John Walker's Electronic House

I’ve been God for quite a while now. It began back in the 80s, and I’ve been filling the role ever since. Funny thing – I’m used to it. It was special at first – I had the power to raise and lower the ground itself, change the weather, summon forth great changes to the world, and most of all, influence the lives of my subjects to my whim. Meh, that’s old news now. Being God is good, yes, and I’m not trying to suggest otherwise. All I’m saying is, I’m past the point where being reminded of my abilities is enough to get me going.

Review of Molyneux’s latest up at Eurogamer. Which is quite pleasant for me, really, since previously the only time I get to review games of this standing is when they come out on budget.

Once again, it’s that time of year where a hard drive dies, and I lose all my music, video and comedy.

Yes, yes, you’d imagine someone who experiences this so frequently would learn to back things up, but that’s what they want you to do. The Man isn’t going to get me that easy.

It all began with installing Linux, and whether the two are possibly connected is still up for debate, but either way, at least I have it to access the internet and be able to work. The drive that’s gone bonkers had Windows on it, as well as my media.

Someone out there might know something about this: one of the partitions on the broken drive still seems to exist, the other two gone. One of those two held Windows. If one bit’s working, it makes me wonder if it all really is, but something’s gone very wrong with the labels. It’s beyond the minds of those around me. If anyone knows anything about fixing such stuff, please let me know.

The short of it is, for the moment, Brian is on holiday until I’ve figured out the software to create him from here, or got Windows back.

Boston is excellent. It comes second to Chicago in the Giant Competition To Be John’s Favourite US City, but that’s no bad position. Managing a similar sense of being a city designed for people to live in, rather than one which appears to find its citizens something of an inconvenience (see: every British city there is), it’s somewhere you can really sit down. So many cities, and in my experience pretty much all of them in the UK, seem to treat people as guests they really regret having invited, and now wish they would just leave. “Oh dear, they’re here now. Well, look, let’s close the shops at 5pm, and perhaps they’ll get the hint.” Boston seems to want you there.

Adventures with horrid mad ladies were not restricted to the plane. We were dragged us into the sodding Cheers bar – for goodness sake, it was a photograph of some steps, and then a set. These steps do not lead to a magical portal that takes us into the world of Cheers. They in fact lead to a dreadful poky little bar with nowhere to sit because of so many other cretins so stupid as to go there, or be dragged there. It’s the bar where no one knows your name, and certainly doesn’t care.

I think I might have spoilt it for everyone else. I’m not sure my face was alive with joy as we stood in the corridor, pressed up against walls as waitstaff and customers squeezed past us constantly. So leaving after one drink, we went in search of more comfortable surroundings.

Oh, what delight overwhelmed me when we chose an ‘Irish pub’. If there’s one international certainty, it’s that an ‘Irish pub’ in any country in the world that isn’t Ireland, is going to be utterly awful. Guess what. So of course the walls are lined with shite, and the stereo is playing a peculiar mixture of appalling music, seemingly from any country other than America, only occasionally fluking Ireland. I skipped eagerly to the bar. Behind it stood a woman who must have been over 800 years old. Retirement was a memory from her youthful past. People ordered drinks. Guiness, Guiness, Sam Adams, Guiness, and for me? (I swear that the following is true, as best as I can remember it, and as verified by repeated playing out in our conversation for the rest of the trip. Please ensure you hear the woman’s replies in the incredulous tones that only the very stupidest humans can generate).

“What soft drinks do you have?”

“What?”

“Do you have any soft drinks?”

“WHAT?”

“What sodas do you have?”

“WHAT?”

“WHAT SODAS DO YOU HAVE?”

“Cider?”

“No. SODA. What SODA do you have?”

“Gin? You want GIN?!”

At which point I wasn’t going to waste another second of my painfully short life attempting communication with this sub-slug mind.

Thanks to WonderHicks, I am with the electric internet in this primitive country. So it seems only appropriate to tell the story of the mad lady on the plane.

As usual, when checking in I asked for an aisle seat with my right leg sticking out, so I can trip up ugly people. And click my knee. The nice lady at the desk said she’d found me an excellent seat on a bit of the plane where they had only three chairs in the middle row instead of four, meaning the aisles are wider, and hence there’s more room for Mr Clicky. It turns out niceness doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re not an idiot, and not only did she put me on the left side, so my right leg was trapped, but she put me in the row of three seats immediately behind the row of four seats in front. Which meant, not only was there absolutely no more leg room, there was in fact even less, because the seats in front stuck out blocking the way. Add to it that it was a seat without any bloody room under the seat in front, because of the large black metal box cruelly in the way, and it was without a doubt the worst possible seat on the plane.

But there was some relief. On a busy plane, after the cabin crew had gone through the plane shutting all the lockers and getting ready to go, the two other seats in the row were left empty. Now, this means one of two things: you’re incredibly lucky, or you are absolutely guaranteed to be sat next to an utter moron. Anyone who cannot get themselves to a plane on time does not deserve to fly. I’m aware sometimes a disaster occurs, and misfortune prevents reaching the airport in time, but that’s incredibly rare. That you’re asked to be at the airport over two hours before the plane is even going to start getting ready to take off, means that being late is invariably because of stupidity. Obviously it was the latter. I’m not entirely sure how the woman sat next to me had managed the mental agility to not have killed herself with a spoon before reaching the over-ripe old age of, at a guess, late 60s. She really was just astonishingly thick. Her English wasn’t good, and so obviously there’s a lot of leniancy offered in many areas, but that left room for enough treacle-thick idiocy to ensure her title as The Stupidest Person I’ve Ever Sat Next To. And I used to sit next to Peter Hitchens when I worked at Talk Radio.

After having to explain to her how the 61 on her ticket did indeed match the 61 on the sign above our seat, and then to explain that she was sitting on her seatbelt, and then explain how to take the lid off her water bottle, and then explain how to attach her seatbelt (IT’S THE EASIEST THING IMAGINABLE. It’s a simpler task than matching up the different shaped blocks to the different shaped holes in the box you have when you’re 2, because with a seatbelt, YOU ONLY HAVE ONE OPTION. What other option is there? To not figure it out is to not have the mental ability to understand that its function is to clasp together, rather than afford you protection by lying open either side of you. How has she not drowned in her own saliva, without someone telling her to swallow every thirteen seconds?), and then explaining how to swallow, she finally settled her vast bulk down into the seat, and settled her razor-pointed elbow into mine. Understand that my arm was inside the armrest, and yet she still insisted on wedging her elbow into me. Eventually I gave up and just pushed back until she got the hint. However, encouraging movement on her part was not ideal – each shift in weight released another puff of the vile perfume she’d apparently been industrially sprayed with that morning.

And yes, we’ve all sat next to selfish idiots before, so why the fuss? Because this woman… she stole my bread! This awful, awful old hag, when I went to the toilet halfway through my lunch, stole the bread from my tray while I was gone. I got back, sat down, and looked at my suspiciously bereft looking dinner, and then across at hers. There was her empty bread packaging, and then there, under the clasp of her claw-like hand, was my un-opened bread! She saw my glance at her thieving talons, and then gripped it more tightly. Her horrid wrinkly glare dared me to suggest that she’d stolen it from me. And how could I? What a ludicrous situation to be in. “Excuse me, can I have my bread back please?” And, to be honest, it was way too funny that she’d sunk this low to want to say anything.

I look back a few seconds later and the bread has vanished, along with her claws. They’re now under her tray, in her lap – a surprisingly awkward arrangement in the cramped conditions of Economy seating. And then, from beneath her hiding place, every now and then would cobitme a clasped pincer sporting a torn lump of bread. She ate it, bit by bit, right there in front of me. The bitch.

Her behaviour was increasingly peculiar throughout the flight. When they came around offering chocolate bars, I said no, and she swang her left arm dangerously fast past my face to ensure that my negative response would affect her chances. Then the flight attendant, a few moments later, turned around and saw me without a chocolate bar. Muddled, he asked if I had wanted one. I said no. She thrust her arm out again. A few minutes later, another attendant came along with some leftover bars. I thought I might lose my nose in her desperation to get one. AREN’T YOU ALREADY FULL UP ON MY BREAD, LADY?

As we prepared to land, she sat there with her bag on her lap. The cabin crew had already managed to convince the similarily, although in a very weird quite way, insane lady filling the third seat in our row to put her CARPET in the overhead locker, rather than cuddle it as she had the bulk of the flight. Evil Bread-Stealing Lady didn’t take the hint. One lady told her to move it. She put it on the floor. Another lady asked her to put it under the seat. She pushed it, and then pulled it back out once the lady was gone. A third guy insisted that she put it underneath. Like a child stroppily half-doing something, she uselessly nudged it a bit, and he said, “Sorry, but it’s got to go right under.” She replied, “It IS under!” He said, “I think you can do better than that,” to which she responded by LASHING OUT TO HIT HIM! He dodged, she tried to cover this astonishing move my tapping his hand rested on the seat in front and fake laughing. He glared at her and said, “I am trying to save your life, not inconvience you. Put it under the seat.” She, sulking, finally did so.

So of course, during the descent, she pulled it all back out, and madly during the landing began transfering things from one bag to another. Including FOUR of those chocolate bars, the sandwich she had wildly insisted on having when she’d noticed she’d slept through their dishing out, and various other things from the flight, including HALF OF MY BREAD! She then, amazingly, tried to take the quiet-crazy lady’s chocolate bar from her seat pocket, brazenly in front of her gaze, which Carpet Lady quickly grabbed and held onto.

This story has a happy ending. As I left customs, my bags collected, I looked across the room and saw the mean old witch looking utterly furious, as a rubber-gloved customs officer was going through the contents of her huge luggage, item by item, spreading the contents widely across a table. Glorious justice.

I’m off to Boston in the morning, back Thurdsday, so again no Brian on Tuesday I’m afraid. Sorry about that.

In the meantime, people have said I should post this here, so I am.

It was removed by the next lunchtime. Freedom of expression is clearly not something they support.

People don’t understand games journalism.

Ask anyone involved, and they’ll groan about how people ask questions like, “Do you get to keep the game?”. Free trips to America are indeed utterly fantastic things. But they are also loss-making things when you’re a freelancer. The chances are you’re only going to get a couple of pages of work out of the four or five days you’re away, essentially losing a week’s wages. (They also induce enormous amounts of stress, as this week has demonstrated to me, trying to fit three weeks’ work into one, between LA last week and Boston tomorrow). And no, I’m not complaining. You choose to go, you invariably have a pleasant time, and get to see parts of the world otherwise inaccessible to those on a four-figure salary, such as me. It’s just, that’s not the perk that counts.

This is:

Free tat. What a wondrous thing it is. (Thanks Leo Tan, PR Man).

The PC’s Call of Duty was an astonishing first-person shooter, built with an orchestral majesty. It understood the crashing cymbals as well as it understood the quietest flutes. It’s a big act to follow. Especially if you’re performing that act on a group of consoles reaching the end of their lives, the bigger, more powerful machines only months away. And while Call of Duty 2 utilises the awesome potential powers of the PC’s multicore processors and the Xbox 360’s triple processing prowess, Call of Duty 2: Big Red One (confusing titles, we realise) would surely be a generation behind?

Call of Duty 2: Big Red One preview up on EG.

I’m pleased with this piece – it’s the longest preview I’ve written, and the interview with Busic produced some excellent comments.

Some idiot reckons that Lucas Kane offof Fahrenheit looks like Jim Rossignol offof Magazines.

YOU DECIDE.

LA then.

It’s not really possible to answer the question, “What do you think of LA?” It’s a bit like being asked, “What do you think of England?” It’s sprawling, and seemingly very different depending upon where you are. We were in Westwood, and I can report back that it’s a surprisingly ordinary place, if a tad rich. However, that didn’t mean there weren’t other places that looked like this:

It was like being trapped inside a horrible Disneyfied cartoon. But there was a pretty girl in the Hot Topic shop, who sold me a Postal Service t-shirt, which made it all better. Unfornately, it was then made all bad again by the outdoor karaoke stall at the end of the street.

But for me, LA was about the puns. The first was encountered at Universal Studios, which requires a short digression…

Walking around Universal Studios: Hollywood is like being in the sort of haunted theme park you’d expect to see in a Scooby-Doo cartoon. Faded paint, rusty metal, the entire place feels as if it’s been designed with a 1992 theme. The reality is, that was probably the last time they changed anything there. There are rides with vaguely more recent film names, but as soon as you enter it becomes obvious that it used to be the interior for something similar. Van Helsing being probably the most recent title to appear was very obviously some other cartoonish horror in a previous incarnation, and tellingly doesn’t feature either bats or werewolves, making the name rather peculiar. The main rides are still Terminator 3D and Back To The Future, the latter now so dated as to have taken on a “retro” styling. “Hey kids, this was how they used to do simulation rides when I was young.” The name takes on a deeper resonance. Terminator’s stage-show-meets-3D-movie is pleasingly effective… once you’re inside. Outside, during the queue, and the gigglingly bad introduction video, the aging nature of the decade old arrangement is all too obvious. Aging grey monitors show what might have looked futuristic in the early 90s, looking surprisingly like this:

The best part of the day was the studio tour – something I was expecting to be terrible. Driving about Universal’s lots is an impressive sight, in a well put together tour. We drove past the remarkable plane wreck from the recent War of the Worlds – a full size 747, destroyed for Mr Speilberg’s pleasure.

But more excitingly than anything I could have possibly expected, we went to Sunnydale! There are a number of ‘streets’ in the outdoor lots, each looking entirely real as we drove down them, but all completely fake. Even the trees, utterly real looking in every way, are all plastic and polystyrene. Everything in the following, which I think might have been Buffy’s house, is fake:

And here’s a weird thing. The same cul-de-sac on which the building lives, and indeed if you’re a fan you might have already noticed, is where the residents of Desperate Housewives glare at one another.

But the pun. It’s so glorious. Outside the Back To The Future ride, depressingly closed (adding to the haunted park theme) was the following stall:

If that’s not enough, then the “Chick Mall” we visted on Tuesday morning should convince you to book tickets to the city immediately.

Splendid stuff.

The ‘boys’ at The Triforce point out C&VG’s entirely brilliant headline, regarding the end of my arch nemesis (since Cryo died), the dismal Myst series:

“LACK OF GREEN MAKES CYAN BLUE”

Pure genius.

I’m declaring an international day of mourning for Cyan and the demised Myst series on the 16th September.