“The soldier to come is both natural and unnatural. I waited to be called up. You stay fit; stay focused, and stay ready. I wore the blacks and grays. I blended in. But the call never came. It never came.” — Fringe, Bad Dreams

We see patterns, connections.  That’s what human brains are good for.  I’m extremely fond of the point in serialised media when you feel like you’ve been rewarded for sticking around.  When all the pieces coalesce, like reversed slow motion video of a dropped egg.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles didn’t really find its egg-shape until mid-way through its second season, where it shifted from good to very good (and then better).  Lost seems to have sustained its later, post-egg, seasons by suggesting that the real revelation is in the dropping itself.  We hang on the promise we won’t be presented with the parson’s nose.

(Well… that was tortured.)

Fringe may well have shown its egg with “Bad Dreams” (which aired last weekend in the UK) which to pulled together its disparate internet-lunacy-of-the-week story-lines into something approaching coherence.  This Mad Science now has a purpose – to create the post-human soldiers of a future war we are, as yet, unable to comprehend.

At the same time the second issue of Wired UK was also promising some sort of bio-enhancement future. It included a fold-out map featuring an innovative projection map, Here & There by Jack Schultze.

Schultze cites Extremis (Warren Ellis’s 2006 Iron Man reboot) as an influence – the concept that a map projection could be like a superpower.  That you can both be in the city and above it within the same field of vision.

Although Extremis, from 2006, was the pre-crunch Iron Man. Maybe it’s harder these days to root for the billionaire playboy industrialists. Superheroes can’t intervene in real-world atrocities; Stark’s engineering-genius can’t save a real-world Detroit.

(And, maybe it’s just the writers I gravitate towards, but do comics seem more zeitgeisty these days.  Like JMS having Doctor Doom look stuff up on Wikipedia, or seeing Peter Parker’s email inbox full of spam.  Weird that – in a world with the likes of Richards, Stark, and Pym – spam is still an unsolved problem.  Although, to be fair, it’s probably way down on the list of existential threats.)

So now Matt Fraction has disassembled Iron Man again. Extremis is gone. Stark Industries is gone.  His equipment; his social status.  He’s shifted from establishment to fugitive. And, in a move even Unclutterer would consider hardcore, has even dispensed with sections of his own mind.

He’s gone from a Bond to a Bourne. Or to a Banner.

Oh, he’s still a guy stomping around in a form-fitting jet-fighter, just, y’know – less Iron, more Man.  That sort of back to basics, Tyler Durden, philosophy. “I’m breaking my attachment to physical power and possessions, because only through destroying myself can I discover the greater power of my spirit.”

Reminds me of when they got rid of the Sonic screwdriver, Doctor Who’s magic-wand, in the 80s.  At the time it was felt that always having this tool available was limiting to the script.  Of course, since reading that I seem to have developed false-memories of entire half-hour episodes consisting of Colin Baker locked alone in room.  Weeping.

The current Who, of course, not only has a multi-function sonic screwdriver but still retains the ability to get out of any situation by McGyvering some other, entirely contrived, nonsense-fueled device.  (“Well.  I would never have thought of that!”)

I’ve recently come into possession of a new Xbox 360 (by dint of being a massive nerd) although sans any games or currently any means to connect it to t’nternet.  All I’ve done so far is played trough the demo for Tom Clancy’s HAWX.

HAWX is a future jet-fighter game that’s only slightly more sim-y than an After Burner.  It’s features that odd arcade perspective where you have a fixed-camera third person view of your jet, but with a first-person HUD imposed over it.  And, what with it being the future, your on-board computer assistant actually takes care of most of the work.  It can do things like project a calculated flight path for either evading enemy missiles, or the optimum approach vectors for missile strikes.  Tanks in cities, hidden behind buildings, may need to be approached by a vertical decent, firing missiles, and then quickly pulling out.  Possibly through the flames of an explosion.  Awesome.

But the game builds weakness into its own technology.  The on-board system has safety thresholds it won’t exceed.  They still need a human on-board, with a pilot’s instinct, to deal with situations the programming hasn’t anticipated.  So, when necessary, you need to “switch off your targeting computer” Skywalker-style, and use the Force.  At which point both the HUD and rear-of-jet view are replaced by a completely third person, almost movie-like, view of the dog-fighting. You’re a sort of floating head in space – the action in view is more distant but still manipulatable.

Strange that, in order the simulate the experience of moving without the guidance of a machine, we are granted the perspective of a god.

“It’s so quiet this high up, the feeling you get is that you’re one of those space monkeys. You do the little job you’re trained to do. Pull a lever. Push a button. You don’t understand any of it, and then you just die.” — Fight Club

I have no objections to it, myself.  It’s a lovely little hieroglyph that reminds me how awesome computers seemed to me in the 90s.  They were the go-to MacGuffins of the modern computer-era in movies like Hackers and The Net.

These days memory cards are the size of fingernails and disks can look like anything from tiki statues to laptop humping dogs.  So what do we get as the current representation of data storage? A featureless rectangular slab?

In OS X, Apple choses to represent unmounted .dmg disk images as metallic cases of internal hard-disks, a circular indent showing the location of the platters (something that’s familiar to most computer people, but probably abstract for Mac users). Oddly, when mounted, they then come to resemble an external drive of some kind – a white flat rectangular casing.  Apple’s iconography for online storage (iDisk) is an external drive casing with a abstract cloud symbol on it – possibly enshrining it as a future anachronism.

So the modern floppy-less save icons tend to look like arrows pointing at slabs, or at cylinders, or pointing into file folders (because some metaphors transcend).  Sometimes it’s a sharpened pencil writing directly on to the surface of a magnetic disk.

Of course there are some that regard the question of representing a save icon as moot.  The concept of “save” is apparently tied to a doomed file-centric paradigm, and that files will be replaced by a continually recorded timestream of changes – the file-as-document will become closer to a spool. The play and record buttons are always down.  (The specific user action will be closer to concept of “export” where capturing the state of a “file” at a specific time is still required.)

This concept of auto-saving has been a familiar one in videogames in the last few years,  but that hasn’t removed the need for iconographic communication.  The games still need to communicate when information is being saved to warn the user not to switch the power off or remove devices and risk leaving the data in a corrupted state.  There are no secondary indicators – no whirring noises, no flashing indicator LEDs, no iPod display requesting not to be unplugged.  On PS2 games they would frequently use an iconographic representation of the removable memory cards.  But how do you visually communicate the internal storage of the Wii?

One of the games I’m currently playing uses a spinning DVD (a read-only medium in videogame-land) to represent, not when the DVD is being read (duh), but when data is being written to internal memory.  I assume there was nothing else suitable in their development kit.

So instead of an icon a user selects to instruct the computer to save, we’re now in need of a universal visual representation an instruction from the computer.  “Attention human: I’m saving your work.  Don’t do anything that might prevent me from doing this.” (Something that potentially becomes much trickier when you think about devices with no persistent storage saving directly to the cloud.)

And, really, what communicates this better than an angry cartoon mole?

Evil mum Karen Matthews has been given a £300 PlayStation in her jail cell as a reward for being a model prisoner.

Crikey. I can’t justify getting a PS3 for myself right now, and the state is just handing them out to people the tabloids are calling, without apparent fear of hyperbole, evil?

The article ends on an odd note, almost as if it originated from some poorly advised press release from Sony:

Players can create a virtual life in new feature PlayStation Home.
Retails at £299, games cost around £45.
The England football team play when they get together – and Lewis Hamilton plays racing games with his brother.

What’s confusing about this is that I was under the impression that the Wii and PS3 consoles were barred from use in UK prisons because of their built-in wifi capabilities. A search of Hansard via TWFY for Playstation 3 backs this up:

John Reid: Advice was issued to all prisons in December 2005 that the Sony Playstation 3 was barred from the prison estate because of the equipment’s ability to send and receive radio signals.

Has this advice been rescinded, or is the Mirror confused?

Allard takes Tony Hawk as a starting point and suggests different ways for non-gamers to get involved. A girl watching her brother play might be affronted by his avatar’s poor choice of clothes and use her laptop to access the Tony Hawk website’s clothing design tool. A few experimental efforts later, and she can upload a new T-shirt for him in the game. He wears it with pride, and his friends online like the look of it. And now the sister can go into business, selling her design via Live’s peer-to-peer micropayments system (previously announced at GDC). “Is she playing the game?” asks Allard. ”I don’t know, but she’s having fun.” Mum can get in on the act too. Not much of a gamer, but she’s keen to watch her son compete in one of these pro-gaming tournaments. Using a photo of herself taken with the 360′s camera, she can use a Sims 2-like system to create a recognisable avatar of herself, and get in position in the crowd, ready to cheer as her son comes in for his run.

This fits, I imagine, Microsoft’s profile of the kind of gamer the new XBox will be targetting. “Yeah, so I’m wearing clothes my little sister designed and I have a virtual representation of my mother to accompany me. Who’s up for a deathmatch?”

The government is holding a further meeting on Friday with industry and retail representatives as well as the British Board of Film Classification to discuss how labelling can be made clearer.

Here are a couple of suggestions on how UK videogame labelling could be clarified:

Clearer labeling for games recieving an 18 certificate from the BBFC

 Suggested new PEGI icon for games containing “Shocking Images”

“Playing the new Grand Theft Auto, not much else.”

“So is San Andreas any good?”

“I just beat a guy to death with a 20 inch purple dildo and escaped in a helicopter.”

“So… good then?”

“Probably in my ‘Top Ten’.”

“Oh, what are your others then?”

“Um. I don’t know, give me a while to think about it.”

So, since I only really post to the ‘blog to let people know I’m still alive, I present to you my (pre-PS2) top ten video games:

10. Super Mario Bros 2 (NES)

Yes, that’s right, 2. The not-really-Mario one. Sure, I loved the first one, and the third. It’s just the timing of the release that makes the difference. While I could zip through SM1, SM2 was a challenge. I don’t think I ever finished Super Mario 3 – there’s something about save game features that makes it easier not to attempt a full play-through. The NES was my sister’s, so I only had limited access (I had a ZX Spectrum, but no old speccy games make the list. Not that I didn’t play the games, it’s just that I don’t rate them that high. See, I’m not a complete retro-casualty).

9. Tekken 3 (PS1)

Tekken 2 and 3 bleed together in my memory. Which was the one with the little farting dinosaur-thing? Three, right? Many late night, post pub challenges. Hwoarang was my usual character, Mokujin when I was on a running streak an wanted to take the piss. Of course, Soul Calibur 2 is a far better fighter, but I just haven’t clocked up the same hours. (See also Street Fighter 2 when visiting SNES owning friends.)

8. Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (Adventure)
(PC/Amiga)

Sure there are other SCUMM games that I’ve loved, Sam and Max, the Monkey Island games, but this was the one I put some real effort into finishing. I first played it on a somebody’s “work” PC. I then went out and got the Amiga version. It came on 12 floppy disks and I had no hard drive. Mid-game load time were painful, it’s the sort of experience that trains you to screen sweep and try non-obvious object combinations in point and click adventures, ’cause flying to Greenland in real life would have been quicker that the disk-swapping required to get there in the game. While I would normally caution against time-travellers meddling with history, I think there wouldn’t be any harm in going back to the early nineties and telling me to buy a frickin’ hard disk.

7. Ridge Racer (arcade)

My lunchtime favourite, a sit-down cabinet at an arcade near my college. To this day I still use the unrealistic RR-style “power slide” in car racing games (foot off accelerator for a couple of seconds, then turn and jam accelerator down). Games that don’t let me do this tend not to be played. I suspect Burnout 3 does, but I’m waiting to finish GTA to try this one out.

6. Quake (Linux)

I got my first “IBM compatible” PC when Wolfenstein 3D was le jeux du jour, upgraded for DOOM (the network version a favourite out-of-hours at the college computer centre), then upgraded again when Quake came out. But by this time I’d switched to Linux, so PC gaming was out. Luckily, the Quake engine sourcecode from an X-Window version leaked into the underground, and an SVGA Linux port emerged.  And thus an academic career was destroyed. (While the Nine Inch Nails soundtrack was great, I found that swapping the game CD for Prodigy’s Fat of the Land produced even better results.)

5. Sonic the Hedgehog (Megadrive)

There was a glorious realisation in 1991 when playing Sonic that, not only was it The Greatest Platform Game Ever, but that it was only available on a platform I actually owned. Ha, in your face Super Nintendo! Always bet on black! (With the exception of PS1 vs Saturn.)

4. wipEout 2097 (PS1)

The electro-soundtrack, the ”club” design, the graphics. Everything seemed so appealing about the original wipEout. Of course, the gameplay was a complete bastard. Then 2097 which combined all of the good elements of the original with a game that wasn’t so unforgiving. Plus the split-screen play was great – a few years ago I involved in a fairly evenly matched 2-player game of 2097 with a friend and my flatmate popped out. We continued with what seemed like seven or eight rematches, when my flatmate returned. “That was quick.” “What do you mean? I’ve been gone for twelve hours.” (See also wipEout Fusion which is just as good.)

3. Road Rash (Megadrive)

The two games that got the most light-night multi-player action were Road Rash and whatever that year’s NHL game was. One of my greatest video game wins ever was in Road Rash. I was behind the entire race until making a large jump, then flukily bouncing off the top of a cow into first place. “I bounced off a cow!” (Note that, while many of the cool elements of Road Rash can be found in San Andreas, there don’t appear to be any cows, a big minus.) I still feel the need to kick motorcyclists off their bikes as they pass me in real life. (I assume that’s as a result of playing the game rather than some latent psychopathic tendencies.)

2. Dynablaster (Amiga)

Of the many Amiga games I played on my friend’s A500, there are three we always came back to for multiplayer – Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge, Speedball 2 (which suffered from giving the winner of the first match an advantage in the second, thus with two closely matched players the winner of the first match would likely win the rest). And Dynablaster (the European name for Bomberman). Two players on joysticks (or rather me on one of my Megadrive joypads, since they also used the same Atari joystick interface) and sometimes another two players sharing a keyboard. In terms of quick multiplayer arcade action this is the king. It was one of the main reasons I got an Amiga – the newly launched A1200.

Of course the bastard wouldn’t boot – one of the few games that was found to be incompatible with the A1200 (the seeds of open source advocacy are sown?).

I got to relive the Dynablaster glory-days at college when I compiled XBlast on the shared X-Window system. All the fun of the Amiga version, with the added benefit that you’re using computer and network resources that might otherwise have been wasted on academic research.

1. Tetris (Gameboy)

It feels like a cheat, putting Tetris as your top game. It feels like the acceptable answer. Uncontroversial. Not to low-brow, not too snobby games-elitist. Like a Miss World contestant wishing for world peace.

But I’m being honest. No other game, certainly no other puzzle game (the closest contender being Puzzle Bobble), got the same amount of attention as Tetris. I only ever bought three other Gameboy games, and even those didn’t get played despite burning through a planet-killing number of batteries. Then again, if you were using the proto-USB link-up cable Tetris was the only game you usually could play with someone else. These days, when I find a port on a phone, or interactive TV, or whatever, I’ll give it a go. But the magic’s gone now, just one well placed “straight” and I’ve played enough. 

So, even though it’s number one here, I’d probably think twice about choosing it in a “Desert Island Discs” situation.

Incidentally, did anyone else call the Tetris-piece consisting on a single row, a “straight”. I referred to the pieces as “straights”, “bents”, “T’s” and “squares”. This once led to a hi-larious misunderstanding which I hope to incorporate into a video-game related sitcom at some point in the future.

As well as the other game hacking, DVD multi-region naughtiness of the
previous version, this one has CD-R support for MP3 and DivX as well as a
emulator for Sega Megadrive/Genesis ROMs and an online IM/chatroom/forum feature. The EVO edition also includes a PC compatible 16 meg USB flash drive.

Now, media players and emulators are unremarkable in the mod-chipped scenester world, but for a mass-market device to be sold in high street stores it’s very interesting.

Datel are teh rox0r. They’re old school. As far as I remember there’s been an Action Replay cartridge available for every UK-launched console since the mid-80s. But it’s the original I have fond memories of. The big red cartridge that my friend had plugged into the back of his C64.

Imagine, in the game world, you’re in a tight spot. You’ve got enemies bearing down on you, and you’re dangerously low on missiles. There are only two ways the story is going to play out: go down in a blaze of glory Butch n’ Sundance style, or get saved by a
Deus ex machina.

So you hit the freeze button on the Action Replay and asked it to keep a check on the status of memory registers (PEEKing) for changes. Then you unfroze the game and fired off one of your missiles. Hit the freeze button again, the AR debugger would highlight locations whose values had decremented. You could then try copying the original value back in (POKEing) and returning back to the game. If the spent missile was replaced, your missile crisis was over, and new supplies can be gained on a whim. Keep the register full, and you’ve got Infinite Ammo.  And what works for missiles might work for other things. Your character is can be stronger, move faster, jump higher… sometimes fly.

Entropy is reversed.
Every death can be turned
into a fighting chance.

It might not be sporting, it may offend the gaming purists, but it was ideal for those who (in the words of “Kobayashi Maru” game-hacker Kirk) “don’t believe in the no-win scenario”.

(My own code-usage is restricted to extreme circumstances, I like to finish
the game by myself. The Action Replay but for breathing life into older, completed games. I return to previously conquered worlds as an idle god.)

This was “hacking” as I first came to understand it. I already had some familiarity with programming, but this was comparatively arcane.
The realisation that behind the game there was a messy and intimidating world of code. And possibilities were available to those that could master this magic wand. Hack the game. Debug. Edit sprites. Fast Format. “Turbo Load”. The possibility of a world without another kind of control existed back there, and its many transgressions.

Neo dies, is resurrected and is then able to see the Matrix for what it is - running code.

(The original C64 Action Replay lives on in the retro-enthusiast scene
with a clone cartridge and C64 demo/copy party was held in Germany this last weekend.)

Action Replay later transplanted itself into the console culture (They were always called Action Replay cartridges in the UK, but until recently were rebranded under names such as “Game Shark” in the US) but over the years the features have moved away from the messy DIY raw code hacking
of the 80s. These days the promethean data can be downloaded directly from a website or magazine cover-mount. The relevant menus pop-up automatically when a game disc is inserted.

The code has disappeared, and we are once again a slave to the interface. But the underground promise of empowerment and control still lingers. The seductive rebelliousness – ranging from the amusing hacks (for example, a Tomb Raider code which gives the protagonist gigantic perky breasts… more so) to these features that seem to have crossed over from “the scene”, from dark side into Action Replay’s grey area – retro emulation or media playback without enforcing the “protection” mechanisms that the console manufacturers are obliged to force upon their customers.

It’s been over a decade since Nintendo lost its case against Galoob
over the Game Genie cartridge. But those were the days before the
DMCA. How long before the EU passes a law that takes away our Action Replay. Will Datel’s skills in systems analysis and reverse engineering one day be outlawed?

If the Military-Entertainment Complex engineers IP martial law
the first thing you’ll see are crack enforcement-troops abseiling from helicopters through the windows of business park somewhere in middle-England. There won’t even be a chance to hit “freeze”.

There may be dark days ahead. So keep informed on the issues through
EFF and others. You have nothing to loose but your infinite lives.

(Update: Apparently the new version no longer requires the memory-card “cartridge” element, since the codes can now be loaded from any memory card or USB flash drive.)