I took this photo at an airport, it was on a sign listing objects that were not allowed on board, and I have put it here for want of any photo actually relating to this post. Looking at it again, I can’t help but think what I thought at the time – Why do spears get their own special category? What about machetes, and chainswaws, and 18th century smallswords? It just seems unfair.

Anyway…

Busy day writing, about halfway through the novel, which is way, way short of where I should be this far into the month. I have been playing Braid a little on breaks, and Assassin’s Creed too. (I know, a year after everyone else played it.) I may review one or both of those games at a later date. For now, a short break to see what’s new on the interweb and then back into the world of the book.

I just wanted to let you all know that I’m still here, and that I still love each and every one of you.

Just like Marilyn Manson loves the company of pale women who like to wear little-to-no clothing,  fundamentalist Christians love a good book burning, and airport security staff love making you feel welcome. (See how I brought it back there?)

I’ll see you all on the other side in July.

P.S I pulled my head out of my writin’ laptop long enough to stick it in a freezer. Google “241543903″ and you will discover that this is not at all unusual behaviour.

Not entirely sure when things got switched around like that, but here’s the proof…

Zombies = 0  Wild Particle’s Lawn = 1

Procrastination = 2

Novel = 1.ehh

Working on the novel just makes the lure of distracting things even more lur-iffic.

So in the spirit of self-torment I have been breaking up writing sessions by playing Popcap’s addictive, Plants vs. Zombies. I’m not really in the ‘casual games’ demographic, but Popcap’s Peggle was the crack-cocaine-like exception to this rule for me, and PvZ turns out to be a  very entertaining little tower defense game. I am hooked.

My other zombie distraction of choice is the copy of Left 4 Dead that arrived in the mail the other day. A surprise addition to my gaming swag. I had almost bought this game, having heard good things and read glowing reviews. What stopped me were the reports that it was purely multiplayer. I’ve never really been a multiplayer kind of gamer. LAN, yes, as I enjoy playing with actual real-life associates, but being shot over and over again by faceless 1337 14-year olds playing Counter-Strike never really caught on for me. (I have extremely warm memories of private Quake deathmatch sessions at a friend’s family-owned computer training business in the mid 90’s, though…)

Anyway I’ve been playing the Left 4 Dead single player (multiplayer with bots) campaign and I can see what’s to like. It does feel like a Zombie movie, (the film grain effect is nice)  and I have been genuinely startled once or twice by a horde of ‘infected’ rushing at me. The ‘AI controller’ sounds like an innovative game mechanic, though not sure exactly how it effects the in-game enemies behaviour. The whole thing is a tad repetitive though. Shoot zombie, turn corner, shoot zombie, go up stairs, shoot more zombies, make it to safe room, start new level, shoot zombies, repeat. I’ve tried to play online through steam once or twice, but couldn’t seem to find any active games. I’m probably doing something wrong, I know.

In the spirit of not writing and all things zombie I watched ‘28 Days Later’ at midnight last night, the first viewing surprisingly enough. (I know, I know, everyone else saw it 7 years ago when it came out. What can I say? I was waiting for just the right time…) So I know now where pretty much the whole Left 4 Dead concept came from, down to the graffiti on the walls and the behaviour of the ‘infected’. And yes, to concur with what the rest of the world was thinking 7 years ago, its a pretty solid film.

I also watched Terminator : Salvation yesterday (See? Anything to avoid writing…) so I had that expensive piece of cinematic nothingness to compare it to. I had heard lots of complaints about various plot elements and other things from people, but no-one had mentioned to me how utterly boring, humourless and empty a film it was. It was like a Michael Bay eye-candy actioner trying to be a worthy and thoughtful piece of cinema with something profound to say. Only they didn’t seem to have two ideas to rub together and I couldn’t care less about any of the characters. *shrug*

Okay, back to writing. I mean writing the book and not this blog.

A Boomer from Left 4 Dead. Not to be confused with Boomer from Battlestar Galactica. (It is also a good representation of how I felt after having three servings of home-cooked curry followed by gourmet chocolate and ice-cream on Friday night. Thanks Warren and Julia…)

So last year when I wrote by as-yet-unpublished fantasy masterpiece “The Gaff”, I did so mostly through the consumption of really unhealthy amounts of junk food. It would be 11pm, I would be stuck, I would walk down to the local 7/11 buy a Redbull, a Wagon Wheel and various other sugary treats, scoff them on the way back, crack open the energy drink and then get to writing. It worked pretty well in that I finished the book, but no so kind on my constitution or snack budget.

So this year I have been chewing (mostly) on carrot sticks, celery, cucumber and sunflower seeds. The cravings are there though, and they reminded me of some random purchases I made earlier this year. The “Super Hero Meal” you see up above. DC comic’s finest in carbohydrate and sugar form.

The Superman drink claims to “charge physical and mental performance throughout the day by providing extra energy power to your body!”

Energy power? That’s a new one on me. With 80mg’s of caffeine and 1000mg’s of Taurine it does the trick in giving caffeine-sensative non-coffee drinking individuals like me shaky hands and a feeling like their chest might explode. The taste though, was truly foul.

The “Batman Shaped Tempura Nuggets made with Chicken Breast” I didn’t actually get to eat. Lizbt did though. Her verdict? “The shape didn’t change the flavour. They tasted like chicken offcuts smooshed together in a factory with a really bland, carboardy “tempura” coating.”

So there you go.

I worked out that if you ate a whole packet of the Batman snacks and washed it down with a Superman drink for three meals a day you’d be consuming 2600 calories.  (And thats without snacks) I realise Bruce Wayne isn’t short on money but I imagine it would be expensive to let out that body armour, and that is what you’d be doing after a few months on the superhero diet. I guess foiling those meglomanical villian’s dastardly schemes would burn up the calories though, so maybe not.

Oh, Lizbt held on to a few of the nuggets  so I could photograph them. I forgot to do so.  The photo below is what Batman Snacks look like if you cook them up and then leave them in a plastic container in the fridge for a few months.

Eurgh.

Image via Jeremy Mayer

I’m writing a novel. This month. (NaNoWrimo, but in June, like I did last year)

So I may be too busy to update with my usual clockwork regularity. *cough* Alternatively in the noble pursuit of doing anything other than the actual task at hand I might blog quite a bit. Either way, you’ve been warned, Dear Readers.

Let the adventure begin!

Weeks ago, my mother was in town and I went on a daytrip with her to the Abbotsford Convent. One of the great things about showing someone around the city you live in is you get to be a tourist again. It was an interesting place. No longer in use by the Sisters of the Good Shepard (as it was for 100 or so years,)  there is a bakery and a cafe doing good business, and nun’s cells now serve as offices and consulting rooms for various artists and alternative medicine practitioners.

Many of the buildings are presently abandoned and falling into disrepair, and for some reason I never tire of looking at that kind of urban decay. It’s always been the case, I’m resigned to the fact that most other people can’t figure out why I am so thrilled and mesmerised by any kind of vacant building. It’s just something about the atmosphere I think, the presence of a place that has had years of life in it and is now silenced and still and empty. Lots of joyfully sticking my camera lens through broken windows was to be had that day.

It turns out I wasn’t the only one who thought the place photographicly juicy. I came across a clutch of quite fancy looking cars at the very back of the grounds.

They looked out of place, particularly with the clothes on the hood. I was curious as to their owners.

Then as I was snapping shots of  a wonderfully rusty vintage petrol pump nearby…

…I heard the distinctive sound of a a camera taking high speed shots.  It seemed to be coming from the building on front of me.

I got closer to the set of green double doors pictured here. I could here voices, and so I closed one eye and peered through the crack in between the locked doors. At first I couldn’t see anything at all. The all of a sudden a head popped in to view, some distance away. It was the head of a young woman – a tribal design had been painted on her face and her hair was in an ornate platinum blonde coil on her head. She shifted slightly, sitting up, and a pale breast came in to my view, followed by the delicate curve of her waist. Then gentle laughter, and then a small cloud of feathers went up in the air, almost incandescently white in the bright lighting that must have been set up. I had obviously stumbled across some kind of fashion/fetish/art photoshoot. l began to feel a bit of a voyeur at that point so I moved away from the building. It  was quite an arresting vision though, not something I had expected to stumble across, and really quite beautiful. At that point my mother announced that she was ready to leave. So we went.

“Hello there.  Do you have time to talk about how much you could be saving on local calls?”

Well, I eventually got F.E.A.R. 2 up and running. Don’t really know what the problem was. Somewhere in the various installs, re-installs and validations and verifications Steam decided it would let me play the game after all. How gracious.

My favourite part was the install when it ignored the DVD in the drive and decided for some arbitrary reason that I needed to download the entire game content. Needless to say I swiftly cancelled that plan. Nothing like an estimated download time of 6 hours when you already have the game on disc.

So was it really worth all the hassle?

The messing around certainly took the edge of my enthusiasm for the game, and then when I actually came to setting it up I ran headlong in to my pet hate.

Lack of fully customisable key bindings.

Now that is something to be truly frightened of.

How can any game get away with this? No really, I mean I have been playing FPS’s since Wolfenstein 3D  and over that time I have come to settle on a particular configuration.  It is altered obviously, game by game – Dark Messiah needed a lot of pressing of the Kick button so that gets a priority place, some games might have a flashlight, others don’t etc etc. But over time a comfortable basic control scheme evolves, so you can transfer habits and skills from one game to another instead of having to re-train your hand-eye coordination for each title. And though it might mark me as some kind of malformed freak of the gaming world  it just so happens my particular configuration does not include having my left hand on the WASD side of the keyboard.

Unfortunately F.E.A.R. 2 refused to let me assign functions to many of  the keys I would usually use. I won’t go on about this too much, though I could – at length. It really is unforgivable in my book. (Many a game I have abandoned playing all together because Quicksave and Quickload are locked to F6 and F9…)

Then I noticed controversial choice #2.

No save games – checkpoint autosave only.

This never bodes well.  Aliens vs. Predator pulled this trick a while back, giving you only limited saves, citing the same “building tension, real consequences” reasons that the F.E.A.R 2 developers are trotting out, and I didn’t play that game until the power of mass bitching saw them add an unlimited savegame function.

Now I understand (I think) what they are trying to do with this. I am something of a compulsive quicksaver myself, so not having the ability to save my game every time I turn a corner does add a certain edge. But this positive is more than cancelled out by being forced into the frustrating situation of having to  repeat combat situations I’ve already completed over and over to get to the bit that keeps killing me. If this kind of repetition appealed  I’d dust off one of my consoles and play Prince of Persia, or maybe Abe’s Odyssey or even Pitfall on the Atari 2600. The other problem with lack of saving options is that one of the things I appreciate about PC games is being able to save them and shut them down the moment the real world intrudes. A phone call, a knock at the door, a grease fire, an alien craft landing on the roof and I can just press a button or two and then deal with the situation. Even if I’m not back to my computer for a week or so (the alien abduction one ) then I know my precious progress has been saved and I can get back to it as soon as the swelling goes down enough that I can sit on my computer chair again.

Moving on to the game itself, as soon as I started playing I found myself trying to remember the plot details of the original F.E.A.R which I had vaguely enjoyed and certainly completed.  What came to mind was that the title was a laughable and unconvincing backronym, that there was a little girl, that little girls are creepy( as evidenced by the last 25 years of horror films,) that there was a lot of blood, that for some reason you could go Matrix-style slow-mo and that you were some kind of super soldier killing some other kind of super soldier, conspiracy blah, unethical experiments blah, telepathy blah, picking up boring memo’s and reading them in breaks between killing blah blah…

Now I haven’t finished the game yet, probably only halfway through, but it seems to me that F.E.A.R 2 is more of the same. The slow mo gunfight action can be quite satisfying, wheeling out every horror cliche ever put on film breaks up the monotony of gun battles, and your companions are entirely useless and die a lot. Usually just up ahead of you, conveniently too far out of your reach to actually do anything to help them. So come to think of it you are pretty damn useless yourself.

Maybe I’m jaded, or expecting too much from what is still a medium in its infancy, but is this really the best a studio can dish up? Well actually, I know its not, because I have played Deus Ex, I have played Half-life 2, I have played a handful of other compelling titles that didn’t feel empty so I know they exist, that they are possible.

In terms of the story, the world of the game, it seems to me like the writers/developers of F.E.A.R. 2 are just re-hashing whatever they played in other successful titles. Nothing feels at all new, or even interesting, I certainly don’t care about a single character and I don’t need to keep hold of the plot to play the game, I just kill whatever is in front of me.  Which is fine for an action title if that’s what you are going for, but then if that is the case why even bother with the  lame story tying it all together? The emails/PDA notes you pick up in particular read like the developers fed a handful of better 1st person shooters, the scripts from a few late night B-grade action movies and a DVD box set of the X-files into a grinder and then typed up the mushy plot-slurry as it squelched out.

So that’s my verdict anyway. I might finish it eventually, I might not. For the moment its a resounding ‘meh’ and I’m moving on to the next game!

WP out.

“Mmmm…  98% recycled material.”

I took these photos as publicity for an upcoming independent theatre show.  I’m playing the role of the “Writer”,  in August Strindberg’s “A Dream Play” – a 1901 expressionist flight of fancy written originally in Swedish and translated and adapted by Caryl Churchill in 2005.

It promises to be an interesting show, so if you are in Melbourne, consider yourself invited!

http://www.theatrealive.com.au/whatson/1395/

I haven’t managed to work any Helium references in yet, but give me time…

Well, it has been a few days now and I have not yet succeeded in getting my brand-spanking new copy of F.E.A.R 2 working – which makes a review rather challenging. Here’s the one thing I have ready to feedback on -

1.) Every time a developer makes you use Steam to install, activate and play a boxed, retail copy of a game the Divine Wildebeest of Gaming Justice cries.

There has been installing, and verifying and patching and deleting and much viewing of troubleshooting forums but what it gets down to is I can’t play a 100% legitimate copy of a single-player computer game because of insurmountable problems with an entirely unnecessary online DRM system.

I have previously had major problems with games purchased through Steam (HL2, Portal, etc) but they somehow seemed less heinous as I didn’t have a physical copy of the game in my hand. It is frustrating enough to have a games re-sellabilty destroyed through having to run it through Steam, without the game not working entirely because of it. I sometimes wonder if Valve’s platform might be more reliable if it actually ran on steam power…

Oh well, time to give up and move on to another game. I might try to revisit F.E.A.R 2 when my patience is renewed enough to try getting it working again.

I decided to play and review “Codemned: Criminal Origins” next, as I was avoiding buying it cheap at EB since November in the hope that I might win a copy, which I did.

Unfortunately the copy is damaged and does not actually work in any of the three DVD drives I have in my home. Witness…

Having learned through painful experience that “Cyclic Redundancy Check” is fancy code for “Your Disc is Buggered or Maybe Has Biscuit Crumbs On It You Slob” I cleaned the disc several times and re-tried to no avail. Well, that really does suck.

So I shall be forced to move on to  F.E.AR. 2 for my dose of gory FPS action!

More to follow…