Blue Man Sings the Whites

How in God’s name are you meant to know when to stop buttering a crumpet?

A nanosecond after spreading the butter, it melts and falls down the holes, leaving it in an uncertain state somewhere between butteredness and non-butteredness. You could potentially collapse the probability waveform by biting into it, but unbuttered crumpet is like eating a bathroom sponge so it’s probably better safe than sorry. So you put on some more butter, which goes the way of the first. So you try some more butter. And some more, only stopping maybe half an hour later when you realise that your crumpet is now an island floating in a sea of cooling yellow grease.

Crumpet is a fun word to say. Crumpet crumpet crumpet.

3 Comments »

Further evidence of my increasingly obvious arrested deveolpment - I didn’t bother going to the flicks for There Will Be Blood, but I did hand over £7.50 (plus a frankly outrageous 10% online booking fee) to see Iron Man.

In my defence, I’ve always had a nagging fondness for old Soup Can Head, dating back to his brief appearance as a backup strip in the old Marvel UK Transformers comic. The attraction was almost entirely shallow and physical - face facts, the classic red-and-gold Mark V armour was the fucking bomb. In fact, it may only ever have been topped in the comic-book-battlesuit way-coolness stakes by his Silver Centurion threads.

Beyond the “Kick Your Ass And Look Great Doing It” thing, though, there was also the practical matter that Iron Man hadn’t been bitten by a radioactive anything, he wasn’t a member in good standing of an honest-to-goodness pantheon or the last survivor of an advanced but selectively idiotic alien race.

He was just a bloke in a tin suit.

A tin suit that fitted in a briefcase, no less, and so therefore would have obviously also fitted into, picking an example at random, a school bag. Man, I wanted to own a flying robot suit more than I wanted to talk to the girl behind the counter at the North Watford Library. And I wanted to talk to the girl behind the counter at the North Watford Library a LOT.

I’m not sure how much crime there would have been to fight in suburban Hertfordshire, but I was up for making the effort to find some. And anyway, I could always use the suit for my journey to school - I’d picked out the little wooded area behind the tennis courts near the underground station as a possible landing area. See, I was even boringly practical in my escapist fantasies.

Ahem. Anyway. Iron Man.

The plot goes something like this. Tony Stark is a multi-multi-squillionaire. He makes weapons for the US military. Whilst visiting Afghanistan to demonstrate his latest and greatest boomstick, he’s kidnapped by a gaggle of swarthy men with teatowels on their heads who lock him in a cell with a load of high-tech equipment and order him to make them one of said boomsticks.

If any of these guerillas had ever seen an episode of The A-Team, this film would have been about 20 minutes long.

So, Stark promptly escapes from a maximum security stockade to the Los Angeles underground, where he survives as… oh no, wait. He promptly escapes by making himself a big armoured metal suit - an iron man, if you will - and shooting the bejesus out of a bunch of people who have the utter gall to look suprised by this turn of events.

The whole incident has made him ponder that the weapons he might be being misused - ie, that they might be being used to kill people. He responds to this realisation the way any of us would if we could, by building a robot battlesuit and flying around blowing shit the fuck up.

There’s an awful lot to like about Iron Man. The dialogue is by and large witty and sharp, the plot hammers along at a million billion miles an hour and while there’s a tiny spoonful of clever somewhere in the mix it never loses sight of the fact that it’s meant to be a big, dumb, massively entertaining blockbuster.

Blocks are duly busted.

Robert Downey Jr. is really, really good in a part that must have been quite a stretch for him - a rich, glamerous substance abuser in the middle of a media circus. This version of Tony Stark appears quite heavily influenced by the Ultimate iteration of the character (an influence made more explicit in a fanservice cameo after the credits), making him considerably more sleazy and reprehensible than he was in the original comics. It’s to the credit of both script and actor that despite being a fairly massive prick Stark remains sympathetic and somewhat likable.

The supporting cast is a bit more of a mixed bag. Terrence Howard is given very, very little to do and does it pretty badly. He primarily appears to be in the film because the scriptwriter is aware you can’t possibly consider doing an Iron Man movie without having Rhodey in it even though he has no fucking idea whatsoever what to do with the character. Howard’s demeanour doesn’t so much project “Highly-Trained Air Force Colonel” as “I May Or May Not Be Awake”.

Jim Rhodes’ usual role in the comics - Tony Stark’s confidant and conscience - is largely filled here by Gwyneth Paltrow as Stark’s executive assistant. Saddled with playing the one of Marvel’s standard-issue Superhero’s Wet Blanket Love Interest, she manages the deceptively tricky balancing act of dancing along the tightrope of concern and underlying sexual tension without tumbling off into the, errrr, big net of being so simpering and annoying that you spend the last hour of the film praying that the villain drops a cement mixer on her (a condition known formally as “Going Full Dunst”). Incidentally, Paltrow also does a nice job of toughing out Stan Lee’s apparent belief that “Pepper Potts” is a perfectly acceptable name for a supporting character.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch Jeff Bridges is clearly having the time of his life giving an agreeably scenery-chomping performance as Obidiah Stane. He comes off as a slightly creepy but avuncular old uncle, with his magnificently bald head, his enormous beard and his lapel badge reading “I Will Die Or Turn Evil”.

There are issues. While the script generally crackles with energy and humour there’s just the odd exchange, the odd scene that falls flat on its face. And the final battle just doesn’t really work. I can’t tell you if its a failure of scripting or direction or CGI, but there’s little or no tension and it’s just a bit… well, boring.

That’s somewhat compensated for by a bloody brilliant ending, mind you.

So, any good? Yes, it really is. It’s not quite in the top tier of comic adaptations - it’s no Batman Begins, no The Crow, no Incredibles - but it’s a brillant romp and is quite comfortable jostling for position with the best of the rest - the first two X-Men, Spiderman, the Tim Burton Batman, Mystery Men. After last summer’s thoroughly limp crop (The Bourne Ultimatum very firmly excepted), this year’s popcorn season is off to a cracking start.

OK. I’m suitably warmed up. Now bring on Indy and The Dark Knight.

1 Comment »

Because I surround myself entirely with excellent folk I sometimes forget that gaming is a pastime primarily enjoyed by affluent young males.

Actually, that’s not really true. Most of my Live friends list are affluent young males. The websites I frequent are largely made and populated by affluent young males. I’M a (fairly) affluent young(ish) male (yeah, I’ve checked). I don’t forget that that demographic dominates gaming at all.

What I forget is that gaming is a hobby largely enjoyed by fucking idiots.

Because I hang about with a better class of gamer I generally burble along decently isolated from the hoards of braying, spoiled, clueless berks carting around a sense of entitlement to rival Violet Elizabeth Bott’s.

Which is why it’s always a shock when something bursts my bubble, then beats me around the head and body with a big sockful of “Oh Yeah, Most People Are Complete Wankers, Aren’t They?” Venturing out into the murky jungle of public online gaming is usually good for this, as is trying to read the comments appended to Eurogamer articles by the hoi polloi.

Here’s a f’rinstance. A developer complains that too many black characters in games are “urban” stereotypes, reinforcing casual racism. Pretty undeniable, I’d have thought. Games still largely filter themselves through the perceived expectations of young white males and so generally treat race in about as enlightened a fashion as they treat women. Yes, of course there are exceptions but they remain just that.

Some selected highlights from the comments section attached to that article, then.

“Tell me this is a joke.”

“Anyone who playes on Xbox Live and hears the Americans knows that this is a reality, not just a stereotype. Anyone offended by it is a complete moron.”

“He’s entitled to his opinion I guess. I can just imagine what his whining sounds like. Bet he sounds really pissy. One of those people you meet and immediately want to punch the crap out of. No?”

“He should go make a game with a main black character who doesn’t “talk black” instead of bitching about it, Mr Victim Complex, stereotyping is good, most of the time it ends up being true anyway otherwise why would we do it on instinct?”

“Well he has to be a tit if he takes Gears of war seriously. Idiot. I quite liked the Cole Train character in Gears, he made me laugh.”

“I quite liked The Black And White Minstrel Show, it made me laugh.”

“Shut the fuck up you whining prick”

“What would a non-stereotypical black person look like?”

Words fail me.

“i dont notice the color of the games characters, and surely thats the point

and white stereotypes are just as prevelant - the white mass murder, the italian mob boss, the irish boozer, the uk thug/upper class twit, the yank dummy, COD 4 for example was PACKED with stereotypes. why is it acceptable for there to be white stereotypes, but not black ones?”

Well, that settles it then. If a middle-class white guy doesn’t notice any casual racism in games then there can’t be any, can there? And I honestly can’t believe I didn’t notice that every white videogame character was a mass-murderer.

This obsessive hand-wringing need to be politically correct about every little thing is possibly the most tedious facet of modern life.

And yet, I haven’t met a single person who wasn’t bigoted about something. It usually just surfaces somewhere else. Get over it.

This from one of the site’s actual writers. For the love of mothering FUCK.

It’s not nice to realise that world is run largely for your benefit, that as a well-off middle-class man you’ve been born into a position of astonishing privilege through no special merit of your own. That most of mainstream media is designed with your point of view in mind, so that 90% of female characters are fantasy objects and 90% of black characters are capering bloody stereotypes. That’s a really tough thing to come to terms with, largely because we’ve come to accept it as completely normal, as the natural way of things.

Minorites and women have legitimate grievences with the way they’re treated by society and portrayed in the media. It’s annoying to feel you’re being berated for something you, personally, had nothing whatsoever to do with. It’s difficult and, yes, occasionally tedious to consciously avoid bigotry so deeply ingrained in us it’s become part of our language, to consciously try and avoid perpetuating casual racism, sexism or homophobia.

But, y’know? Call me a bastion of bleeding-heart white liberal guilt, but to consider yourself anything even starting to approach a decent human being, I think it’s an effort you’ve got to fucking make.

15 Comments »

I can’t remember ever having pre-ordered a game in my life before.

This month, I’ve done it twice.

The first was Grand Theft Auto 4. All the previews I’ve seen made me a little leery of it at first. I was a little worried tht the game seemed to be veering toward tedious realism for the sake of realism and away from the anarchic fun that’s made the series so iconic and widely-imitated.

Then I remembered that it’s Grand Theft bloody Auto, for crying out loud. There’s exactly no chance that Rockstar will fuck it up, and the game’s website seems to indicate that its predecessors’ nihilism and cynical, none-more-black sense of humour has survived intact. Sold.

-

Secondly and seemingly more controversially, there’s Rock Band. I can’t remember a game I’ve anticipated more eagerly. My enthusiasm for the Guitar Hero games has recently been boosted by thrashing through them in co-operative mode with my last-born, and I’ve even gotten a fair amount of fun over slightly broken, crappily-designed hateful misogynyfest Guitar Hero III. So the thought of being able to get all the kids together and form Garston’s answer to the Patridge Family… well. It’ll even be worth having to be the sodding bassist.

I’ve been waiting six months for news of Rock Band’s European release and I’m far from the only one. Which goes some way towatd explaining why the Internet exploded when it was announced that it would launch with an RRP of £180 - pretty much just substituting a pound sign for the dollar on its US price tag.

“Sheer greed!” cried the masses. “Rip-off!” “Buy real instruments!” “Boycott the game!” “Boycott EA!” “Boycott EVERYTHING in the WHOLE WORLD!” Teeth were duly gnashed, garments were duly rended and the uncaring sky was duly howled at by hundreds of hacked-off would-be customers.

(Incidentally, there are very few internet discussion participants more annoying than the smug fucks who turn up in Guitar Hero or Rock Band threads and tell you you ought to spend the money on a real instrument. Just fuck OFF. Do you go out of your way to tell people talking about Pro Evo Soccer that they ought to play real football? Do you go out of your way to tell people talking about Outrun that they ought to spend the money on a real Ferrari? Do you go out of your way to tell people talking about Call Of Duty that they ought to join the real army? No, of course you fucking don’t. “Buy a real guitar!” translates to “How dare you enjoy this game! How DARE you even get a hint of a taste of a suggestion of what it might be like to be a guitar God without putting months of frustrating joyless practice in first. I play the guitar, nyah nyah nyah, I play the guitar so I’m better than you, I’m better than you, I’M better than YOU!”

Fuckers. Anyway…)

Personally, I always thought that the people expecting a sub-£100 price were living in denial, and was anticipating paying something between £120 and £150 given a) the game’s manufactured in the US and shipping a big box o’instruments over the Atlantic is pricey, b) VAT, c) generally higher costs in Europe leading to pricier warehousing, distribution and everyhing else, d) that EA can’t bank on the dollar mantaining its prodigiously weak value against the pound and e) yeah, a certain amount of greed. So the £140 (£133 with a sneaky discount code) that Play are offering the game and instruments for is pretty much exactly what I was braced for.

Don’t misunderstand, I’m genuinely embarassed at paying a hundred and thirty quid for a game. I can’t escape the feeling that I’m emblematic of Western society’s fall into shameless greedy consumerist depravity. You watch, it won’t be long before I’m heading down to the vomitorium to watch two monkeys have a knife-fight in a vat of cornflour pudding.

On the other hand, I really want to play Wanted Dead Or Alive. So, you know.

Plus, I’m not really paying for it - it’s actually a gift from the good people of Pacific Poker’s $1-$2 no-limit hold ‘em ring games. It’d be positively immoral to spend gambling winnings on anything but selfish gratification and bored lazy depravity, wouldn’t it?

So yeah. It’s an obscene amount of money to spend when there are millions of people in desperate need. But what’s the point of being in the top 10% of the planet’s population that hold 90% of the world’s wealth if you can’t play a plastic drumkit while Rome burns, eh?

I’ve already booked the 23rd May off work. So if society could put off imploding until after the end of the long weekend, that’d be awesome.

6 Comments »

Hello, you!

Sorry no updates over the last couple of weeks. To get you all caught up, I did the road-trip to Bolton on Easter Saturday. It was a long day - out of the house at 8am, home about 1am - but an absolutely brilliant experience.

In the main tournament I made it through the first two breaks but went absolutely card-dead for about two hours. I’m just not a good enough player to keep my stack ticking over if I don’t have the cards, plus I think I was a little intimidated by the game and the setting. I ended up pushing in from second position for about twice the big blind with K10 suited, but the button’s pocket 9s stood up to put me out about 90th in a field of 148.

I then played in a £20 sit-and-go and managed to piss away my early chip lead by playing an awful lot of legitimately terrible poker. Recognising I was a tired and tilty, I elected to spend the rest of the evening as a railbird.

Still, I had a great time despite being really disappointed with my play. I ended up travelling with a bunch of regulars from the Tuesday night game who wouldn’t otherwise have been able to make it, and they proved to be a thoroughly excellent group to spend several hours cooped up in a very small car with.

Plus, I’m now a member of a casino. Which really makes me feel very James Bond indeed.

Then this weekend, I got my hair cut for the first time in about 5 years. On the upside, I now look roughly 20% less like the Comic Book Guy. On the downside, my famous Cousin It impression is now a thing of the past.

By way of illustration, I’ve pretty much gone from Bill Bailey to Action Man.

After spending most of Saturday whimpering in a foetal position, I’ve now progressed to the stage where I’m only 40% traumatised and 60% convinced it was probably for the best.

AND THEN today, on getting back from my lunchbreak I was faced with this:

I didn’t have the nerve to ask the burly hard-hatted men in the vicinity if it was meant to be scaffolding for Jedi, or scaffolding by Jedi.

Either way guys, two words - Force Levitate.

4 Comments »

This may not tickle you as much as it tickles me. But then this is my blog, not yours. It comes via the excellent Control Point podcast.

“They call it a Support class because I carry your ass…”

I particularly like the assorted scenes of bonesaw-related ownage. Possibly my proudest moment in TF2 came when I managed to take out a full-health Heavy via the bonesaw.

Helped that he had his back to me, obviously.

5 Comments »

Ten weeks. Three wins. Three times runner-up. Eight final tables.

I promise you, nobody is more surprised than me.

I’d played no-limit maybe five times ever prior to getting involved in this, so there’s definitely a fair amount of beginner’s luck / people not being familiar with my style going on here. That being said, I’ve played a lot of one-table sit-and-goes online over the last couple of months and been wildly more successful than I ever was in the limit ring games I’d been exclusively playing to that point.

The problem is, the final is being held on Easter Saturday at a casino in Bolton. Much as the chance to play in big live tournament is exciting, much as I’m sure it’s be a good experience and a good game of poker, much as it’s a chance to boldly go where I’ve never gone before, that’s a total of 400 miles and about 6 hours of expensive and awkward travel no matter what method I use to get up there.

That’s a long way to go for potentially one hand.

So, gentle reader, I’m genuinely torn. Should I stay or should I go?

10 Comments »

“You’re only writing about games now, aren’t you?” said my mum when I was over there on Sunday. “I like it when you write about other things.”

Sorry, mum.

Call Of Duty 4 (Xbox 360)
I’m not much of a first-person shooterer in general. I’m really, really not much of a console first-person shooterer. But CoD4’s set-pieces, clever narrative tricks and brutal difficulty level + surround sound = something a bit special. I realise that sandbox games and offering the player freedom to wander are in vogue just at the moment, but personally I’ll always take a well-crafted linear game over an aimless, sprawling one that offers several equally-dull choices. There’s nothing here that compares to the brilliant Arnhem Bridge or Stalingrad levels from the original Call Of Duty, and its single-player campaign is pretty short, but it captures the essence of what you expect modern battlefields must be like – messy, scrappy, confusing, vicious and largely fucking terrifying.

I’m pretty sure I mean that as a recommendation.

Chessmaster (DS)
It’s chess! But on the DS. The AI plays a decently strong game (although it’s a shame that there’s no way of forcing the computer to use or avoid a specific opening), and the minigames are quite compelling in a thoroughly boring way. I’ve no idea why I’ve played this every lunchtime for the last couple of weeks, but I have. So there you go.

Team Fortress 2 (PC)
Two things have been instrumental for rekindling my love for Valve’s beautiful-looking, beautifully-balanced Team-Based Online Shooter Of Champions. These two things are the Control Point podcast and my belated discovery of the “Switch To Previous Weapon” key. The former is just a bunch of likable blokes being enthusiastic about something that deserves some enthusiasm. The latter gives me half a chance of surviving in those situations where a certain amount of regrettable violence needs to be handed out to someone in my general vicinity.

I’m a Medic by trade, y’see. Not for me the glory-boy solo-effort flag-capping nonsense of the Scout, nor the shifty, skulking, duplicitous death-dealing of the Spy, Engineer or Sniper, nor even the wholesale slaughter and mass destruction of the Heavy, Soldier, Pyro or Demoman. No. Instead, you’ll find me diving into the midst of battle with only my healing ray to protect me, selflessly risking life and limb to keep my team-mates upright even as a hail of bullets, rockets, grenades and God-only-knows-what-else rain down upon me.

“Rain down on me”, you’ll note. Not “rain down on my armed-and-dangerous team-mates.” Because putting on the Medic’s big coat and the child-molester glasses is basically the same thing as painting a bullseye on your face.

If (like me) you’re a fairly casual player with less-than-perfect knowledge of the game’s maps, and less-than-less-than-perfect FPS skills, playing Medic is great. It allows you to contribute in a real and valuable way to your team’s success without needing the twitch reflexes of a fighter pilot. Just lock that healing-ray onto the arse of a more competent team-mate and follow them on a sightseeing tour of your local warzone.

(My uncle Derek was round my folks’ for the aforementioned Mum’s Day visit. He’s planning a holiday in Vietnam and Cambodia. “Don’t forget to pack a wife!” I said cheerily, to predictably blank looks all round. Sigh.)

The fearful and wonderful thing about the Medic is that you’re playing a purely supporting role – you’re almost entirely dependant on your colleagues, both for protection and to actually accomplish the goals of the level. This is immensely frustrating if you’re playing with chimps, but with competent people around you a decent Medic can be the difference between victory and defeat, by keeping the damage-dealers alive long enough to wear the enemy down, or supplying a burst of invulnerability at the exact right time. It’s immensely satisfying, and a way to feel good at FPSs without being any good at FPSs.

Every so often, though, you’ll find yourself in a spot where you actually have to put away the healing ray and defend yourself – if you’ve clocked an enemy Spy lurking about for example, or if all your team-mates in the vicinity have displayed insufficient respect for the rule that incoming rockets always have right-of-way. Up till this week, these situations have been characterised by my fumbling around with the weapon selection keys like a big fat-fingered fool, then getting my brains blown out. Now I tap Q, and go from selfless healer to SYRINGE-GUN KILLA in less than a second.

Then I run away. No sense in being a bloody idiot about it. If I could shoot straight I’d be playing a sodding Soldier.

Audiosurf (PC)
Audiosurf is a simple little game. Point it at a music file on your hard-disk and it generates a track, along which your guide your ship collecting coloured blocks. The faster and more intense the song you’re playing, the more blocks are available for you to collect. Link three or more blocks of the same colour and they disappear, scoring points. There are various different ships, each playing in slightly different ways. I’ve largely found myself gravitating toward Mono, which plays more like a racer than a puzzler - there is only one colour of scoring block and the main challenge comes from avoiding grey obstacle blocks, with a significant bonus at the end of the song if you’ve picked up no greys at all.

And you’ll want that significant bonus, because on completion your score is uploaded to the Audiosurf website, where you can see the best scores of everyone else who’s played that song. That’s the reason I spent half an hour last night repeatedly replaying the heart-pumping white-knuckle ride that is Identity by the X-Ray Spex, punching the air in glee as I finally managed to finish a run with no greys hit and no leftover blocks, becoming THE CHAMPION OF THE WORLD!

Ahem.

(By the by, other Blue Man Recommend-o-Tracks for maximum Audiosurfing fun include the Bill Shatner/Joe Jackson cover of Common People, Car Fiction by Echobelly, Robyn’s Cobrastyle and the proper, non-cheaty four-and-a-half minute album version of Vision Thing. I am the best at (some of) these).

Honestly, as a game it’s nothing special. But it looks like a rollercoaster in a theme park run by Tron and I keep getting drawn back to it to try new tracks, to creep up the leaderboards or for a ten-minute blast after a poker game or TuFTy session.

A hugely pretty, sneakily addictive little fiddle-toy for fewer than six of your Earth pounds? Up with this sort of thing.

4 Comments »

Gary Gygax, father of Dungeons & Dragons, has died aged 69.

Your ludicrously overcomplicated, massively unrealistic, batshit insane roleplaying system took up more hours of my teenage years than I care to remember, Gary. I still don’t understand why you wanted us to roll high to hit but low for saving throws, and now your character sheet’s gone to the big punch-pocket folder in the sky I’ll never get to ask.

So long, and thanks for all the half-elves.

3 Comments »

…which is a bloody tricky maneuver, let me tell you.

The fact that I almost never remember my dreams is a source of occasional wistful regret. I’ve always believed that the fact that I don’t have access to the meanderings of my subconscious has held me back creatively, and I really, really don’t need much holding back creatively.

On the evidence of last night, perhaps it’s as well I don’t usually remember. My subconscious is apparently really, really boring.

I was playing poker in a place of no particular import or character. The other players, as generic and forgettable as the room, folded round to me on the small blind. I peeled up the corners of my hole cards, saw the jack and nine of hearts and called. The big blind - a schoolfriend I haven’t seen or spoken to in about fifteen years - raised. I called the second bet.

The flop came down with the king of clubs and the seven and eight of hearts, giving me flush, straight and straight flush draws. I bet out, and was raised again. I called the raise, and the turn was dealt - and it was the miracle card, the ten of hearts, making me an unbeatable straight flush.

I bet, and was immediately raised again. I took one more peek at my cards to make absolutely sure I was playing what I thought I was playing - and I wasn’t. I had an ace of diamonds and the eight of spades. “Oh my god!” I thought, aghast. “I bet out on the flop with second pair!”

And then I woke up. To coin a phrase.

Yeah. Thanks, subconscious. Samuel Taylor Bloody Coleridge gets to visit Kubla Khan’s sacred pleasure-dome and compose a 1000-line epic poem in his dreams, I get this. Fantastic.

Admittedly, I’m fairly sure Coleridge didn’t play as much online poker as I do.

4 Comments »