John Walker's Electronic House

In other news, this is correct.

It seems important to note that Tim O’Reilly and Jimmy Wales are the two most repulsive, fetid vomit-chunks spewed from the rancid, rotting arse of Beelzebub, and I hope their homes are filled with the faeces of ten thousand choleraic horses.

recently, because I hate you.

Back Wednesday.

Griefers are much maligned. Condemned as the playground bullies of the online world, they are in fact masters of innovation.

Sure, there’s the sort of git who mindlessly crashes an online funeral, but what about the guy who figures out a way to ninja-style-kill a Battlefield pilot in midair? For every knob who spawn-camps, there’s another who is healing the enemy when no one’s looking. These are the anarchists of gaming, taking the ingredients they’re given and making a cake no one was expecting. Jealous? You should be. So why not begin your career of adding imagination to multiplayer gaming today?

PC Gamer has a website now, which reprints various content from the magazine into this place they call “the internet”. And on it, it seems, is a feature I wrote for the current issue, as a sort of how-to guide for being naughty in games.

I strongly recommend installing both an ad blocker and a flash blocker before you visit the site, as it will otherwise destroy your browser with its, er, design. But then I strongly recommend installing those for reading the internet anyway.

Hooray! My prediction is beginning to prove true.

“The BBC has defended it decision to film its Songs of Praise Easter special in November.”

Everything on television is a lie – that’s the mantra. Even your goodly, godly Songs of Praise. And as a consequence of the premium rate phone-in debacle, it’s going to be all the rage to reveal it for a while. Soon enough it will fade away, and TV Land will go back to its usual ways. It doesn’t have any choice, of course – it couldn’t exist without it. Songs of Praise has to record two editions at once, months in advance, to save money. It’s a lot cheaper to change the flowers in the church than roll out the OB rig a second week.

Fun fun fun.

I’ve never understood the idiocy over console wars. It appears to be based upon telling everyone how the one you own is best, presumably because you spent £400 on it and you don’t want to think about people having fun that you can’t. So I’ve no agenda in favour of Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo, and I think to do so makes you a wretched moron, most especially if you’re a games journalist.

But that shouldn’t stop anyone from sniggering at/feeling sorry for Sony this week.

The PS3 launch has become something of a disaster. Ideally what you want is to drive customers to pre-order, threatened with shop stocks selling out on day one. The Wii did this perfectly, with millions of units flying out around the world, Nintendo genuinely restocking as quickly as they could in order to cash in on Christmas. When I was in Washington last month, there were still queues forming outside a mall’s EB before its 10am opening, the manager warning people at the back of the line that they’d likely go home empty-handed.

When the PS3 is out, and the price drops to something vaguely affordable (currently around £450 without £50 games), and there’s a decent range of titles, it will obviously be a great piece of kit. Just like the 360 was pretty useless for a year, but is now a fantastic thing to have.

Meanwhile, UK Resistance – the “swear until funny” Sega loving site – seems to have suddenly blossomed in the face of the British desperation to shift units, chronicling shops’ attempts to sell pre-orders. And these have become really bizarre. This especially stands out, as GAME in the Bluewater Hoodie Centre seem to be telling their customers not to buy a product of which they are selling plenty, denouncing the 360 in the face of the PS3. The Oxford Street GAME, after cancelling its midnight opening, is now to offer bacon sandwiches to customers who appear for their early morning Friday opening.

But little is as funny as this:

The Virgin Megastore’s special two day early opening for queuers, waiting in line until midnight Thursday to secure a unit. All one of her. Perhaps, just perhaps, screwing over Europe with the PS3 launch wasn’t the best plan ever.

I had to be forced to play it. Forced, because my life had been taken over by 1994’s Mario’s Picross, run on a Gameboy emulator. This was November last year, and it was my first encounter with the block filling puzzles, each so perfectly formed and satisfying to complete. What more could I want from my spare-time fiddling?

But the good Reverend Campbell in his liturgical wisdom forced me to take a break from the Picross frenzy and check out Hudson’s fifth game in their Japanese Puzzle Series, Slitherlink. I had a quick look, found the concept less immediately obvious than Picross, and immediately went back. I was on Picross 2 by then, and taking on the huge grids of Wario’s puzzles, where wrong answers were ignored to make the challenge even more tough. I can’t remember what it was that had me give Slitherlink another go, perhaps more reverential pestering, but, well, I haven’t done a Picross since.

This could be interesting.

EDIT: Apparently Play Asia have sold out of Slitherlink since this review was posted an hour and a half ago : )

Tom and I threw some questions at Bioshock’s Ken Levine.

So looking forward to this game. Tom did all the hard work for this interview, btw.

I’m thoroughly enjoying the increasing nonsense over these premium rate phone-in television competitions. I missed out on an excellent opportunity for feeling smug when I forgot to publically declare that the whole system would unravel after the Richard & Judy incident. So rather belatedly I’ll state: it’s going to get a whole lot sillier before it goes away.

The key thing to remember is: everything on TV is a lie.

This seems too extreme or too cynical a position to take, but yet it remains true. Pick the most innocent programme you can think of, and it will be lying to you.

Take Pet Rescue. I’ve no idea if that ridiculous programme is still on air, but a few years back it was a daily broadcast on BBC2, chronicling the minute events in the lives of an animal rescue centre. They would follow rescued pets to their new homes, and celebrate the endless loveliness of a Disney designed world. A friend of my family was on the programme, rescuing a tortoise. The animal turned out to be very sick, and was eventually put down. But that’s not quite how it was shown on the show. In fact, in TV Land the shelled beast is still living in perpetual happiness in their home, saved from his previous misery. A producer has a quick word with the member of the public, explains that they need to film the animal at their home for a bit before it’s taken to the vet for bye-byes, and then the magical version of life’s cruelty is cobbled together. Does it matter? No. Is it better TV their way? Yes.

Or how about cuddly afternoon competition, Ready Steady Cook. A university friend was featured, and discovered that she in no way got to spend her “£5” on her bag’s contents, but was instead presented with them and told why she’d chosen them. She’d never even seen a green lentil before, let alone ate them “all the time, because I’m a student,” as she was instructed to say. The twenty minutes ran out, so the cameras stopped while the chefs finished off cooking. Does it matter? No. Is it better TV that way? Yes.

Everything from Blue Peter faking a competition winner to every local news report being a cavalcade of bullshit is for one reason: it makes better television. Blue Peter (currently scrambling over itself to apologise and not get dragged down into the mire with ITV Play’s quite separate scandal, as the press merrily pretend they’re all the same thing), had two choices: Say, “Sorry everyone, even though we’ve been hyping this competition for the last half hour, and asking you all to ask permission to spend 10p on a phonecall, there was a technical glitch and there’s no winner. See you all next time when Simon will be absailing into a volcano, and Butterscotch will show you how to make a new Trident system for under a billion pounds.”; or botch it for better TV. This time they got caught, and now they’re pretending they care. The few dozen other times they’ll have had the production team mock up cardboard entries for an ignored competition didn’t merit a four-way on-air grovel, because, er, no one knew (“cared”).

What ITV Play were doing was extortion. Deliberately posing impossible questions (the missing “correct” answer for the “contents of a woman’s handbag”? “Rawl plugs,” of course!) in order to entice viewers to sit on redial with their 75p-a-call line is a clever con. Even more impressive is the way all such channels (CHANNELS! There are channels exclusively dedicated to impossible phone-in competitions!) give the impression that no one’s calling. You watch the cute presenter looking so desperate, trying to fill yet another awkward gap between their chiming phone sfx’s appearance, talking increasingly nonsensical babble while their eyes flick back and forth as if they might at any moment explode in panic. The viewer is intended to think, “Wow, this is so funny! This poor woman’s got to ask this question for four hours, and no one’s phoning in! Well, it’s £30,000 if I get it right, and it seems like they need the calls. What the hell.” Then when they call they find they don’t even get through to a switchboard, but instead are informed that, regrettably, their call hasn’t been selected, but they can find solace in the cost of their fruitless call reaching the coffers of whichever unscrupulous organisation is running the scam. They are, of course, receiving numerous calls, but as the on-screen information informs, your call may not reach the studio, but keep on trying!

But that, of course, has very little to do with Channel 5’s dreadful afternoon puzzle show, Brainteaser, faking winners’ names when they didn’t get any correct answers. What else should they do? Put, “No one with a modicum of intelligence is calling in,” on the screen? Funny as that would be, it would be Bad TV. So inventing a few Michael Fartenburys is the far more elegant solution.

When I worked at Talk Radio, we had a competition that was run at about 5am every morning. A short clip of a famous song was played, and callers would phone in with their guesses as to what it might be. Surprisingly at that hour, we’d get a lot of calls, and it was my job to fill the six lines with five wrong answers and one right one. That made good radio. The presenter would then work his way through the calls until he got to a right answer, and a prize would be awarded. Of course, in order to do this I had to find five wrong answers, and if the clip was too easy, this could often be hard work. So there I’d be, pretending to write down the phone numbers of correct callers, letting them know they might get called back if they’re selected, trying to find those who’d got it wrong. Once I had five, I’d then take the next right answer to come in, and stick him up there. It was as arbitrary as any other system of course, but all ridiculous nonsense from start to finish. Clever callers caught on, mostly because the presenter was so idiotic as to always insist on five wrong answers every single night, which made it stand out rather. They’d phone in with a dummy wrong answer, I’d put them up on the board with the answer they were going to give, and then on air they’d produce the correct name. The presenter would then trip over himself in confusion, flap about as he tried to find the winner’s sound effect he’d not thought he’d need to press, and then go apoplectic as soon as we went to adverts. The point being, even the most obscure and ill-placed phone in compos are faked. All of them. Get used to it.

So as every show is scrutinised, and the public start speaking up about the time they were asked to pretend to love their new front room or that they’d found a £500 vase in their attic, more of these are going to appear. The quite valid stance against programmes asking callers to dial premium rate phone numbers for competitions they cannot possibly win is the gateway for all this fiction to be discovered. It’s going to be rather fun.

What do you think? Call 0870 5 56 57 now to let us know!

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There are a few cats in our neighbourhood that stalk down the front path to our house. And peculiarly, each of them is monstrously fat. And this isn’t just in comparison with the 17 week old kitten that’s currenly sprawled like an idiot between my arms, head upside down, paw draped across his face, but in comparison with, say, articulated lorries. There’s one in particular, black and white, that seems to have developed a strange interest in Dex.

On their first encounter Dex ran into my room meowing furiously, demanding I go with him. I found him in the front hall, back arched, ears folded back on his head. Looking through the front door I saw this great lump of catfat staring angrily at the gap. So the two of us ganged up, and Dex, checking I was still there over his shoulder, bravely saw him off (it had nothing to do with my making threatening gestures behind Dex’s back).

This morning the Cat in the Fat came back. And this time Dex was much more brave. And even braver still when he saw Craig and me stood behind him. The encounter lasted quite a while, with lots of nervous steps forward from both parties, and Dexter pressing himself low to the ground, ears pressed back, looking as though he would tear Fatty limb from fur – but then chickening out the moment he got anywhere near. Then, inspired by the enemy cat’s movement away when Craig stepped toward it, Dex took the initiative and ran at it, chasing the lumbering behemoth out of the garden.

Dexter the Hero!