John Walker's Electronic House

Shiiiiiiiiiiing!

Seamless link to review:

Best review ever!

And now, for your viewing entertainment, I’m going to come up with an exceptionally good idea. Take your phone off the hook, turn down your music, you’re going to want to concentrate.

Ooh, the interface improves.

Newly added, the first year of my Copyright Watch columns from PC Format.

It’s permanently linked on the right, and now should be easy to update each month.

Nick Mailer has sparked off an excellent debate over on his BLOG, daring to challenge the latest wave of Really Rather Cross Letter Writers in the guise of new digital-rights campaign group, ORG. (Nothing says quality like a tech-head organisation’s website being the default WordPress template, with no mission statement anywhere to be found on the front page…).

The fun stuff happens in the comments, with Terribly Nice People don’t like the idea of someone actually doing anything. People who do things only encourage Hitler, you see.

My forays into the world of Free Open GNU Software Source Linux, and the peculiar behaviour of groups like this, leads me to suspect that many people involved would hate it if a solution to their complaints were found. It beings to look an awful lot like a co-dependent relationship between complaint and complainer, and when a radical movement is suggested, anything that might actually change something, and force them to peer outside their protective DRM-free bubble, must be immediately stamped out. They do have the answer, and I firmly believe in the philosophies of the GNU organisation. Which leaves me feeling bewildered that so many inside seem to so defiantly not want to share it with anyone.

A conversation on the phone with Maplins Electronics Customer Sales:

Him: We don’t sell that. The best thing you can do is go into one of our stores and ask.

Me: You don’t sell them, but you have them in your stores?

Him: I’m saying that we don’t have them, but the best thing you can do is go into one of our stores and ask for one.

Right, well, that’s it then. It’s going to be one of those times where I report the facts, tell the truth, and then the entire internet will come round my house and break my kneecaps.

Can we go now?

Continuing in my newfound role as weekend-filler for EG…

Pleased with the words in this review – and it goes on to contain the greatest analogy in the entire history of all games journalism, ever.

Excellent front page from the World’s Most Horrendous Newspaper, the Daily M**l.

Ignoring the fact that they’ve somehow travelled forward in time and taken photographs of the drunken behaviour that will happen later tonight as a result of our being treated like adults for the first time since WW2, and the dreadful inevitability that it portends of every single drunken incident getting reported as if happening for the first time ever (further making the photographs more ludicrous), it’s the peculiar threat at the top in the DVD promotion that entertains me.

Good grief, quickly, get to WH Smiths!

I AM A REAL GAMES JOURNALIST.

Here are my impressions after spending up to two hours watching someone else use an Xbox 360 and having a quick go myself. Yes indeed – by far and away the most accurate way to judge something:

“Oh dear, they will have fun pretending to love it.”

And in more detail: A very troubling launch-list will send everyone into apoplexy as they attempt excuses and overrate everything in desperation.

Fifa 06

It’s hard to know quite what the console is capable of, unless of course the horror show zombie apocalypse of the new Fifa is what it’s capable of. Screams. That was the most common response to the ghastly visages of the seemingly deceased England football team. They’re not the prettiest bunch of men at the best of times, but the waxwork monstrosities generated by all this new processing power caused yelps of panicked disgust from a room filled with deeply hardened Men. The entire game appears to be in blur-o-vision, everything ghosting horrifically in the dreadful animation. Which is as nothing compared to the most hilarious crowd animations beyond anything you could imagine. Moving as one, the thousands of identical blobs appear to be trying to break the record for the largest number of above-water synchronised swimmers in one stadium. It’s near impossible to concentrate on the tedium of mis-angled penality fluke-outs when in the background Earth’s most complicated Mexican wave is taking place.

Kameo

Oh dear, oh dear. The curse of being bought by Microsoft is now confirmed in Rare, as they generate Yet Another Generic Platform Game, this time with added rubbishness! A horribly long and boring first level introduces the central pixie character’s three other assumable forms – furry ice beast, roly-poly spike ball and angry plant – involving the mandatory repetition of simple platform tasks, frustrated by an evil sluggish camera, hellbent on facing the wrong way in all situations. Once this has been completed, you’re then required to take part in… a basic movement tutorial! Yes, that’s right – as soon as you’ve discovered how to move left, right, fly, walk and fight with the idiot camera for yourself, it then painstakingly tells you how to do those things! It had better get a lot better very quickly. This is the game Rare didn’t rush to complete for release, which bodes very poorly for Perfect Dark: Zero.

Condemned: Criminal Origins

Hard to say from a cursory glance really, it might be awesome. But the confusion of CSI style poking around murder scenes with shooting innocent people in the face for the crime of being a drug addict does seem a little worrying. Beyond the Fifa-esque facial tragedies, it looks pretty enough. Somewhat boosted by being played in the pitch black the entire time.

Project Gotham 3

Heavens to Betsy, do we need another identical Project Gotham? The original and its sequel being two of only six games that ever made it worth knowing someone else with an Xbox, I imagine Microsoft are relying fairly heavily on this licence, especially without a Halo 3 to throw at the launch. If familiarity will offer comfort to customers, then Project Gotham 3 will score the win by being seemingly the exact same as Project Gotham 2.

Call of Duty 2

Which leaves the only hope for the console in the arms of Call of Duty 2: The One Without The Subtitle. Which is already out on PC. Which is a better medium for playing games than a 360.

Keep it calm. This is what consoles do when they’re brand new – have games that don’t know how to make use of a tenth of the potential. Compare the awesome Call of Duty 2: Big Red One on the PS2 with any PS2 FPS five years ago. But man, Fifa – what the hell?

As I check the time on my mobile phone before I start writing, I notice that it’s 11:11. Normally, seeing this time reminds me what a complete idiot Uri Geller is, but today, having spent the last few days playing the console Call of Duty sequel, it makes me think about… well, nothing really. A good way to start the review?

A large parcel arrived in the post this morning. Emptied out, it revealed:

And then opened up further revealed:

Thank you Charity. You are “awesomest ++++billion x infinity!!!”