Let It Burn

Battlefield 2 in pictures

2011-07-15T23:46:00.001Z

Gogo photobucket account! Most of these are 800x600 res at crap settings due to the computer I had at the time I think.

The MEC Decoy Biker was a valuable part of any team.

Poor guy....

You could do this by driving at the bow at a certain angle, and slip through the collision maps or what have you.

You had to put the Viper where the Blackhawk spawned, and this would happen.

Mmmm, so satisfying.

I don't know what happened here. Maybe the Vodnik decided to end its life :((((

Why would you waste your time with sniper rifles for that medal when you could just spam claymores and grenades on the first flag of Karkand? Aiming for efficiency here, yo.

Logged in to get a bunch of medals cos they changed the prereqs.

Yeah, that's us with both choppers of the map, raping the fuck out of the sea dock! What of it? B))))

Oh how we raged.

This player had an excellent point!

OMG fucking teamstackers!!!! :mad:

The dreaded nokit bug!

I guess they really wanted that heli??? Dumb thing to do though, cos one bomb or grenade would take the whole lot of them out, as happened several times.

Players on BF2S edited that to say "there is a problem with our patch"

Trololol, always look where you are driving, kids.

They weren't having a good day.

BF2 had the best bugs!

Messing around with a guy from Totse.

The real-life Predator drone was based off these modified game files, true story.

Oh sorry, how did that get in here? Moving on...

What was this baby's problem, why was he so angry all the time? No-one knew.

The GAU-8 and it's accompanying plane was in a BF2 mod.

Dice really missed a trick by not including this vehicle.

In conclusion: BF2

I have a second tranche of shots I can do in a later post.

Edge Magazine and what it meant to me

2011-07-15T18:21:00.014Z

So seeing as people on the twitters are making fun of me for my love for Edge and all the writers that used to be on that mag, allow me to elucidate.

Okay, so let's take it to the beginning.

In 1996 I was 10 years old, and I loved video games. I would go to friend's houses who had consoles or computers and play their games for hours, while they would be like "come on, i'm bored" etc. They would drop less than subtle hints like "yeah, the thing I like about Freddy is that he isn't friends with me for my cool computer." I didn't give a fuck. I remember playing some side-scrolling shooter on like an Amiga or something? You could duck behind stuff and there would be people up in windows on like the Y-axis and you could press the C-button and fire up at them.
I remember playing some platformer on PC where you're this little dude who runs around and collects coloured keys and shoots turrets. I played Simon the Sorceror on the same guy's PC but I think it might have been just a demo version or something. I thought it was cool though.

I would go to my uncle's house in St. Albans for family Christmas visits and would spend hours playing Wolfenstein 3D on their computer. I would get stuck in the mazes, and ask my uncle for help, his advice was usually along the lines of "go back and check every route, take your time, you might have missed one". Completed that game by getting the secret chamber before the final boss that had a fuck ton of guns and ammo etc.

I would go to people's houses I barely knew, to play games. I remember playing Missile Command at my brother's friend's house, that was cool. They had a NES too, and we played Battletoads and Mario Bros.

I remember being up in Scotland to visit my uncle on a summer holiday, and we went to some carnival or something, which was ok, but I really wanted to be back in these kids' house playing Lemmings. I remember going on summer camp in Year 5 of primary school and seeing some kid's Game Gear with Sonic on it. That thing was treated so reverently by the kids, and guarded so jealously by the owner. I don't think I got to play it, I did get to see it in action which was sweet as fuck. I remember lying in the grass eating rhubarb and custard sweets and thinking how cool it would be if I had one of those things.

I remember going to arcades at bowling alleys, the place near us had a Sega Park which was the best thing ever. I played Time Crisis and Sega Rally and House of the Dead, and that four-player tank game, and everything else.

I would go to my dad's work and sit in the meeting room or in his office playing Solitaire and Minesweeper. Solitaire was pretty cool, I liked changing the pictures on the back of the cards to pretty scenes, cos the game itself was a bit boring. Minesweeper, I couldn't really play since I didn't know the rules and would just randomly click squares until I hit a mine. Hearts was some weird shit I didn't understand at all.

At home we had a 386 with Windows 3.1 (with a turbo button!) I would press the turbo button in and out cos it was chunky and satisfying to press, and it didn't actually seem to do anything. I had a Young Telegraph floppy disk of games, which I played to death. My favourite was some quiz one where you had to answer questions or you got eaten up by some robot monster. I eat that thing up, and for years afterwards, people would be astonished by how I knew that Edward Jenner had created modern vaccination for smallpox by observing that milk maids who worked with cows did not contract it, only the milder cowpox.

So when I was about 10 or so, I remember going ice-skating with a family who lived across the road from us. We would go on Christmas morning, before lunch, because it was free on Christmas day. I remember skating round and having that Wham song about giving his heart away at christmas because they played that shit like non-stop.

Anyway, so my friend's older brother had a Game Boy with Super Mario Land. I though it was amazing, and I decided I had to have it. I went down to town with my dad, took out however much I needed in cash from my building society, and bought a Game Boy with a purple box that proclaimed something like "Over 100 million sold!". I bought just the one game with it I think, which was Super Mario Land. I remember taking it into the "back room", my dad's study, putting it on the thick dark turquoise shag carpet and opening the box and being SO excited! It was amazing.

So I expanded my collection of games, starting with Donkey Kong Land after I read an article about it in some games magazine I stole from a schoolmate's backpack. I thought it was amazing, the music was so awesome, those first bars of the first jungle level, like BA BA badabadbada BA BA. Heh, I can link that now, can't I? Yay internet.

Haha, well I remember it sounding chunkier, oh well! :D

But yeah, it was so good. And the gameplay was awesome, with all the secrets to find and so on. I remember being really challenged by the game, like those wasps on the ice levels? And you have to time your jump out of a barrel or off a rubber tyre to avoid their stinger. Shit was hard. And I remember the Nautilus thing on an underwater level on the second world, that thing was fucking scary!! It would appear and fill most of the screen and you had to swim for your life to avoid it.

I remember the first time I completed Super Mario Land, pretty vividly actually. I was at my uncle's flat in Edinburgh in Scotland. I think I was a bit ill, so was on the toilet playing it, and I got to the flying level and then to the cloud boss, and then to the alien in the spaceship who fires a fuck-ton of bubbles at you that split off into threes, for like at least 3 or 4 minutes, non-stop. I had always died there, but that day something clicked and I was able to anticipate the bubbles' motions and avoid them and kill him. That was so amazing, the ending of that game where they fly off in the little rocket ship, oh my god that was so cool!

So yeah, I played the shit out of that Gameboy. My parents would keep me supplied with 12-packs of Duracell AA batteries, and to this day I still love a brand new pack of unopened batteries. I mean think about it, they were power, they were games, they were life! I didn't know about rechargeable battery packs at the time.

Other games I played were Kirby's Dreamland, which was great fun, and again I had a lot of trouble with the last boss battle against King Dedede until I asked someone at school how to defeat him, and he was like "you can suck in the stars he makes when he jumps". I was like, ohhhhhh there you go. That game had epic music too, especially the boss battles.

Youtube only has the last boss battle, which is a bit of a travesty. I remember the one against the airship was epic as fuck. You went up to the clouds, eat a firepepper, flew off the edge and the airship flew out and the health bars went across the screen with like a "dillililili" and the battle starts and you're spewing hot fire breath against a freaking airship that has bullets and spin charges you!

Heh, found one on youtube with 11 views. Fuck yeah!

So yeah, loved the Game Boy to bits. I remember being in a car with a friend from school driving to his house, and we swapped games: he gave me his copy of Link's Awakening, and I gave him my copy of Donkey Kong Land. After 45 minutes or so we got to his house, and gave him his game back and told him that it was really weird. He told me the same about DKL :D

So yeah, fast forward to the summer of 1998. I was 12 and had seen adverts for the Nintendo 64 on tv, and thought it looked amazing. There was one game in particular, that I had played in a shop while in a visit to town, while on Scout camp, that I had to play. That game was Banjo-Kazooie, and I bought it and an N64 with a gold controller from a big toy shop in town. I bought it with all my own money, saved up from birthdays and christmas and pocket money over the years. I was a good little saver, and had several hundred pounds in my building society then, which I used to buy the N64 and its games with. Yeah they were expensive, at £40 or £50 a pop, £60 in the case of Donkey Kong 64 with the included Expansion Pak. But it was worth it, and besides, a game those days lasted me like a month or more due to only having a couple hours after school every day to play them, and a bit more at weekends, but my parents didn't let me stay indoors all day playing them.

So yeah, I bought the N64 in late August of that year, with Banjo-Kazooie, and alongside it I picked up a copy of N64 Magazine by Future Publishing in Bath, 10 miles from my home town of Bristol. I think it was issue 19? It had a thing about Wipeout 64 on the cover I think. I had missed the previous month's issue which had B-K on it's cover, but I got it anyway.

So yeah, Banjo Kazooie was awesome, but equally, so was N64 Magazine. It had been created by many of the same people who made Super Play, a SNES magazine, which apparently was really good. I've never seen an issue though I don't think. But yeah, N64 Magazine was a fucking revelation to me at the time.

It was full of these larger than life characters, the staff of about 8 or 10 writers all had these funny, outlandish personalities and the start page for the review section every month was one of my favorite parts of the magazine, reading about what they were doing that month. There was James Ashton, and Tim Weaver, the editors of the magazine for the first year of issues I read, and Martin 'Kitsy' Kitts who had this angry demeanour, and Andrea Ball, who was apparently obsessed with fake suntan, and Will 'FuSoYa' Overton, who produced wonderful artwork for the magazine and would later go on to work at Rare after one of his covers featuring Joanna Dark caught their eye. Oh, it caught mine too, let me tell you!! ;) There was Jes Bickham, who looked a bit like the guy from the pop band 'Aqua' at the time, so pretended he was him.

And the reviews themselves, and every word and page in that magazine were just fantastic, especially to me aged 13 or 14. The letters page was brilliant, and they had competitions and like a leaderboard club thing where they would set challenges for games like complete Banjo-Kazooie in under 4 hours, or do a certain lap time on Big Blue in F-Zero X, or what have you. Readers had to send in pictorial or videotaped evidence of their times and scores, and the people who had completed the most challenges would be printed on the leaderboard page every month. I don't think I bothered with trying to do those though, mainly cos I didn't have a VCR player at the time to tape my speed runs.

So yeah, it was awesome. Reading the magazine informed me of the impending release of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, which looked amazing, so I pre-ordered a copy at the EB in town. I went there on release day, ponied up my fifty english pounds, and started to play the best game that I had ever played in my life. I remember going to school a few days later, and someone asked me how I managed to get a copy as it was sold out everywhere. I was kind of half mystified, and half proud that I had known that it would be a huge game, and that he hadn't, and now had to wait until after Christmas to play it!!

So over 1999 I went back in the N64's catalogue, filling in the games I had missed like Super Mario 64, and Goldeneye 007 and Mario Kart and Blast Corps and everything else. I remember in the summer of that year, going to buy some football manager game, but it wasn't released yet, so instead I picked up Space Station Sillicon Valley, which was amazing luck since it was a freaking brilliant game, full of invention and fun.

So Christmas 1999 was an amazing time for the N64, there were so many amazing games that came out that December, and it yet would be the last time the N64 was a serious commercial entity. There was Smash Bros, and Donkey Kong 64, and Worms Armageddon, and Jet Force Gemini. Meanwhile, the old Game Boy 'brick' was being re-energised by a certain Japanese phenomenon about some kid who travels round the place collecting and battling monsters. It's pretty obscure, you probably haven't heard of it.

Just a staggering profusion of incredible games and fun. I remember getting the Star Letter in N64 Magazine that Christmas, writing about how hardly anyone I knew still had a Gameboy Brick and everyone had moved on to the Gameboy Colour, and why had Nintendo bothered releasing Pokemon on the obsolete system? Tim Weaver who was the editor at the time said something like "maybe, but it's still a great game and aren't you glad they released it at all?". I won a steering wheel and pedals which I sold to my mate for £20 cos I didn't really like proper racing games, I preferred Mario Kart-type ones. (Not DKR though, I thought that was jank compared to Mario Kart!!)

So yeah, the year 2000 came around, and my 2 best friends and I played the shit out of Smash Bros. Of course, as was the custom, you picked a main character, and stuck to it. My friend Tally was probably the best out of us 3, though I thought that may have had something to do with how overpowered his choice of Link was, especially the Up+B spin slash move aka the "SHAAAAAARD!!!" (Hey, why call something by it's real name when you can call it what it does?) I was a close second with Captain Falcon, and became a major irritation to the guys with my use and abuse of the Falcon Kick and the upwards jump-grab thing. They of course would refer to these moves as the Falcon Dick, and his taunt as the "Show me your boobs!". My friend Steve played Kirby, and he did his best, but was usually outclassed by us other two.

My favourite thing was to play with a lot of items on, the good ones like the Light sabers, Pokeballs and Bob-Ombs, the bumpers and fans etc were just annoying and pointless. You haven't lived until you've played a game of Smash Bros with just Bob-Ombs and Pokeballs, on max drop rate. Setting off 3 Pokeballs at once and then getting blasted off the stage by a chain reaction of like 5 Bob-Ombs is the best thing ever! :D

Anyway the rest of that year was fun, and then Perfect Dark came out in the summer. Oh yes. PD was just amazing, incredible. The multiplayer had so many options, and stat tracking, and bots to play against, and an amazing selection of brilliantly fun weapons.

It featured dual-wielding, years before the Halo series had it in Halo 2. We were all mystified why everyone though Halo was so fucking amazing, having played the far superior Perfect Dark just a year or so earlier.

But yeah, the weapons and multiplayer were so amazing. Dual Cyclones on magazine discharge, oh my god!! And I remember the first time we used the Farsight. I spawned next to it, in a duct system on a new map that we hadn't played before. I spent most of the match sniping them through the walls as they didn't know how to get to me! Oh how they raged. :D And the first time you set off an N-Bomb, you're like WHAT IS HAPPENING? And the laptop gun, so sweet! And the SuperDragon with grenade launcher, and the RCP-120 with a built-in cloak.... Just so good.

We spent many a night playing those games. We would get in to mine at like 5pm on a friday or saturday night, and play till like 2 or so am, alternating between Smash Bros and Perfect Dark, with a bit of Mario Kart and Party and Rakuga Kids and whatever else thrown in. I remember once we stayed up playing till like 5am, went to sleep on the sofas, and were woken up by my brother at about 7am wanting to watch cartoons! Felt so weird walking up the hill to the sweet shop that morning. Weird, but good.
Once, we even played a game of Smash Bros with the timer set to an hour, that was so intense. We were so knackered afterwards that we barely played anything else though, so that wasn't tried again. (Our normal battles were usually 10 minutes on the timer, we didn't like stock as that meant at the end one person would have used all their lives and wouldn't be able to play.) I remember playing a few races in F-Zero X and them bitching at me that it was unfair because I had the game and could practise on single player and time attack. Yeah? So what, suck it up losers!! :D

Ok, so I guess i've typed for like 2 hours without even getting to Edge magazine! Haha. So yeah, Christmas 2000 came and went, Majora's Mask was brilliant, Pokemon Snap was not... I remember driving back from my aunties with my dad feeling really pissed off, due to the stupid carnivore's turkey taking like all day to cook, and me having to wait to eat with them when I wasn't having any of the stupid meat. I remember that quite clearly actually, I remember sitting in the front, driving down the road back home, with the setting sun ahead of us in the west, with trees either side of the car, and my dad on my side. It felt good, and it felt right.

I got back to school at the start of term in 2001, and everything had changed. For some reason, never explained to me, my best friends in the whole world suddenly did not want to be friends with me any more. I think I wasn't cool enough for them any more? They wanted to be cool, and were sick of being nerds. They started experimenting with weed, and later stuff like ecstasy and whatever else. I had pretty strong views against drugs of any kind, which I credit to my mother and her strong moral values imparted to her by her parents. So yeah, over the year, my friends and I had huge fallouts, arguments and fights, and eventually stopped talking to each other except by necessity. I ended up becoming friends with a couple of other guys, Mark and Jagdjit, who I intially thought were poor substitutions, but we got on pretty well, and it was hassle-free as they were both a lot more mellow people than my other friends who were both pretty highly strung-people.

So yeah. In early 2001, our house got burgled, and my N64 and all my games, about 20 or more, stolen. I was devastated, but the house was insured, and I got a letter with a big voucher for £500 pounds credit at Dixons, a local electronics retailer, after listing my games at their new prices, instead of their actual worth as second-hand games!
So, in the market for a new console, I picked up a copy of Edge Magazine in January 2001, I think. It had Phantasy Star Online on the cover, with a glowing nine out of ten review inside. I don't know how i'd missed the magazine before, perhaps some kind of weird mental block that shut off my vision in the WH Smiths newsagents, to the side marked multi-platform. Yeah, I was a pretty enormous N64 fanboy.

Anyway, so I went up to the new mall off the motorway, walked into Dixons and bought a Dreamcast with PSO, Sonic Adventure, and a copy of Chu Chu Rocket, that I insisted, after reading a copy of DC-UK, that was sold free alongside all Dreamcasts. I was completely honest in my belief that it was the case, and the shop gave it me as they didn't know any better. I would later find out that the promo offer was a limited-time only thing to coincide with the launch of the Dreamcast's online service, but I honestly did not know that in the shop!

So I took the DC home, unboxed it carefully, and started up Sonic Adventure. I was blown away by the intro movie, and even more blown away by the first beach level. It was so unbelievably beautiful, I had tears in my eyes.

Can't find a video of the game that isn't the later DX port for Gamecube, so that will have to do.

To a 14 year old kid coming off the N64 to the Dreamcast, it was utterly mind-blowing, the graphics were night and day, and the games were so different! The N64 and Nintendo games seemed very familiar, very homey; but the Dreamcast games were so weird! They seemed a lot more Japanese somehow, crazy and mad and beguiling and wonderful.

I would later buy a Mega Drive and go back and play some of the classic Sonic games and wonder how I had managed to miss them and end up with the game boy instead!

Anyway so that night, my mum came home and seeing the white phone line snaking in from the hall socket to the front room, as I attempted to set up the Dreamcast online; she absolutely forbade me from using it online because of the phone bills. I never did get to play PSO online, which was sad, but there was plenty else to play. I took it back to EB at the top of Debenhams in town, as they had a pretty good secondhand bin, and exhanged it for I think, Shenmue and Grandia II.

I took the console in a big cardboard tomato box from the tills at supermarkets that my mum always had millions of, and I took it to my dad's for the weekend. I was really proud of my new console, I remember my dad remarking on how small it was. So I plugged it in to the big tv in the lounge area next to the kitchen and started playing Shenmue while they were cooking tea. It was really cool, really different, and the graphics were gorgeous, though the controls with the d-pad used to move were not to my liking of course. So I was playing along, and I got to the bit where Ryu's looking for some dude in the town? And you have to go and ask the townspeople about it, and every time you do, Ryu says something like "have you seen my friend i'm looking for?" or whatever. And my dad's then "partner" remarked, "it's a bit repetitive, isn't it?" Well I wasn't going to sit there and let her insult my new baby, so I took it downstairs to my bedroom, plugged it into the small tv there and played Grandia II, which was just brilliant.

So I started playing the Dreamcast in earnest, buying and playing incredible titles such as Jet Set Radio, or Soul Calibur, or Crazy Taxi or Metropolis Street Racer, Skies of Arcadia, everything.

Oh my god, Skies was so good!!!! So good.

And JSR was the coolest damn game i'd ever seen!

And right there with me, was Edge.

Edge was something completely different than what I was used to. It was grown-up writing about videogames. They would have long, in-depth articles about games and developers and gamer culture and retrospectives on old games and systems, and thought pieces on where games might be going or where they had been and how they had got there. It was amazing.
My favourite part though, was the columns. At that time, I think there were just the three. There was RedEye, which was Ste Curran, a staff writer for the magazine, writing under that psuedonymn, there was Trigger Happy, with Steven Poole, and there was a column with Toshirio Nagoshi of Amusement Vision, which I unfortunately can't recall the name of off the top of my head.

So every month, I would buy my copy of Edge, and dispense with all formalities and skip straight to RedEye. Yeah Ste, there were people who did that, as you remarked in your E100 column. Then I would read Trigger Happy, then Nagoshi's column. Then I would usually read the editor's leader, then check the reviews, read the first few main ones, then the letters page, and skip all over after that, reading the magazine end-to end in a couple of hours.
The thing I most enjoyed about the three columnists there, besides the incredible quality of writing, was how they complemented each other all lined up one after the other, in three pages, one a piece. RedEye was a persona of a "veteran videogame journalist whose views do not necessarily coincide with Edge's". He was brilliant, sharp and incisive, cutting and vicious when he needed to be, yet always eloquent and always with a real point to make. I enjoyed the first-person perspective style a lot, getting sucked in to his world of press parties with the disgust at the fanboys with their "ghostly-white rolls of flab, or the other sort, which was stick thin. There were never any normal-sized ones". I remember that line, and I also remember the one where he is sent to cover a show about 80's videogame music and told to stay off the drugs, yet he feels in his pocket a bag of white powder, and then the room explodes, people leaving trails of images behind them, the sad people from the 80's who can't let the past go. Well that was the gist of it.

Then there was Trigger Happy, with Steven Poole, which was sort of a compatriot to RedEye, but in a completely different style. Poole was sober, intellectual, and measured. He had previously written a book of the same name, and he drew on that and experience writing literary reviews for other publications to produce a frankly brilliant column every month. It was full of amazing imagery, he would slap a laptop gun against a wall as he rounded a corner and listen to the sounds of gunfire and the machine killing the enemies for him. He would be traversing an ice-bitten wasteland, the heavy mist of his breath reflected in the visor, the dead world groaning, and the eldritch crackle of the lightning arm cannon. He would be playing Time Crisis on the PS2, sat on his sofa with light gun in one hand, and cigar in the other. It was so real, and so good.

Nagoshi was fun, and provided a cool insight into Japanese game development. Then later on, after a bit of a misfire with a young guy who was a developer at Square of FFXI, ("hey let's have someone talk about these newfangled MMOs" I figured was the kind of idea :p ), it got even better, with Biffovision, which was written by Paul Rose who had been a pioneer of teletext graphics and had stuck to that format long after the internet had made it completely obsolete.
But yeah, it was so fun. They would have little in-jokes, and references to each other, like one column, after F-Zero GX was released for the Gamecube, RedEye woke up in bed with Nagoshi (the lead developer of the game), and imagined sharing a flat with his co-columnists. Nagoshi would have whisky on his cornflakes in the morning, Poole would be reading some dense literature while smoking a cigar, and Biffo would be doodling on the walls of the flat! It was so good.

So my best friends had left me, and I was doing shit at school, and fighting with my father and brother, but I didn't care. I had my Dreamcast, and I had Edge.

I mean lookit, I would lie there on my bed on a summer afternoon, reading a videogame magazine, with an Oxford English Dictionary next to me, where I would look up words like intransigent, which I recall was used to describe real-world car manufacturers that would not allow their cars to look damaged in the latest version of Gran Turismo. A videogame magazine that required a dictionary to fully read and understand it. That's something pretty special, right?

Anyway, time moved on, I bought a Nintendo Gamecube, which had some very good games, and that I would infinitely prefer playing than I wanted to play an Xbox or Playstation 2- I thought of them as inferior machines with inferior games. But it lacked third-party support, and the games, though brilliant to play, and gorgeous to look at, somehow lacked the punch and impact of the previous console.

I remember in 2005, being stuck in my mum's flat, with no money, and basically no hope after dropping out of college for the second time. I would go online on our slow as molasses Pentium 1 machine with dial-up internet, and would spend hours on the forums and community at Totse, as it was text-based, with no frills or graphics that would slow my chugging machine down. So I would sit there and post, and talk to people and shoot the shit. I would also visit Penny Arcade, which despite the jpegs taking a good couple minutes to load on my machine, was a real highlight of my week. I would wake up on a tuesday or a thursday, and feel doubly shit, because there was no new PA that day to make me laugh and give me something interesting to read about. I would also visit the comedy website Progressive Boink which would take fucking hilarious shots at nerd culture and pop culture and reminisce about stuff in the 80's, like the quintessential question of who was the best Ninja Turtle. Most of the articles were text also, but on the ones with a lot of images I remember there was sometimes a little thing saying, "if you're on 56k, go and make a sandwich while this page loads." I was! And I did just that!

And of course there was Edge. By this time I had amassed quite the collection, and laid them out in date order, in neat folders in rows on my shelves. I didn't miss an issue for a good period of time, probably 5 years. And I was only subscribed for one of those years I think, as I didn't like the way the postman dropped the magazines through the letterbox and onto the stone floor of the entrance hall, which sometimes damaged the spines. So the entire rest of the time I would go out to a newsagents or down to town and to a games shop and pick up my copy, every month. It really meant a hell of a lot to me.

Anyway, so in the summer, Battlefield 2 came out, and I would go to my local pc gaming cafe, and go downstairs and play for eight hours and forget my life. I kept blagging the £5 offer for a full day of computer time, long after the offer had expired. Mainly I think due to the staff being your regular clueless students, and also I like to think, due to the fact that they didn't have anything to lose by pretending the offer was still running. They got my fiver, and I sat in the corner of an empty basement with 20 PCs humming away beside me and forgot myself in the crucible of online play. I revelled in the sweetly-handling Blackhawk, and the sense of respect that those guys gave a pilot who wouldn't fuck around and crash the thing, and who could keep it out of enemy fire through deft piloting, and developing new and unexpected routes into the enemy base. And stuff like sitting there at maximum altitiude where the jets couldnt get you due to the pecularities of trying to fly a jet close to the top of the skybox, as a squad commander, allowing a full squad of 6 to spawn constantly on you, and halo onto an enemy flag until it was captured, and then moving onto the next one. You wouldn't get shit for points on a round like that, but you helped your team win it, and people began to trust you as a pilot, and would not hesitate to hop in, or to form a specific loadout for the chopper if you wanted to try that.

In late 2005, my grandparents died, and I used some of the money they left me, a full one thousand pounds, to buy upgrades for our home PC which at that point had been upgraded to an AMD Sempron 2600+ processor, which combined with a cheap graphics card, and 2 gigs of ram, was more than enough to run BF2 smoothly at low settings. I spent away the rest of it on comic books such as Spawn, and Witchblade, and Sci-Fi novels, and Yugioh cards to play local tournaments at a comic shop up the road from me.

So I started writing, and you can see the first thing I wrote in a serious manner on the first post of this blog, if you'd like. I had joined the Triforce forum, and they were understandably sceptical of me and my writing.

The oft-quoted saying is that you should never meet your heroes, lest they disappoint you. For me, it was more like, you should never talk to your heroes on an internet website, and find out that they are not the persona you thought they were, and sperg out all over their forum in a thoroughly embarassing manner for everybody present.

So yeah, there was that. I wrote a bit in that first year, but after that it was very sporadic, due to serious long-term depression, inspiration was hard to come by. But when that veil lifted, and I found a window in my concentration, god damn I took that motherfucker by the scruff of the neck and wrote my little heart out.

So the influence of print magazines on my life gradually faded, due to having broadband internet at my fingertips, and the free price of admission being a lot less onerous than the £4 for a copy of Edge at the time. I discovered blogs, and I discovered youtube, and all those good and great things that the internet we know today is made up of.

And I discovered a writer called Leigh Alexander, from a small piece in the Escapist magazine she wrote very early in her career. I enjoyed her writing a lot, and her blog was always at the top of my 'blogs' folder of my bookmarks, through browsers and hard drive failures, and new computers... It was always the first link I would add to my bookmarks when installing a new computer and loading up Firefox for the first time. (I didn't trust RSS feeds or sites like delicious at the time, so I just stuck to a good old fashioned bookmarks bar with tens and hundreds of writers and bloggers and games news sites on it, divided into categories. And she was always at the top.)

Anyway, in late 2008 I was admitted to hospital following a serious psychotic episode. It had been building for years, coming out in huge bursts of anger and rage, but I and my family, being completely unexperienced in such matters, and being so very ashamed and embarassed of the huge, screaming and raving outbursts, tried to cover them up and pretend they didn't exist. This could not work of course, and following a few nights of staying up all night on the computer, and watching all the monumentous election build up and coverage, and the financial crisis unfolding, and watching old cartoons I used to watch with my brother when we were young and he didn't hate and despise me and consider me a leech on my family and society and that I was ruining all their lives, well I broke.

I spent a day wandering the streets, alternately feeling that I was being followed by the CIA, and that I was part of a huge tv show all about me like the film Ed Tv. I eventually made my way down to Temple Meads Station, after failing to find my dad at his workplace. I walked past the open ticket barriers at the station, got onto a train, and pushed my way through to the empty guards carriage just behind the locked driver's cabin. In my mind, somehow I had gotten the idea that this was a huge, elaborate real-life video game being played out for my benefit, and that the entire world was watching and that I had to beat the game to save the world. I remember sitting down at a chair where there was small electronic control panel which I believed contained a series of puzzles that I had to unlock, to open the door to the driver's cabin, where my childhood friend Sophie, who I had lost touch with over the years, was held, and it would open and release her and we would be reunited.

So I sat down at the chair, and operated the cabin controls such as the cabin heating and lighting, and various other controls like something to do with wheels and the undercarriage. I was getting increasingly more frustrated at not being able to solve the puzzles, and next to me there was a button, a big red button that I knew somehow that I must not pull at any cost, as it would endanger the lives of everyone on the train if I gave up and lost the game. I grew so angry that I smashed open the plastic case of the locked first aid box, thinking that there must be a physical key in there that I needed to unlock a different control panel. My hand was bleeding, and I tried to patch it up and did an ok job somehow and it didn't bleed that much.

Then the next thing I knew, there was an open door leading out onto a railway station. It was empty, and it was near sunset. It was quiet, and it was peaceful. I stepped out of that door, and a local police guard very calmly but firmly held my hands by the wrists and told me to calm down and stop what I was doing. At this point, my mind was cycling through every comic book and fictional character I knew, trying to find a way to escape. I knew that I had a multitool in my pocket, that if I could get out, I, being at this point, the brilliant Tony Stark, would be able to use in such a way as to escape. The guard told me that no, he would not let me reach in my pocket, and that he was going to take me into his office to wait picking up by my father. I sat in his office, and he tried to ask me what I had been doing and thinking, but I couldn't explain it, and instead ended up talking about fantasy novels such as the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan, that I was a huge fan of, and he also had some familiarity with.

Anyway, my dad picked me up that night and took me back to his boat in the docks, and I had a curry that was the most delicious freaking thing I have ever tasted in my life. They had put air-fresheners in my room, and I was afraid that they were trying to drug me, to get me to go to sleep. So I opened all the windows, and sat upstairs until they went to bed, at which point I left the boat, and embarked on a second insane destination, this time the Bristol International Airport about 10 miles out of the city. (I think my reasoning was something along the lines of, if trains didn't work, then clearly I should go and get a plane.)

So I spent the night walking up the long hill, with blistered feet, pretending I was Johnny Cash on a love walk, to reach my love, June Carter. I remember the street lights were bright, really bright, and as if on cue they dimmed as I looked up at them. I remember thinking that somehow they were monitoring my body temperature with an advanced thermal imaging camera from a satellite, and they were adjusting the street lights to suit my body and mood. I would lay down on the grass from exhaustion, look up at the lights, and talk into a silver metal USB stick I had picked up and had convinced myself was a communicator with these people watching me. I would talk into it, and the lights would blink in affirmation to my questions, and when I had rested enough, they would burn bright and hot, and I would get up and keep walking.

Eventually I had got to the top of series of seemingly never-ending hills only to find that the road continued upwards. I lay down on the grass of the side of the big water reservoir, and looked at the stars and wondered when the CIA were going to come and pick me up so I could join up with them and fly across the atlantic in their X-Jet which I was convinced they had. I was going to get a suit, and a watch, and somehow go to San Francisco and meet up with The Donnas in a bar and take one of them to my new apartment and fuck them.

Anyway, eventually I was getting cold so I sat inside a horrible, crusty old bus shelter and waited for the limo that never came. After a while I was getting resentful of all the cars and trucks passing, so I sat on the other side of a statue so they couldnt see me and spend a fucking freezing and horrendous night at the side of the road.

Well this has rambled on long enough already, so to cut a long story short, eventually in the morning I walked into a plant works and asked for my dad, who I was convinced this was his office. Luckily due to my father being somewhat well known in the city, they got hold of him and picked me up, and I had a bath and changed into clean clothes and a doctor came and took me to the hospital. I spent a week in the high-security ward, bouncing off the walls and experiencing every kind of everything you could ever imagine, I played my whole life out and every variation of my life out that could ever exist. After that week I spent 3 weeks in the regular ward, the last couple weeks of it mainly waiting for a place in supported accomodation. I met a young girl who had been in the hospital for a while, and we kind of clicked in a cool way. She called me her "big bear", and I called her my "little fox". Never got her number or anything, I always wondered what happened to her, because she was a real comfort in a time of just ridiculous everything.

Anyway, super long story shorter, I was recently taken off all my remaining medications, and am due to be discharged from the mental health service this september due to not having any relapses at all. I've never told anyone the story to this extent, and like I said I had to cut a lot of it down. And it's absolutely insane that i'm preparing to publish it on the internet, for the whole world to see. Absolutely ridiculous.

But to be honest, I just started typing, and it just started coming out, and I thought I may as well keep going. I have had an absolutely rotten couple of fucking weeks, with my brother coming back from 6 months of a gap year, and ranting and raving at me because I had left his computer half assembled due to cleaning it, and his desk, and his tangle of cables under his desk and laying out his uni applications neatly on his desk. I have been trying to reach out, to old friends, some successfully (you know who you are), and some unsuccessfully, who seem to think that the fact that I have been speaking to them or their boyfriend, or showing up at his pub, is some kind of really suspicious behaviour.

Yeah! You know what, last time I felt like this, you were probably right to be suspicious at what was going on with me, though its not like you made an effort to actually you know, come and see me, or talk to me on the phone, or any of that. You shied away, because you were afraid of what might have been happening to me, and you could not deal with it. And again, this time you were extremely suspicious of what I was doing trying to contact you. I posted a series of 10 or 11 videos on my facebook page that I felt summed me up, and affirmed me as who I am as a person today. And none of my 41 friends on facebook commented! Not a single word!! The fuck is wrong with you people?

A pro tip people, if there is someone you know who you think might be having a mental breakdown, do not shy away from that. Do not be afraid to talk to them or be suspicious of their intentions, because that is not going. to fucking. help. matters. Talk to them, ring them up, go round to their house and see if they are ok. Ya dig?

I know you're ashamed of what happened to me in 2008, and I know you are ashamed and embarrassed of what you think might be happening to me again, now. Well I can assure you that this is not insanity speaking. It is fucking ANGER, anger at everyone who refuses to listen to me or even try and give a fuck what I am thinking or feeling. It is anger at having been turned away by almost everyone real in your life, turning to the internet and having enormous, pages long fucking threads on technology forums where you are angry at the last space shuttle having flown, and the JWST funding being cut, and you try to express those feelings, in every way you can think of, and it all gets shot back right in your fucking face. Yeah Glorious, fuck you buddy. You ain't shit you fucking pedantic PRICK.

It is anger at trying to reach out to an internet community you have been a part of for over 6 years, but yet do not really know anyone on there except a couple of people on msn. Trying to reach out to those people, your thread is deleted because it might pose a risk of a personal information leak. Oh no! Heaven forFUCKING FEND we actually get to know the people behind the screen names we have been conversing with the past 6 years.

It's anger at being dismissed out of hand as some dumb kid who doesn't know anything or has nothing to offer. Getting into an argument with that kid without even reading the fucking comments he posted on your article and was asking you to read. It's anger at being laughed at by all her friends and followers and hangers on, when I was just trying to put my fucking viewpoint out there because I am sick and fucking tired of being ignored by everyone.

And finally, I am fucking apoplectic at the fact that I have a friend whose daughter's 6 year birthday it is today, yet is not allowed to see their daughter, due to personal mistakes and confusion and distrust and everything. I think this person is the most honest, warmest and nicest person I have ever met, someone I can talk to to and share my feelings without being laughed at or met with blank looks. And I think it is an absolute fucking disgrace how society treats this person, how people on the internet treat this person, and how the child's mother treats this person, refusing to allow access to see their child on her 6th birthday.
I actually ran a little test by them, I asked if they would believe me if said that I played the part of Bugsy Malone in our Year 6 school production of Bugsy Malone. They said, yes of course, why wouldn't I? And I mean that just fucking summed it up for me right there. This person who I have never met in real life, and I only speak to across thousands of miles and the internet, has more faith in me than every single one of my real life so called friends. Do you think they would believe me if I told them that? Would they fuck, they are all from after that time and simply cannot envision a different version of me then the one they know and grew up with.

I have finally fucking had it with you fucking intolerant selfish twats. I don't give a fuck. I know my family and my friends and everyone is ashamed of me, but I am not, and I can finally say that. You don't want to know how long its taken me to say that. And this is absolutely not another psychotic episode, the fuck do you take me for, i'm not gonna let that happen again. After I have decided to post this or not, im going to turn off the computer and watch a fucking movie, in the imaginary make believe land of hollywood where people have hope left and do not all treat each other with such fucking intolerance and hostility.

Battlefield 3

2011-07-14T13:40:00.007Z

First, what was. Dice made an incredible game with BF2, it was everything you could ever want in an online FPS.

They gave us this, and it was wonderful:

And we turned it into this, which was also wonderful :D

And my favourite, the beautiful and beguiling AH-1Z to some P.O.D.

I used to play with this guy, Champuss, who is the gunner in this video. I was a hell of a lot better than that pilot though, he spends way too long close to the ground almost stationary, and would have been raped by the dudes I used to play against on the EA UK and Pornostars servers.

He was fucking god tier, it was any pilot's dream to have him as your gunner. I did manage to kill him a few times, but mainly in jets as it was pretty much impossible to beat him in a chopper battle.

Here's my stats, I got to Colonel rank, and figured that would be a good place to leave it, seeing as everyone I knew and most of the good servers had quit by that point. I did reinstall it once, a year or two later, but it was like a million gig install at that point, and every successive patch had made it run and play worse, so I didn't stick around.

http://bf2s.com/player/48949941/

And now, the future. I am so excited for Battlefield 3, I hope it lives up to all the potential that is being shown in the trailers, the graphics and engine look incredible, and the gameplay looks really fun with a lot of variation, and tiptoeing that fine line between realism and fun perfectly, that the best PC Battlefields have always done.

Next, I would desperately like to see some multiplayer footage, also what they are doing with the aerial vehicles. Tanks are cool and all, and rolling down a map in an armour column is certainly a fun time. The thing is though, the flyboys will come along and fuck up your day just like that, given the chance. And the jets and helis are where you get the 50+ kill streaks that make you feel like a fucking demigod for 10 minutes :D

I hope the handling of the aerial vehicles is complex, and tricky to master, with none of the appalling hand-holding and training wheels of the hover things from Battlefield 2142. I hope there is a good balance between the aircraft, rather than the situation in BF2, where there was the god tier of the J-10, the mid tier of the F/A-18 and the Mig-29, and the waste of database space that was the F-35. Literally, the best use for that thing was on Wake Island, where you could load early, grab an F-35 and full reheat towards the Chinese airbase- if you were lucky you could bail out and HALO onto a jet or heli. If you were even more lucky, there would not be an anti-tank enemy within range to kill you! That was some fun shit.

I want to see the Blackhawk restored to its former glory before the 1.2 patch, I want to see those gatling guns act like they do in real life, that is, rip everything they touch to shreds. I want to see the epic healing/repairing/resupplying/mine-laying Blackhawks with a full squad inside turning the tide of battle. I want to see TV-guided missiles from the attack helos that do not magically run out of fuel and explode after 450 metres.

I want to see foot combat that is fast-paced and fluid, yet still retains all the classic Battlefield traits such as crouch, prone, and the increased accuracy these stances provide, and for that additional accuracy to be vital to suceed. I don't want to see dudes with AK-47s being able to pull the dive and spray trick, and I don't want to see LMGs with instant pinpoint accuracy. I want to see medics with a defined role, and under absolutely no circumstances will I accept the cover/regenerating health paradigm that is the favourite of the Xbox shooters. Seriously, that point is huge to me. You could build the best fucking Battlefield game ever, and if it has self-regenerating health in any way (save for medics holding medkits), then I will not play this game.

I want to see a squad and team system that is intuitive, and easily adaptable to changing conditions on the battlefield. I want to see some way to re-create the hot-swapping squad leaders thing, maybe to not the extent it was, but certainly not to the other extreme of being able to kill the squad leader and the squad is effectively fucked.

I want to see patches developed exclusively by the main development studio and team for the game, not palmed off to some substandard contractors that have no idea how to program or balance the game as in BF2.

I want to see a full and comprehensive stats system, and the API fully and freely available to third parties so they can make stuff like BF2S and so on.

I want to see all this and more. Dice could have an amazing game on their hands, proving the doubters wrong who say that PC gaming is dead and that all anyone will buy is Call of Duty sequels and clones on the Xbox 360.

I'm going to predict, here and now, that Battlefield 3, will upon release, shatter every record Modern Warfare 2 ever made. And it will be ten times the game to boot.

Welcome to duty.

Eve 2011

2011-03-10T17:19:00.022Z

Just gonna post a few screens from my current/recent playing. Joined a new corp, Stimulus in Rote Kapelle alliance- they seem like a pretty switched-on bunch of dudes, though targets and so on have been a bit lacking unfortunately. Still, gonna stick with them for a bit and see what happens.

Oh, and I guess i'll sort out the links and stuff on the sidebar if I can be bothered.

Messing around in a Dram

New character creator

Dat ass. It is remarkably juicy considering the fact that she has NO WEIGHT lol

Clothed. Sadly I forgot to save pics during my main's character creation, oh well. If CCP release Incarna in the summer, then I will be able to show you her smexy body.

I did take screens of what she looked like on the login screen though. This is first version.

And second version. I kinda preferred the first one :(

Cloakfagging it up with the monkeys

They definitely don't have enough bubbles protecting that TCU

My ill-fated cargo for SHC Minmatar Night

Commence hurricane of Hurricanes

Hurricane of Hurricanes gathering strength

Conga forming

More conga

Ultimate conga

Sadly, despite superior conga capabilities, the 80 man Cane blob lost to a 200 man Drake blob. But at least they looked cool while doing it.

Silly highsec fight

Brick Squad being terrible

Cynabals are cool

I like the thruster pods the best

The Gathering Storm- Book Twelve of the Wheel of Time

2009-11-05T02:11:00.005Z

The first new Wheel of Time book in four years, and it is (sadly) with a new author, Brandon Sanderson, author of the Mistborn and Alcatraz fantasy series. Robert Jordan's boots are indeed large ones to fill, but I can tell you now, you need not worry. Sanderson is a supremely gifted writer. And yes, it begins with the wind whistling from the mountains, down to the plains etc. And they still say things like "Light!" or "Burn me!"

And as this is only a week after the book's release, don't worry, I won't give away any spoilers. I almost ran into spoilers when flicking past the Wikipedia entry on the book, it gives away the entire plot!

The book clips along at a right old pace, yet never feels rushed. The chapters are shorter, the changes of perspective faster, yet you never feel disorientated or annoyed at leaving a favourite character so soon, as you will return to them soon enough (well that is if your favourite character is Rand, like me!). But even the smaller characters, like Gawain, Egwene, Siuan, Nynaeve, Cadsuane, Aviendha, Tuon etc all get plenty of airtime- with one notable exception- Elayne is only mentioned in the book, we don't get to have a chapter about her. Presumably he will get to her in the next book, after all she is carrying Rand's baby. Of the other two ta'veren, Mat gets a decent amount of pages, Perrin less so. This book is very much about Rand, perhaps half of it is devoted to him.

The characters and individual threads (in the pattern ;) are fully fleshed out, indeed they feel very real and substantial. What is more, they feel right, somehow. They act, speak and think just the right way as they should, not diverging from their previously established archetypes unless demanded from the story. The dialogue seems almost perfectly balanced with descriptions and thought bubbles. He occasionally forgoes complete transcriptions and relies on a sort of precis of what was said- not in a rushed way- more of a 'skip the boring parts' way.

Indeed the pacing, along with the frequency of action, reminds you of no-one so much as a younger Jordan himself. But this is like a turbocharged Jordan, an energised writer not seen since the earlier books. Sanderson writes a bit like some kind of post-apocalyptic clone of Jordan, but one right at the height of his powers. Well, to call him a clone is unfair, he is certainly his own man, has his own writing style, although it is very smooth, the transition here. You could almost forget it was a different writer, but the brilliant turns of plot and just amazingly readable text, even in the slow patches soon remind you differently. I mean, he even made Aes Sedai interesting, and that's something I thought i'd never see after the drudgery that was Crossroads of Twilight.

While Sanderson is certainly a gifted writer and has been given much free rein, and indeed he must have had to fill in large portions of the story, the overarching story is still very much Jordan's. The main points in the story, and especially the ending, really feel like Jordan writing- they have a great feel of him- and you can almost see his invisible hand writing those sections. And of course all the main characters and their stories were written by Jordan.

So to sum up; The Gathering Storm is a brilliant, wonderful, not just fantasy but great book in any genre. If you're a fan of the series, buy this without hesitation. If you haven't read the previous books, read them, then get this.

[Art by Seamas Gallagher. You can see his blog here, and particularly check on this post, which has some fabulous pictures of the WoT characters.]

The Spy

2008-08-16T01:12:00.005Z

So I suddenly had an urge to write one of those fancy Game Design & Balance posts from SHC about this, don't know why. I am banned from the forum at the moment, for posting a link to a Dark Knight rip (stupid Clamdong), so I shall post it here.

Ok. The spy.

The spy is one of my favourite classes to play as in TF2. It is one of the only classes that can utilize asymmetric warfare when conventional attacks fail, and outplay the skill level of your team. (The others are Scout, if you are good, and possibly Sniper). A good Spy can thoroughly disrupt the other team, killing unaware enemies with ease, killing key links such as a medic with an ubercharge, and demolish a turtle strategy of Engineers or Snipers. However there are still numerous problems with the class.

I will start with the most basic.

The knife

The butterfly knife is great at it's main role, that is back or side-stabbing an enemy for an instant kill. However, the non-crit damage from it is awful, the worst melee damage in the game by far. Many times I have gone in for a side-stab of a sniper in a corner, and as you stab he quarter-turns to one side and you only score a pathetic normal hit. Then he guns you down with his smg.
The non-crit damage from the knife needs to be boosted.

The cloak

The improved cloaking device II, wait wrong game... The cloak is the key strength of the spy. It allows him to sneak behind enemy lines and bypass his weaknesses of slow speed and low hp. The problem lies with the recharge time; it is simply too long. Assuming you get to a safe spot to rest for a while, you will have used up much of your cloak bar, which you then need to recharge. This increases the likelihood of an enemy stumbling into you, or at the very least slows your stealth ambitions down significantly.

The cloak recharge time needs to be reduced. I also think it should be replenished from friendly dispensers or spawn room lockers. Every other class when they retreat to these areas, can be back at full strength almost instantly, yet the spy can do nothing to speed up the process.

As for the total cloak timer length, while I would not object to it being increased, I don't think it necessarily needs to be. While it is a bit of a stretch to traverse some areas under cloak, for the most part it is just about long enough.

The disguises

So from the off there are at least three disguises a spy can't really use. The scout disguise, because he is given away very quickly by his too-slow moving speed and lack of double-jump ability. The heavy, because making yourself that slow does not help you at all, and the medic, because people will wonder why you are not healing them (and you display no Ubercharge status).

Now adding to this is the idiocy that when you pick a disguise, your nametag is randomly chosen from one player on the other team. If that player sees you, he will instantly know that you are a spy, as of course there can only be one instance of himself on the server! It's basically a free kill for the player that spots an enemy spy with their own nametag.
I would fix this by making it so that players only see another teammate's name displayed when they look at a disguised enemy spy. Of course if you saw two teammates side by side with the same name, then you would know that one of them was a spy, but the situation would not occur too often, and it would not immediately pinpoint the enemy spy the way the current system does.

Passing through enemies

Currently a disguised or even cloaked spy cannot pass through enemies. If you try to walk through a teammate and you bump off, this is a dead giveaway to all but the most green novice. Similarly, if you come to a sudden stop and see a flash of colour, that is your cue to light up your gun and score an easy kill on the disgruntled spy.
This would not be such a problem, were it not for a fundamental flaw in TF2's map design and mapping tools (besides the over-abundance of desert/industrial textures). There are simply not enough nooks and crannies for a spy to hide in, and there are not enough alternate routes. The average map has at best two or sometimes three tunnels or passageways between main areas, and most of them are too narrow to allow a spy to sidle past an oncoming enemy unnoticed.

That spy has to either hop into one of the rare "passing places" that allow the enemy to go past, or back up all the way into the entrance and waste most of his cloak doing so. It is one of the major weaknesses in the current implementation of the spy, that there are so few routes to get behind the enemy team, as they come in waves out of their spawn in a linear path to the front line. Of course you learn to wait for a lull in the traffic, and move then, but you are always just a corner away from bumping straight into an enemy and being completely wide open.
Certain points in the game it is extremely tricky to get behind the enemy into a good position. It generally gets harder on the last point of a stage, as the enemy are more bunched up, but it is usally still doable. Otherwise you have to wait for them to walk past you before you can strike, but by then they are probably under fire from the rest of your team anway.
One particular bad point is the last cap on the last stage of dustbowl. The defending team's spawn doors open directly onto a flat wall, and there is pretty much no way for a spy to get there and decloak unseen. Consequently the cap generally devolves into a stupid slugfest that needs a quad-ubercharge by the attackers to even break through. But I digress.

I would make the spy able to pass through enemies while cloaked. This would help greatly with moving behind enemies and around the map.

Ok, that's about it for now. Happy backstabbing!!

Art by Clickmon of DA.

Eve-O

2007-07-06T13:11:00.000Z

So I thought i'd post something, seeing as I haven't for ages. So, at the moment I am mainly playing Eve Online with the odd round of BF2 on the side.

I've got 2 battleships at the moment, one Tempest (2nd tier) which I have set up as a close tackler and damage-dealer for pvp.

And a Maelstrom (3rd tier) which is set up with arty and I am using to grind out level 4 combat missions for ISK.

Skills-wise i'm getting my shield and cap skills to 4 or 5, then
Large Projectile Turret and Minmatar Battleship to 4, and a
couple of sensor and drone stuff that I didn't get very far in.
After that i'm going to train Minmatar Frigate to 5 and look at Interceptors, or possibly Covert Ops.

My corp, PCTI, have left 5th Column alliance as we felt it wasn't really going anywhere fast. We are in talks with Invictus who have about 10 systems in the drone regions in 0.0 space. The thought of going to 0.0 at this stage of my skills and resources is a little scary, having only just got into battleships a few weeks ago, but I reckon I'll be alright. I mean, I haven't outgrown empire by any means yet, but if the corp goes, I will too because I like them, and the potential for growth is a lot better out there apparently. And it will be certainly interesting to see how it works, there are only 2 stations for like a 20-jump range! Also there should be better pvp available; at the moment all we get in Molden Heath is pirates coming through in ones or twos who you can hardly ever catch, or enormous gatecamps by big alliances with capitals, which we can't really match up to.

o/

BF2 1.4

2006-09-06T17:51:00.002Z

So patch 1.4 came out today. Here is the official changelog.

GAMEPLAY TWEAKS

- The vehicle drop has been modified to help prevent exploits such as blocking enemy vehicles, destroying vehicles and commander assets, or as an alternative to artillery.
- C4 tossing distance has been reduced.
- A prone->crouch delay has been added.

BUG FIXES

- Fixed the Linux server hangs when trying to load a Special Forces Co-Op map.
- Another attempt at fixing the Red/Blue nametag bug.
- Fixed the missing server info on the map briefing screen.
- Fixed the server browser issues with updating info.
- Fixed the filter by maps size option in the server browser.
- Fixed a low reproducibility crash bug related to the vehicle drop.
- Fixed a crash in Co-op after a player is revived without a kit.
- Fixed a server crash on Linux 32 when trying to rotate maps in Co-op Mode.
- Fixed the occasional red distance marker appearing on the ground.
- Fixed the bug that caused the player's arms to become invisible when switching weapons.
- Co-Op bot console commands now function on local servers.
- Fixed the excessive damage taken by the Muscle Car.
- Adjusted the minimum number of players to start the round on ranked servers.
The new values for 16, 32 and 64 players are 6, 8 and 8 respectively.
- Re-enabled unlocks on unranked servers.
- Commander options are no longer available whilst commander is dead.
- Fixed bug where a spawn point is shown as selected when it is not if player has spawned in during the preview round.
- Co-Op (Local Server) - Fixed the issue where no other players may join the server if the server host is kicked and banned.
- Ranked Servers now force unlocks.
- Added support for multiple gamemodes in single maplist for mods.

Notice how the bug fixes list is three times longer than the tweaks one. Of the tweaks- you can't drop cars on buildings anymore, this is good, although it was quite fun to crush unwary snipers!
Reducing C4 throwing distance even more is stupid. You basically have to be like kissing the tank now to make a pack stick. Someone tell Dice that C4 can actually be thrown without detonating, it's not like a Molotov or something.
The prone->crouch (and standing->prone delay) which also makes your accuracy worse while doing it is kind of annoying, it makes for more deaths by some grunt with an AK-101 running round the corner because you can't get up quickly enough. Also it messes up the Support kit, cos you need to be prone to get any kind of accuracy with the guns, so you will die more while going prone. I think it was done to stop prone-spamming like this, but it's fairly unnessary as nobody does it and its not that hard to kill someone doing it anway.

Of the bug fixes, the main ones were server crashes, where your connection would freeze and then drop you back to the server list, and random CTDs.

The tanks are 'flying' because they carry on sliding along the screen
in whatever direction and height etc they were going!

These have been mainly fixed I think, I did get one server crash in an afternoon's play (although it may have been the server's fault) and some people said they got connection problems on bf2s.com. I'll see if I get any more.
The missing server info bug is also fixed, that was q. annoying.

The patch also added a new map: 'Road to Jalalabad', or Road to Jalalalalalalalalalalalalalabad as it's really called. This map is like a cross between Sharqi with the open ground at the start, then like a wider Karkand. It's got a lot of tall buildings, with some good sniper positions, which is a plus. The art side of things is kind of lazy in that they've re-used a lot of assets from previous maps such as the mosque from Mashtuur, the hotel from Sharqi, and a lot of the generic buildings are from those levels, albeit with a few more ladders. There are some cool touches though such as flaming wrecks of trucks, APCs, planes etc littering the streets.

The main problem with the map is that it's quite easy for the USMC to just roll across the lake crossing and cut right into the heart of the city, ignoring the outer flags. It's pretty hard to defend both sides at once, and once they get a flag in the middle, very hard to contain, and prevent a load more flags falling. I mean, it's always been like that in these defense maps, but none of Karkand, Sharqi, Warlord, Mass Destruction etc have this massive shortcut right into the heart of the enemy defenses. I think they should either let the MEC start with the lake flag or get rid of the lake crossing, because the available terrrain around the road is wide enough to let FAVs zip past defenders anyway.

You will see this a lot.

Okay, i'm off to snipe some unsuspecting fools...

Yugioh

2006-09-03T10:10:00.000Z

Wow, long time no post.

Anyway, been playing Yugioh cards weekly with Joe, Louie and Matt, it's fun. Here's my new Horus deck, for those of you that are interested.

Horus Spell/Trap Control

Total cards: 42

Monsters: 20

Horus the Black Flame Dragon LV8 x2
Horus the Black Flame Dragon LV6 x3

Horus the Black Flame Dragon LV4 x3
Luster Dragon x3
Goblin Elite Attack Force x2
Breaker the Magical Warrior
Twin-Headed Behemoth
Element Dragon
D.D. Warrior Lady
Magician of Faith
Night Assailant
Sangan

Spells: 19
Level Up! x3
Graveyard in the Fourth Dimension x2
Level Modulation
Heavy Storm
Stamping Destruction x2
Graceful Charity
Magical Mallet
Premature Burial
Order to Charge
Smashing Ground
My Body as a Shield
Nobleman of Crossout
Book of Moon
Different Dimension Capsule x2
Poison of the Old Man

Traps: 3
Royal Decree x3

So the basic idea is to get Horus LV4 out as quickly as possible, DDC helps with that, then level up to Horus LV8 with its effect or with Level Up if needed. Then with Horus LV8 negating the activation of all the opponent's spells, I can play Royal Decree to negate and destroy all traps, creating a semi lock that will be hard for them to get out of.
Sangan will be used to search for DDWL, MoF or Night Assailant, and Night Assailant can special summon MoF from the graveyard to reuse her effect. Poison of the Old Man is a little insurance against My Body as a Shield's 1500 LP cost.

I'm going to get King Dragun soon hopefully, he negates all effects targeted at dragons and can special summon a dragon per turn. I can summon him easily with Fusilier Dragon and Metamorphosis, although Meta is restricted to one unfortunately.

Update: So I played against Joe yesterday, it did quite well, although as expected Horus LV4 was being a little bitch and hiding in my deck quite a lot, so I need to add another DDC. The Horus LV8s seemed to end up in my hand often, where they're useless unless you have a LV4 or 6, or you can dump them and then Level Modulation them. I'm going to try adding a Lighten The Load or Magical Mallet to shuffle them back into my deck. Also Mystic Swordsman LV2 is too weak... he nearly always dies the turn after killing one facedown, not really worth it. Updated the deck.

Urgh

2006-04-21T17:23:00.000Z

Wow, haven't posted for a month.. Still playing a lot of BF2, i'm 2nd Lieutenant now. J-rock.

Anyway, I can't really seem to write anything, well I haven't really tried. I guess I can't start.
Depressing. Spending tooo much time on the pc, bleh...

Anyway i'll make more of an effort to write something this weekend. Wish me luck :(

Yours,
A dead person.

In dreams begin responsibilities

2006-03-07T09:17:00.000Z

This is a great review of 'Gideon's Daughter' by Hermione Eyre, from The Independent on Sunday (05/3/06); I couldn't find it online, so I copied it from the paper.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Watching Gideon's Daughter, the latest TV play by Stephen Poliakoff, was like going through REM. At the end of it I felt obscurely refreshed and full of renewed understanding. Only, as after a dream, it took some effort to remember why. I felt as if I had gone under with its first long seamless tracking shot, which glided over several bunches of flowers lying end-to-end on the pavement, panning up slowly to show dozens, hundreds, thousands of bouquets covering the ground - a field of flowers laid, of course, for Princess Diana. With this one shot, Poliakoff regressed his audience to 1997, to its strange sentimentality, it new touchy-feely government.

Flowers then peeked out of almost every shot of the film, which had as its central character Gideon Warner (played by Bill Nighty at his best and most restrained), a New Labour PR svengali going through a breakdown. His office is stuffed with designer tulips in vases full of glass pebbles. His daughter's dress has a print of blown poppies. He makes cherry blossoms fall out of the sky over London as part of an aerial PR stunt. The flowers represent the superficiality of his world of spin, cut flowers being the ultimate symbol of style without substance. Good job, then, that Gideon meets the down-to-earth Stella (a magnificent Miranda Richardson) who takes him to stand in a field of thistles outside an industrial estate.

Thus the PR supremo is redeemed, and quits his job running the Millennium Dome. "What a hole he left behind him" the chorus-figure Sneath (Robert Lindsay) comments dryly.
The flower motif also relates to the play's other preoccupation: a parent's loss of a child. The blossoms must fall, whether to death (Stella's little boy died in a cycling accident) or to university (Gideon's Sphinx-like daughter, played beautifully by Emily Blunt, wants to go on a gap year). There's a rather crass equation of the two in Robert Lindsay's line, "When they go to university, it's like a death, a little death", but then these kinds of condensations, these moral equivalencies, do occur in dreams.
And with its richness in content, its hallucinatory colours (Stella wears pea-green gloves) and hypnotic, tranquil pace, Gideon's Daughter was a dream. A very good one. You would have been better off watching this than having a deep sleep, which sounds rude, but is in fact the most sincere compliment I can think of.

It's like 'Through the Nerdhole'

2006-03-04T09:21:00.001Z

I was bored a while ago and took some pics of my room and flat, and some of a lego model I made. It's an approximation of the Delphinus ship from Skies of Arcadia,
but with Ramirez's ship colours as I didn't have enough silver and blue bits. Also the Moonstone cannon folds from the underside, as I couldn't make a decent sliding mechanism (not to mention splitting the nose in half), and I added some solar panels that fold out from the sides for fun. It took me about 3 days to make, and then I spent a few hours making it shorter to make it look better. I think it's really good, the only thing I don't like is that the hull is bulky and square apart from at the front, because the solar panel folding mechanism takes up a fair bit of space. You get the idea of a curve from the front though.

The other pics are fairly self-explanatory, if a bit self-indulgent. Meh. Sorry for the quality, they were taken by some ancient Kodak 2MP wood-fired camera. Pixorz.

See you!

BF Tooie

2006-03-01T18:15:00.001Z

I appear to be hopelessly addicted to this game. I haven't played a game this much since... well probably Smash Bros and Perfect Dark on the N64. Used to do 10-hour multiplayer sessions on those... ah good times...

Anyway, joined a sort of unofficial clan, TUS or The Usual Suspects. Shout out to Snake, Revan, Doodle, BigMick and the rest. It's a lot of fun; we do stuff like one us nabs a plane at the start and parachutes into the enemy uncap base, then we spawn on them and proceed to wreak baseraping havoc. We snipe them out of their chopper on the helipad or while they're waiting for a plane, c4 the assets, lay claymore traps and try and nab the chopper or tank. A lot of the time the people we kill get really pissed off and come and get us in force, while the commander is wasting UAVs and artillery on us- but most of the time we survive through hotswapping the squadleader so we can always spawn. It's so funny having like 5 or 6 guys coming back time and time again to try and get us, but they can't stand up to 4 sniper rifles from hidden hillsides... :D

Patch 1.2... ugh. Basically choppers are fucked; their armour is super-weak now and AA missiles are massively improved in terms of accuracy and lock-on time. Also the attack chopper's rockets payload is reduced to 8x4 from 14x4 and TV-Guided Missile range is reduced. Planes are also subject to weaker armour, dogfights are now just whoever gets behind and a missile lock. Blackhawks and Cows are next to useless as they're the slowest aerial vehicle and the guns are crap now as well. It's just ridiculous that noobs can hop in an AA and take down pilots so easily who had to spend hours getting good. AA needed to be improved, but not that much. Really annoying, as I was just getting good at the attack chopper, I mean it's still ok, you just die a lot more, and I can't play Super Blackhawk Midair Repair Man anymore, it's too weak now. :(

Good bits about the patch are that mines don't activate from teammates, and there is a great new sniper rifle I want to get. Still love the G36C and E.
Played Special Forces a bit more and i'm finding it better now that i've learned the maps and found some decent snipe holes and where enemies will be coming from etc. I like defending the back stairs on Devils Perch, you have like 30 seconds to kill people trying to get up them (easy) and if they get past then they can taste some c4! Also I found a good sniping spot on Ghost Town; on a bank overlooking a couple of flags, you can get some good shots and it's far enough away so they don't often know where you are.

Okay that's it for now.
See you!

Hostile slick inbound, over!

2006-02-14T16:19:00.002Z

Hej.
My guess I should do one of those post things. Well I don't exactly have much to write about really, kinda down atm, can't really be bothered to do much or write anything. Been playing copious amounts of BF2, i'm now a Staff Sergeant. I've got a few decent awards and stuff now, trying to get the Veteran combat badges for each class, and stuff like knife and pistol combat. I love the G36E unlock for Medic, it's really powerful and more accurate than the Spec Ops' G36C, if a bit worse at close quarters because it's burst instead of semi-auto. You get tons of points as medic, and it's fun reviving people. Been playing with a few regulars, they're really good; and it's so much more fun with talking and a good squad. It's quite suprising actually how few people use VOiP on it, because it's a ton faster than typing and allows far, far more complex strategies than using the Q command or the squadleader just placing an attack or defend marker on the map and everyone dumly running along to the spot.
Once we were defending a flag on Dalian Plant, and an enemy tank rolls in. I was the only Anti-Tank in the squad, the rest were Spec Ops and Medics. I fired a SRAW at it (takes about 3 to kill one) to distract it, while the others C4ed it.
Also it's a ton easier to do stuff like get a good Blackhawk setup with VOiP, you get mostly ignored if you tell people what to do by typing.

Funzorz. I got the Special Forces expansion pack with BF2, but I haven't played very much of that; most of the maps are 'meat grinder' tightly-packed city ones where it's just like spawn-death from sniper-spawn-artillery on your head-spawn in front of a tank-spawn-assault rifle magazine unloaded in your face... Whichever dumbass decided we needed grunt-combat-time needs to be beaten.

On another note, I finished my month trial of Eve Online, and I decided not to subscribe. I don't really want to spend that much dosh on a game, and it was kinda slow anyway. I didn't like how when you buy a new part for your ship you also need to buy and then wait hours for the skill(s) to train before you could use it.

See you!

DS Lite

2006-01-30T10:07:00.000Z

Well, it's been a good few months since the DS was out, so I guess it's time for a redesign.
Apart from looking like the bastard spawn of an iPod, it looks quite good, with larger and prettier screens, and the body is also smaller and lighter. They're also tying the looks into the Revolution: the d-pad has the same markings and the general look is similar to the Rev controller.
It is too soon for this though, the SP was released a good 2 years after the GBA; I would be quite pissed off if i'd bought a DS at full price recently. I think Nintendo also recently quashed rumours of a redesign, which is slightly underhand.

The point is, they should revise their hardware before manufacture, not test out a prototype on the public (while raking in the early adopters' money) and then announce a new version. It's the equivalent to launching hardware and then slashing the price by £100 within a few months like they did with N64, (and MS with Xbox, but they did offer free games) it lowers your reputation as a solid, trustworthy company. I mean, that's a fair part of Nintendo's appeal- you expect better from them.

Google Video

2006-01-25T09:26:00.000Z

Now i'm sure this is not new for you lot, but wow. As you may know I just got broadband, then I stumbled across this, i'm blown away. The videos aren't very high quality, but they're good enough, and it is only a beta version. The videos range from everything from smooth press-release style ones by companies, to fanboy-made compilations of stuff they got off IGN, but the range is amazing. Here are some fun ones I found (been mostly looking at games vids).

An advert for the first Zelda on NES, featuring appalling 80's white-boy rap.

The Revolution trailer, you may have already seen this, but I thought it was really well done and showcases the new controller in a clever and funny way.

Some nerds in a choir singing NES songs, very funny.

Again, this was on the net before, on the original site; Smash my Xbox (.com) but oh so satisfying. And thank god there are some guys out there not suckered into paying $499 for a buggy, unfinished hardware launch with crap games. I love the part where the guy nonchalantly walks out of a hardware store with a massive sledgehammer slung over his shoulder! And rather telling that the guys in the line are playing PSPs, know what i'm saying?

Finally, some emo retards who need a baseball bat/mouth interface.

Post any cool or funny vids you have found on the comments. Cheers!

New pc bits!!

2006-01-20T09:27:00.001Z

Getting them today; 2x1GB DDR400 and an ATi Radeon 9600 Pro. That's probably upgraded my Sempron 2600+ as far as it will go, so i'll have to buss out some X2 goodness next time.

Still, this setup will play recent games pretty well at medium/low settings i'm guessing, so is plenty good enough for now. I've got BF2+ Special Forces and Eve Online to play on it, should keep me busy for a nice long time! :)
Also combined with 2mbps and Azureus, whoa! That HD is gonna fill up pretty fast!

Ok, see you.

Tales of Symphonia

2006-01-18T14:54:00.002Z

Format: GC| Developer: Namco Tales Studios| Publisher: Namco| Released (PAL UK): 19/11/04
Spoilers!!!

Tales of Symphonia tells the story of Collette, the 'Chosen' of the world of Sylvarant, and her friends Lloyd and Raine, who set out to regenerate the failing world by praying seals scattered throughout the land at temples. Once Collette has prayed at all the seals, she will awaken as an angel and heal the world. However; once they get to the last seal it turns out that the angels aren't angels, and are in fact a shadowy organisation of mortals endowed with the power of the 'Cruxis Crystals'. It's then revealed that there is another world; Tethe'alla, that is linked to Sylvarant by mana flow. The two worlds are competing for energy- one is always in decline and by regenerating one world, you would kill the other. Lloyd and party set off to Tethe'alla to find a way to break the link between them and find out about the 'angels'.

The story is quite engaging intially and to the middle section, and has moments of real pathos, like when a character is showing off the Tethe'alla bridge which he proudly explains is powered by 10,000 energy crystals called Exspheres. What he doesn't know is that a human life was used to produce each one.

So the gameplay is typical console RPG fare; travel between towns, go through dungeons and beat the boss, level up and learn new skills and then buy better weapons and armour from your battle winnings.

What isn't typical however, is the battle system which operates on a realtime basis. Once you enter a battle; you directly control one character, while the other three are computer-controlled. You can set up fairly complex strategies for them such as guard settings, all-out attack, reserve magic, heal and support, or general attack. You can also set them to target enemies who are targeting your lowest health players, or to follow your lead, or to do their own thing.
Play as a melee fighter and it plays like a fast, simplified beat-em up- with standard attacks and blocks, and special moves via control stick and c-stick shortcuts. While this sounds too simple, it's quite satisfying to time when to attack or run out of the way of the super-death move, and there are various combos to try for.

Or you can be a long-range attacker and sit back and cast spells while the cpu characters get stuck in. This isn't as fun as playing close attack however; and while computer casters are autonomous during battles (you set which moves they can use), they can be commanded to perform a specific spell, which makes actively controlling them slightly redundant. Added complexity comes from Unison Attacks, where you combine your characters' special moves to produce various compound attacks which deal major damage. Also; out of battle, aside from the bog-standard weapon/armour system (although there are some clever rings/charms) of knife>sword>big sword>magical sword>Demonic Blade of Ultimate Destruction: there is a system called EX Skills.

Your characters can learn these from special crystals they find, and equip them. They have 4 levels, 1 is basic health/defense/attack etc increases, 2 is stronger versions of these, and some esoteric stuff, 3 and 4 are more powerful and some only work in conjuntion with others. When you set your four available slots, after a few battles with them, you may learn an Ex Skill on top of the increases from just the stones alone. Obviously the more good combos you have, the better skill you'll get. I had Genis the 'black-mage' type on heavy mana regen, heavily increased magic attack, and low health regen.

Altogether it works well and is a fun and fast-paced system, meaning that hacking through waves of enemies never gets too monotonous. Up to three other players can control the other characters in battles. I haven't been able to try this feature, but I assume it would add another layer of depth and fun as you shout out for help, or berate someone for not covering you etc.

Also fairly novel is the cooking system; instead of being limited to your standard potions/herbs, you can learn recipes. They are composed of two or three main ingredients and a few extras that will increase the food's effect. 'Tenderloin Stew' for example needs a type of meat (there are many, also many fish types), carrot and onion. Other vegetables and black satay sauce can be then be added. Recipes restore HP or TP (technique points; magic basically), cure status effects or increase defense/attack/resistance etc for the next battle. This means timing is also involved, you want to power up your squad right before you see the boss. (This may require saving often and seeing when a boss appears so that if you die, you can do better next time with a little home-brew style powerup!)

The towns that you visit are quite empty- in that there's not much to do apart from shop for stuff and go in a few houses and talk to some NPCs who deliver a few lines of boring, pointless dialogue. Consequently, the game can feel a bit hollow, you're just forever going from one dungeon to the next. It would have been nice to have some Zelda-style minigames and more interesting NPCs to chat to, to break up the gameplay. Well, and the fact that the 'world map' style of things isn't exactly condusive to looking at a distant mountain and going there, jumping over fences with your horse. I'm not comparing this infavourably to Zelda (completely different games), but you get the point. The map-world graphics are terrible, barely above PS1 level, which is really lazy. Or if it was a data space thing, they should have rendered a nice 2d map, with paths and cities as buttons on it. Incidentally, Baten Kaitos, also a traditional RPG on Gamecube does this.

The dungeons themselves are not great; they're generally quite short (though lengthed by respawning enemies). The puzzles are generic block pushing, or light all the torches, match up the statues etc. (Please Nintendo don't do this again in Twilight Princess!!!) They leave an unsatisfied feeling, and because they're over relatively quickly, you are then forced to go to the next location as there's nothing much else to do.
Actually, the whole game is like that- there are too many locations and not enough functionality and interest in each one.

The graphics on the main characters are pretty good; sharp and colourful anime-styled cel shading. Enemies in battle are also presented well, in the same style. Town graphics are not so good, a strange mixture of muted colours and pre-rendered, but soft-focus style which doesn't pay off. Irritatingly, there are almost no cutscenes of any kind, apart from when the characters are standing around talking-but seeing as the general graphics are poor, the few ones there are leave little impact.
Which is very bizarre, seeing as ToS has a fantastic pre-title screen sequence. Proper, quality anime with rousing orchestral music and a fantastic visual flair and energy. There are a couple more near the end, but they're quite short. Weird, because they neither followed the FF convention in this, or the action style of ingame graphics cutscenes. Disappointing.

The music is quite 'meh' as well, a few tunes are repeated throughout the dungeons, and the town music is forgettable background stuff.

Tales of Symphonia is a fairly solid game, with the dynamic battles and strategy making up for the spartan towns and repetitive dungeons. It is very long though, I ended up just playing to finish it, I had little interest in the story which had descended into 'oh no a giant demon who we didn't see before and is going to devour the earth, you are the only ones who can save us' blah blah blah.

So yeah... I suppose if you stayed into the story throughout it would be better for you, (do you like long, boring stories?) but it got very tedious towards the end for me. Get it if you're an RPG nutjob and you have a long attention span.

Friends and Crocodiles

2006-01-16T09:29:00.001Z

I just ordered this on DVD from Amazon. "By Stephen Poliakoff".
I watched it last night, BBC1-it was fantastic. It's about this guy Paul Reynolds in 1981 who is ridiculously rich and this uptight woman Lizzie Thomas who starts work as his secretary. He is pissing around the whole time, having parties, and driving a red bus around his grounds, although he has a study full of designs for wind turbines and airships, which makes her fascinated by him. He has a crowd of poets and "artists" and stuff who he lets hang around and gives enormous banquets for ("just a small picnic, nothing special I promise") About a year later she organises this amazing, posh party for him and after a while he invites some hooligans in ("my parties always need an element of suprise") and they fuck it up. She leaves, and doesn't speak to him for like 5 years...

5 years later she's working in this stupid "future-prediction" type company, and he's invested badly and has lost a large part of his money. They meet by chance, and after a while she gets him to come and work at the company. Everyone else in the company is obsessed with stupid 80's "future" shit. So he spends five months in his office coming up with... bookshops. Just simple bookshops that sell quality books, no extra shit (Waterstones, anybody?) They of course think he's crazy and fire him, and she freaks out at him.

Another long period of time passes. He's now lost pretty much all his money, and is long-haired and unkempt; but still very smooth and suave. He hangs around in an old 24hr cafe, where a mentally handicapped guy also does (he was round the mansion as a kid). She's getting married to a guy whose dad owns an enormous pan-european manufacturing empire, and is going to work for them. Paul crashes the wedding, and a lot of the people from before are there who look at him in disgust. He has a bit of a scene with Liz; him saying that the company is "like a giant hippo, slow moving but very hard to destroy" but he goes when Liz agrees to call him after her honeymoon. She doesn't.

Another few years pass. It's the late 90's. (Guess what happens) The company is selling off all it's factories, laying off 20,000 workers; to invest hugely in internet and telecoms companies. Liz has misgivings about this, and finds Paul, who is now living on a farm with two wives (they were in his "artist" bunch) and about 5 kids all running round. He obviously talks sense to her, and she agrees, but can't seem to do anything about it.

After a bit, the dotcom bubble bursts and the share prices bottom out at like nothing pence from £20 each. She and the executives get lynched by the press at the shareholders' meeting, and she breaks down. She phones him, and he's like "yeah, I heard, so what? Come to my party."

Liz goes, and it's a big bonfire, everyone from the old days who rejected him is there. (Paul's bookshop idea paid off and he bought an old school, randomly.) He takes her aside and says that they should work together, that you need people that challenge you at work, and that they don't even need to see each other, with email and all. That they would be unstoppable together! She groans/smiles and it pans out with everyone dancing around the bonfire.

Friends and Crocodiles is a fabulously complex and indulgent tale, telling the story of Paul and Liz and their complete incompatibility, but dread fascination with each other. The way the characters are weaved in and out of each other's lives throughout 20 years is brilliantly executed. The characters themselves are also great. Paul is a masterclass in unflappability, cool and collected and sharp even when he's lost all status. People are clearly intimidated by this ability, none more so than Liz who is completely scared of what he'll do when he shows up at the wedding. It takes a long time for her to realise that what looks like his uncaring, surface-deep view and presentation of himself to the world is actually a far more mature and reasonable approach than her obsession with 'bettering herself', and in the end when it all falls apart, he is there to catch her. Liz is not so interesting, as a slightly uptight and prim character, but obviously plays a necessary foil to Paul.

The best character drama I have seen since I can remember.

9/10 for me.

2 Megabit!!

2006-01-13T21:39:00.000Z

So I just ordered 2MB ADSL from tiscali. It should be arriving in about two weeks. I'm kinda embarrassed to admit this, but I had to get my mum to pay for it (well she'll use it too, but obviously I was the one that pushed for it). I was intially resistant to getting tiscali, as my dad was espousing it's virtues, and he knows shit all about PCs, and I wanted to get Blueyonder. It wasn't available here though, so I checked out tiscali, and it's actually very good; £17.99 PM for unlimited usage. Although it does have a 'fair usage policy' which basically amounts to no P2P filesharing in the peak evening hours as it uses too much bandwidth, which is fair enough really. (I'll just use P2P in non-peak hours, duh.)

So yeah, in a couple weeks I will actually be a 21st century human! Online games! Music! Video! Wooo!!! ;) Haha. I'm going to get Eve Online, been waiting a fair while to play that, and also get BF2 on this, instead of forking through the nose for it at a stupid pc cafe.

Feeling a lot better today, and not just because of this. Mevve the medzorz are working a bit. I went out and bought some comics- the new Witchblade, a few back issues of it, a Spawn issue, and a Soulfire book. Gonna read them in a bit. Now I just have to stop spending my will money....... crap, Eve has subs, doesn't it? Oh well.

See you!

Battlefield 2

2006-01-07T15:23:00.005Z

So here is my review, it's 6 months late, but hey.

I blink in the bright sunlight as I step out onto the flight deck of the US Naval carrier i'm serving on. All around me is chaos as troops run to board helicopters, their blades spinning up and creating a terrible drone. I follow their example and jump aboard a Blackhawk transport just as it leaves the deck. The pilot dips the nose to build up speed as we fly low across the water towards our destination- a small, Chinese-controlled island.

As we approach, the missile lock-on warning sounds and the pilot jinks left, right, left again to break the missile lock, but it won't go, so he releases flares, leaving us vunerable for a few seconds until they reload. Beside me, the twin chain guns erupt into life as we fly over the enemy territory, scattering troops on the ground, and ripping apart those caught in the open. We hover over an enemy base, guns blazing, until the lock-on warning sounds again, and the pilot pulls the helicopter into forward motion.

I glance to the side, and see an enemy attack copter; harder to shake than ground AA, and indeed, the sound of bullets pinging off the thin shell of the aircraft cements this fact. Despite the pilot's best efforts, we're being destroyed. Warning alarms sound as flames burst into the cabin. I take my cue, and jump out, waiting a second before pulling my parachute ripcord and floating down to the ground. I land smack in the middle of a road, with enemy troops bearing down on me from a hill to the side, bullets thudding into the soil around my feet. I run and dive behind a burned-out plane. In my ear piece I hear the commander's warning- "artillery, your area". I run for a group of buildings I can see in the distance, as behind me the screams of enemy soldiers are drowned out by the deafening roar of artillery shells bombarding the narrow spit of land.

^A couple of minutes in the life of a BF2 soldier.

Battlefield 2, the sequel to FPSes Battlefield 1942 and Vietnam is set in the near future and sees the aggression between the Middle East, China and the US reach breaking point as they descend into open war.

The US is the invading force, so most of the maps are either the People's Liberation Army of China or the Middle Eastern Coalition trying to hold off the United States Marine Corps from getting a foothold in their territories.
In BF2 you play online in games of 16, 32 or 64 players. The game uses a clever but simple system of flags and tickets to decide which team wins a round. Each of the two teams has a number of flags, and you can only spawn at a friendly flag unless you're in a squad (more on that later.) Each team has a limited number of tickets; one is used each time a player dies and has to re-spawn. However, if one team holds more flags than the other, the weaker team will steadily lose tickets regardless. Flags are captured by standing next to them until they return to your control, and this process is speeded up with additional teammates helping with the flag capture. Whichever team runs out of tickets first loses.

When you spawn you can choose from a range of troop classes to attack or defend in many different ways, from standard Assault grunts with a standard rifle and body-armour, Snipers, Special Operations who specialize in stealth and covert operations, Anti-tank with a rocket launcher, Engineer, and the supporting classes of Medic and Support.

My personal favorites are Spec Ops, they have a good rifle, and can lay remote C4 charges to destroy enemy structures like their radar or artillery, tanks, or lay traps. Versatile! Although the the chances of getting 2 charges on the back of a tank and retreating to a safe distance before being reversed into or shot to bits are fairly low. Maybe 3 or 4 times out of 10 you'll be successful. It's very satisfying when it works though.

I like snipers too, it's fun to snipe people, although it's pretty hard to be accurate, and you're very vulnerable if they figure out where the fire is coming from, although you can sometimes get them post-death with your craftily-placed anti-personnel mines .

Engineer is a fun class as well, you can repair vehicles and structures, and lay anti-tank mines, although not too much as team-retards, sorry team-mates have a habit of running over them and then punishing you for the TK.
Adding into the mix are a plethora of vehicles, from buggies and jeeps, to APCs and tanks, and helicopters and fighter jets. Tanks can be good, but they tend to die quickly, as they're a big target. The Anti-Tank bitches pop out from behind some building and hit you, then duck back round while they reload, before you know it, you're blown up...
I've been having the most fun with the small attack choppers. The pilot has 3 sets of 14 unguided rockets, and then a gunner can hop in and use a machine gun and tv-guided missiles. It's quite hard to fly and aim them, but you can get a lot of kills.
I find jets too fast to fly properly and hit anything, but you do get guys on them who are insanely good and get the top score every time.
The Blackhawk transport helis can also be good- but you need a decent squad who will spawn on the squad leader, and that consists of a couple of medics to auto-heal flesh wounds, and preferably 2, but at least 1 engineer to repair the heli in flight. It's pretty hard to acheive this level of cohesion, but is supremely satisfying when you manage to pull it off. My best scores have been in this situation.

You can make or join a squad to play with, with a squad leader who is in contact with the commander, and issues orders to his squad. The squad-leader acts as a mobile spawn point for his squad, allowing him to be reinforced in enemy territory. You can speak to your squad through VoIP, although I haven't been able to test this function yet. When you're in a good squad, it can really add another dimension to the gameplay, with a genuine sense of cameraderie, and of course you are more likely to survive as you have more firepower and hopefully a medic to heal/revive you.

Medics are an essential part of a properly functioning army, they can drop healing packs, or revive a dead teammate with shock paddles (magical shock paddles that heal bullet wounds of course). When this happens, your team doesn't lose a ticket for respawing them. The Support class isn't so essential, as to be honest, you will often die before running out of ammo. They have a spray-happy machine gun for covering fire though, and on the occasions when you need ammo, you will be glad of it.
Also available is the commander position, where you have access to a map of the battlefield; which you can scan to see enemy positions for a few seconds, use a UAV to see realtime enemy positions, but only in a small area, drop supply crates, and bombard the enemy with artillery. You also issue orders to squads, to attack, hold a position, repair etc. You can get quite a lot of points as the commander, and it's a nice diversion when you're tired of being blown up for a bit.

That's probably the most annoying thing about BF2, you die. A lot. Whether from an artillery strike, or sniper, or heli or jet, or just foot soldiers- you die quite often and without warning, it can get quite infuriating. I don't know if it's because i'm rubbish or what, but my health seems to be tiny whereas enemy troops will survive heavy fire from me. Some people online are very good at this game. Another annoying factor is the fact that the other type of people online are just idiots, plain and simple. Teammates running into mines they saw you lay, C4ing the vehicle you were about to get in, rendering it comically vunerable to bullets detonating the packs, getting into a heli with some retard who crashes it in a few seconds, killing like 3, 4, 5 people, etc...

A bit less drastic, but still irritating is people who you get to join your squad and don't follow orders and piss around by themselves. This can usually be alleviated by joining a clan server, as a higher class of player frequent them. The flipside to this however is that these same servers are often full of super-nerds who are insanely good at the game and kill you before you even get a shot off at them; after a while of this I often find myself forced back to the EA servers for some easier kills (but stupider teammates). *Sigh* I guess I just need to get better at the game. But these are really the exceptions to the norm, most people are pretty good and reasonable, I guess I just had to get the worst cases off my chest.

Adding to the replay value is a system of points and awards. Every time you get a kill, kill damage assist, flag capture, flag defend, repair, heal, revive etc; you get a point or two. These add over the hours, and your rank increases, allowing you better weapons to unlock, and also to give you the commander position when more than 1 person applies (the highest rank gets it). The points system is a brilliant addition; you get rewarded well for skill, and even if you're losing badly, you'll still accrue a few points to edge you closer to that next rank and unlock.
There are a huge amount of awards that can be earned- from your basic awards for each class and vehicle, through special awards for teamwork, combat, weapon profiency and skill.

Unfortunately, i've been playing on a rather low-end machine in minimum settings, so I can't really comment on the graphics firsthand, but if you have a decent pc they are pretty spectacular. You can see some good examples here:

Pics!

The audio is very good; in battle there is no music, only a soundtrack of war! Rifle fire, explosions, shouts, screams etc all sound very realistic and are also directional- if you are looking towards a sound it will be louder, thus allowing you to judge where it came from. There are nice background effects; seagulls on the beach and at sea, rustling palms, gently creaking cranes, and wind effects when you're very high up.

Battlefield 2 is exhilarating, fun, addictive, amazing. It can also be fairly frustrating, but give it a break for a couple of hours, and you'll be raring to go, to punish that little sniper/pilot/tank whore etc who pissed you off last time, and you may find yourself still there 8 hours later! Highly recommended.

Edit 723: Here are my scores courtesy of BF2S.com

http://bf2s.com/player/48949941/

9/10