite.

This week has also featured an awesome time on Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Even though I’ve felt a bit detached from the site for a short while, with all those weeks outside of our secret chatroom, this week we pulled together what I think might be our most awesome feature so far. Rather splendidly it came out of an idea mentioned last Thursday, and happened by Monday. Alec suggested we each write about the games that defined us as gamers. (I rather love that this notion possibly doesn’t make half a second of sense to anyone who isn’t a gamer – the thought that one’s personality could be affected, even changed, by playing games is probably horrifying to those who love to tell you that they never touch the things. (Then switch on EastEnders and slowly die.)) So we did.

The result has been pretty special. You can find them all here.

It makes me look at Rock, Paper, Shotgun with a lot of pride. Obviously other gaming sites have written about games that were special to their writers in their pasts, but I’ve a strong feeling they’ll have written about the games. We wrote about ourselves. And not because we’re all giant egotists. We are, or we wouldn’t be games journalists who believe our opinion and rating of a game is deserving of authority and respect from other people. But not because of that.

Games criticism/writing tends to be pulled between two extremes of so-called objectivity and subjectivity, with people arguing themselves into knots over which is best. Ignoring all that nonsense, and sharing who we are, and how gaming is part of why we are who we are, has created four articles I’m really proud of.

It was splendid to sink back into my brain and recall times when a moment, a place and a game all joined together to create a significant memory. Recalling times sat next to my dad as he played through games, and feeling blessed by the warm, safe happiness of those early evenings, has been a huge pleasure. I distinctly remember how those times would begin. Dad would be playing something, I’d want to watch, and I’d squeak, “Can I sit and watch you for a bit?” And dad would sigh gently, his respite from a long day at work broken, and say yes. I’d climb up on one of the tall, tall kitchen chairs at the breakfast bar, and then drive him to distraction asking what he was doing, why he was doing it, who that guy was, why he’d dropped that item, why did that spell not work, how come you just died, why are you staring at me like that? At my most pestering I’d ask him if I could have a go, and he’d relent and let me sit at the controls for a bit, flailing in the complexity of the role-playing game he’d invested so much time in, and hopefully recently saved. I distinctly remember sharing games of UFO and Civilisation, where he’d let me do the interesting bits like have battles, then take over once it got to the boring rubbish like buying bullets or negotiating land treaties. My interests in strategy gaming have not changed since I was ten.

(The comments on the articles have also been really fantastic. Occasionally, reading through comments threads can be a demoralising experience, as angry people shout insults at each other, or rude people write pointlessly unpleasant things. RPS has one of the best comment communities of any site I’ve known, but wander into the wrong subject area for a post and it can sometimes get grim. These have been almost entirely free of that. (Although I’ve removed at least one that began, “Meh…” Who in their right mind writes “Meh…” after reading someone’s shared personal experiences? I’d love to visit their house, and just as they’ve finished telling me how sad they are about the terrible situation with their friend’s marriage or whatever, I reply, “Meh.”)

So yes, go read. The feature, rather splendidly, is getting bigger all the time. Today we added a collection of similar anecdotes from other games journalists and games developers, and next week we’ve even more from industry types. It’s all rather great, really.

(And time on Gamer was superb. And I’m sorry to Terry Waite, who I’m certain reads this blog.)

It’s been a while.

I’m currently in LA, in a peculiar hotel on the edge of Korea Town, a little overly filled with Korean BBQ. My life may not be well paid, but I’m certainly one lucky guy with the peculiar things I get to do. Now Valve has finally revealed the existence of Left 4 Dead 2 I can say that I’ve been in Seattle for the weekend. Life is sometimes odd, that I sometimes can’t say where I am on the planet because cunning RPS/Gamer readers will put two and two together and get a number dangerously close to four. Valve weren’t even stating they were going to E3, let alone that they’d be revealing a brand new game. I was like an international spy.

It meant there was a spare weekend in Seattle, which was filled tremendously. I ate splendid food like six-egg omelettes at Beth’s Cafe and pulled pork sandwiches from an awesome sandwich shop, visited all the right touristy places like the Space Needle and a Duck Tour, as well as the Jim Henson exhibit, and saw Up at the cinema and Anthony Bourdain and Mario Batali live on stage.

Arriving in LA would have been glum, were it not for meeting up with a chum and going for Korean food, then being given an impromptu “nickel tour” of the city in her car. Another really nice evening.

It’s been a great time, with splendid people.

Tomorrow I have to start doing some proper work as E3 begins. (Well, beyond the 2000 word exclusive preview I already wrote, and so on). I’ve not been before, and it’s a daunting schedule. It’ll be interesting, at least.

And that’s all the weather.

Over the last three months I’ve been writing a project of Eurogamer, where I’ve replayed Knights of the Old Republic by making only the most evil choices available. Whenever I’ve played role-playing games that have offered ethical choices, I’ve always tried hard to make the decisions I believe I would make were I in that situation. Clearly I’ve always flattered myself, as I always become glowingly virtuous in all of them – a feat I don’t always quite manage in real life. As I play such games, I see those awful options, those terrible choices, and very occasionally out of intrigue I’ll pick them to find out what happens, immediately reloading to undo it all. Of course, playing like that breaks the already tenuous frame, so it’s something I mostly avoid doing. I wanted to find out what would happen if I played a favourite RPG completely against character and instinct, both as an excuse to replay the game after five or so years, and because I thought it would make for an interesting article.

I pitched it to Eurogamer as a single piece for their Retro Sunday slot, and lovely editor Tom Bramwell agreed to it. I realised there was going to be a problem after I’d finished the opening sequences on Taris, realised I’d been playing for many hours, and had already done enough terrible things to fill two articles. Tom rather generously agreed to let me break it into two parts. And then I wrote an article nearly three times as long as the standard for the first part anyway.

So playing and writing part two, I realised there were still problems. Buzzing around two planets, I’d gone through quite a transformation, and had started to thoroughly enjoy my evil ways. But I was still a long way from the end. Once again I went grovelling to Tom, explaining that I needed just one more part, oh please, go on. He agreed again, and I wrote another triple length piece for part two.

I really did finish it for part three. Although I really could have broken it in half (not least because the final piece is about 3,200 words long), instead skipping huge chunks of the game to keep it within some sensible size. This is testament to the scale of Knights of the Old Republic, just how much could be said. In the end I wrote about 9,000 words, and could likely have found another 9,000. (Although getting paid three times for this worked out pretty well.)

It’s been a fun experiment, and something I’ve had some really nice feedback from. So part one is here, then part two, and finally today’s part three. Cheers to Tom for letting me take as much time and space as he did – I cannot think of any other publication (beyond RPS) that would have let me do that.

Here for no other reason than I consumed some rum is a collection of Black Betty covers:

Ram Jam:

(continue reading…)

Sorry to everyone whose comments weren’t coming through. They’ve all be approved now and should appear on the relevant posts. I’m so used to “pending” meaning “spam we didn’t filter” I’d forgotten to go through the pile.

A double-review of some casual gaming distractions appears on EG today.

PopCap has previously done a couple of Mystery P.I. games on PC, The Lottery Ticket and The Vegas Heist, and Portrait of a Thief borrows very heavily from the former. Indeed, many of the same screens are used, this time to “tell the story” of an art theft that you’re “investigating”.

Such laborious use of quotation marks is pretty necessary here, since all you ever do throughout is hunt busy images for items on the list, then solve a simple puzzle, and repeat, forever. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. Against all reason, this most simplistic and ridiculous of notions is oddly gratifying. Think Where’s Wally, but with dozens of things to find and none of them wearing stupid hats. It’s that constant hammering on the satisfaction button as you tap on the third frog, and then spot the umbrella along the top bar of the lamppost. Ding! Each object vanishes from the scene and is crossed out on your list.

Read on.

The PC aportion of Rise of the Argonauts gets reviewed all up in its face by me on Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

It begins a lot like this:

“What a view!” boomed Hercules. “You can see for miles from here!” Looking across at the horizon I could see the tiled sea, and a grey, looming fog. Moving the mouse to the right angle, I could just make out the shadowy shape of a distant hill. So I went to find the graphics options, of which there are none. Quit to the main menu, but they’re not there either. Quit to desktop, search through the Start menus, directories… nothing. There are some inis I could edit, but screw that, I don’t need to see the hill that badly. Oh, I love a good port.

And then carries on here.

One of the most frequent comments you’ll hear from the anti-MMR groups is the progress they are making in the States. They will link to the completely irrelevant case of Hannah Poling, and then reference the enormous case going through a special court in Washington, where 4800 families are attempting to sue for compensation after their children developed autism, which they believe was linked to the MMR vaccination.

That will come to an end, since the court has ruled against the first group of the families, making it clear that there’s no supporting evidence for the claims whatsoever.

The three groups are pretty confusing, and when further rulings will appear is not clear, but CNN says,

“Powers’ litigation steering committee is representing thousands of families that fall into three categories: those who claim MMR vaccines and thimerosal-containing vaccines can combine to cause autism; those who claim thimerosal-containing vaccines alone can cause autism; and those who claim MMR vaccines, without any link to thimerosal, can cause autism. Thursday’s rulings will only affect the families that fall under the first category, Powers said.”

Of course, while this is a victory for scientific rationale and common sense, it’s not a time to celebrate. It means that 4800 families seeking compensation to help them raise their autistic children have had their time wasted and their hopes dashed by these vile and malevolent campaigners, lawyers and quacks.

The people who have lost are innocent victims of the lies spread by Wakefield and his band of useful idiots.

Dear The Sky,

I’m very sorry for all my moaning.

Thank you for the first snowfall I’ve seen in my adult life.

Love,
John