John Walker's Electronic House

MANDELWATCH EXTRA!

My disturbing obsession with the Adrenaline Vault‘s most verbose hack, Bob Mandel, has been noted previously. His astonishing need to mention how he is no novice in every review he writes is peculiar and hilarious, and about a million examples of this are compiled here.

Which makes it all the more strange that he has recently written a feature on the (almost dead) Avault stating how good gamers are not necessarily good game reviewers.

From his new feature:

“Indeed, the dimension that bothers me the most about game reviews I read on the web or in print is the tendency of many reviewers to find a way to brag about their own prowess as they report on the title.”

And here are some quotes (amongst dozens and dozens) from Bob’s reviews, showing us how it should be done:

“BEYOND ATLANTIS

Beyond Atlantis is not an easy game, and I can easily see how some would get so frustrated they would just call it quits early on. In truth, this title is probably too difficult for those new to the adventure-puzzle genre. But for diehard adventure gamers, including myself, this offering provides a veritable cornucopia of some of the best and trickiest challenges I have encountered in a very long time. You need to have both great patience and a willingness to figure everything out without many signposts, but if this is the case you will be pleased as punch by what you encounter here.”

“DARKFALL

Although Dark Fall is nowhere near the most difficult virtual adventure I have played, it is clearly not designed for the casual gamer or the novice adventurer. It requires a level of patience, meticulous attention to detail, and perseverance well beyond what most are used to in computer recreations.”

“THE EGYPTIAN PROPHECY

The Egyptian Prophecy is one of the least challenging adventure titles I’ve played. What this means is that it’s perfect for novices, but also a bit below the capabilities of seasoned adventurers.”

“SCHIZM

Regardless, the unfortunate truth is that some novices to computer adventuring or those not used to puzzling would probably never make it all the way through, even with a complete walkthrough in front of them. However, for those of us who enjoy solving environmental puzzles, Schizm is a dream come true.”

I could go on.

I have absolutely no idea.

As has been previously noted, I’m not entirely put off by the idea of a game of City of Heroes. And if anyone has been paying attention to the game, they’ll have noticed that developers NCSoft are currently being sued by Marvel, after the comic behemoth decided that the in-game character designer allows players to infringe their copyright.

It’s quite an extraordinary accusation. NCSoft have built a simple but enormously versatile application that allows you to tailor your avatar to have just the sort of superhero look you’re after. For some (read: most), this offers the ability to generate a scantily clad buxom superheroine. For others it allows originality and creativity and a unique and/or remarkable look. And for others still, it lets them build something vaguely approximating to a favourite comic book hero. Marvel contest that this freedom encourages players to rip off their IP, and have called in their superlawyers.

But for all the sense this makes, Marvel might as well be suing Crayola for their wax crayons’ ability to render Spiderman on the lower part of the kitchen wall. It can only be a matter of time before they drag into court all manufacturers of paint, ink and plasticine.

Of course NCSoft have always been on the ball with regards to IP infringement, and hopefully this will be enough to see Marvel laughed at by the judge. An excellent article on Game Girl Advance explores quite how possible it is to create copyrighted characters, and more significantly discovers quite how quickly NCSoft removed them from the servers. And this set me thinking.

How versatile is the character generator? And quite how protective are Marvel? I decided to put their board of directors into the game.

Inhibited by a lack of photographs of most on the board, despite enormous amounts of research (clicking through the entire first page of results on Google), I was eventually left with two key players.

Superhero Name: Sid Ganis
Age: 64
Day Job: Marvel Director, President of Out of the Blue… Entertainment
Salary: N/A
Power: Chairs Academy Award dinners.

Superhero Name: Avi Arad
Age: 55
Day Job: Chairman and CEO of Marvel, Producer/Executive Producer on every Marvel film
Salary: $625,000
Power: Invents toys.

Brilliantly neither name was taken nor blocked by the game. So now they are there, living in Paragon City, and fighting crime along with the heroes they are attempting to sue. I will let you know how they fare.

Just a muse, maybe an introduction.

I’ve updated the They’re Back Archive to contain issues 128 and 129, as well as a couple of additions to the Reviews Archive.

Not much else to report.

I should probably feel like I should apologise for just sticking up CoH grabs, but I don’t.

Cheers Rich.

The snowman menace must come to an end!

City of Heroes, possibly with some rather poor timing, is taking over life again. It cannot be helped – there is crime to fight, and frankly, who else is going to fight it? (Apart from the thousands of other players, I mean).

It’s been a while since I’ve had one of those games which I promise to just spend half an hour playing, before realising it’s Tuesday and I’ve missed my daughter’s wedding. I think that time-lapse property is a defining feature of a *good* game. Not necessarily a hugely accomplished game, but a good one. I’ve been finding fewer and fewer games that contain that property of late, able to just dip into things for an hour and then actually stopping playing an hour later. It’s just not natural.

Even Half-Life 2, which I pined for during the Christmas break (my family’s attentions so rudely interrupting my progress for a few days), was played in sensibly rationed proportions. Perhaps I’m just becoming more sensible. Although this does seem a laughable conclusion.

So it’s nice to recognise that the life-consuming passion is still present for something as lovely and absorbing as City of Heroes. It’s ultimately an entirely futile exercise, utterly contradicting my usual desires from a game. I want narrative, the illusion of progress and the unveiling of a story. City of Heroes defies these properties without apology, as is inevitable with a massive multiplayer. Defeating the same crime boss for the same crime twice does feel a little daft, but that’s because you’re playing the mission for the second time on someone else’s story arc. And who cares, because you can jump huge buildings and zap vampires!

It’s good to be back.

I’ve invented a new extreme sport: Extreme Washing Up.

I’ve never particularly objected to washing up – the radio on, hands warm, and taking part in a process with the inbuilt satisfaction of making dirty things clean. There seems little to make a fuss about. Of course, there is the difference between doing your own washing up in your own flat in your own time, and being ordered to do it by a parent right in the middle of your favourite TV programme. And this of course means that it does build up for a couple of days on occasions, what with there being no mums here to shout at us.

It must also be known that our washing machine is in the kitchen next to the sink. This of course means that the washing machine surface becomes the shelf upon which all dirty crockery is stored. (The pieces are starting to slot into place). Our washing machine is on the exciteable side. During its spin cycles it’s not unknown for things to tumble from the tops of cupboards, or the bin to fall over spilling its rotting bellies across the floor. So of course it would unfeasible to have the dirty dishes sat atop it while it was washing clothes.

And so this is how we get to Extreme Washing Up. The washing machine carries days of dirty dishes, and is full of dirty clothes. Powder is put in, and the wash is begun! There’s only so much time before it does its first crockery-cracking wobbles! THE WASHING UP MUST BE COMPLETED BEFORE THIS! GO! GO! GO!

It may be noted that John is putting off doing any of the huge amount of work he needs to do.

Every muscle in my arms and legs aches. I made a mistake. I did some running about.

I got back last night from a youth group weekend away. We took seventeen 13 to 15 year olds to an outdoor activity centre in Northhants, for reasons that escape me. I feel so tired that my face feels as though it might melt.

I loved weekends away when I was in church youth groups as a kid. They were always the best times, where you got to do activities that otherwise might never be experienced at 14, like abseiling, high ropes courses, and sneaking into girls’ bedrooms at 1am.

There’s one weekend away I always particularly remember, when I must have been 13, and I fell in love with Debs Thompson. I lay on the top bunk in my room, and like a Byron for the modern era, composed a poem about my love for her of such mature epic beauty that it wasn’t understood by those around me. My contemporaries poured scorn on my efforts, criticising the candor and eloquence of the piece through responses composed of fingers pointed toward the backs of throats and barfing noises. Perhaps a copy of the work still exists, which will be published and recognised posthumously (because if a copy of it still exists, I will kill myself immediately).

Of course, for a fourteen year old memory, it has lived mostly in broken pieces. The parts that stand out are the abseil tower, on which I performed what the instructors called “the Irish Crucifix”, which involved sitting on the verticle wall, lying backward until completely upside down, twenty foot in the air, and then letting go of the rope with both hands (dangling only on the safety rope); sitting around a campfire and listening to Debs Thompson sing; and walking at the back of the nighthike caravan sharing my fruit pastels with Debs Thompson and playing “I Don’t Spy With My Little Eye” in which we guessed things beginning with a particular letter that one couldn’t see. I forget anything else.

We are permanently short of female leaders for our youth groups, relying on generous mums who attend groups on a rota, and so depend upon dragging in female friends from outside the church to help us with weekends away. This year I asked Debs Thompson if she would be able to come along. Debs is still an awesome friend, and she’s an exceptionally good youth worker, and I couldn’t think of a better person to come along and help deliver the talks, hang out with the young people, and generally be fabulous all weekend, and amazingly she agreed to give up her weekend to come along. All salute her.

Graham, my line manager and co-leader of this group, helpfully told the young people of how Debs and I had been out with each other when we were 14 (I cannot remember whether this was around the same time as that particular weekend away), so from the very beginning there was much teenage giggling and implication that they would be spending the weekend setting us up. (They failed, the stupid, useless, idiot children).

My line manager is also the MD of a group of outdoor activity centres scattered about the country, and yet we’ve never used one of them for our weekends away before. This seemed silly to me, and so this year we chose one of his places. When we arrived the youthlings immediately dragged their bags down to the accomodation, leaving Debs and I to unload stuff from her car, meaning we were last to walk down to the site. As we walked Debs said to me, “John? Stop a second. Does this place look familiar to you?”

I honestly staggered backwards.

That sort of coincidence is most peculiar. The sensation of looking up and rather than seeing the place where we would be staying for the next two nights, instead I saw an enormously realistic looking large-scale 3D photograph of fourteen years ago. It was like in Dark City when Rufus Sewell thinks of the beach, and all the memories zoom toward him at tremendous speed.

So that was weird. It would have been strange enough to have gone there at all and realise that it was the same place (and this is a large centre on hundreds of acres with lots of different accomodation areas, and we happened to be in the very same one) as one of my own weekends away. But to have brought Debs along… Weird.

And now: exhaustion. My brain is currently confused about why I’m not hearing “Jo-oo-hhnn” every couple of minutes (genuinely this often, non-stop, all day long), as one of seemingly thousands of teenagers demands a question of me. And my arms and legs ache from playing three surprisingly violent games of Unihoc over the weekend, which involved actual running about.

Sleepy.