Happy Birthday Elite!

Hard to believe, but Elite came out 25 years ago this month. Twenty-five years!

This makes me feel very, very old. Still, Elite has held up really well over the years. That must mean I have too, right? Er…

The first time I played Elite was on my cousin’s Commodore 64. I was barely out of nappies and for the life of me, I couldn’t wrap my head around the whole space-trading thing. Having to keep track any number of variables is kind of difficult when you’ve got the attention span of a sparrow. I had no idea what was going on and understood maybe every second word in a sentence. “What is ’narcotics’?” “Drugs.” “What is ‘drugs’?” But I loved the game’s 3D engine and the feeling that you could go anywhere, do anything. All this in a game that took up less than 22K of memory - that’s less than an average email. And I still count my first successful docking with a space station as one of my videogaming high points.

If you fancy playing a bit of Elite right now, grab a copy of Oolite, which runs on almost anything.

Crank 2 DVD Commentary

Remember when DVDs first arrived on the scene and everyone was gushing about how great it was that they could record their own commentaries for their favourite movies? How did that work out?

Not so good, huh?

Know why? Because most people are boring as shit. When you get them talking about movies they love, they’re even worse. I’m not saying I’m above this. Put a microphone in front of me when I’m watching Kickboxer you’ll just get me either rattling off the entire screenplay or not saying a word because I fucking love that film so much.

Over on the AV Club, frequent commenter and the world’s biggest fan of ownage, Zodiac Motherfucker, has recorded his own commentary for his film of 2009, Crank 2: High Voltage. This is decidedly not boring. Imagine the forgotten love-child of Andrew W.K. and Kanye West screaming at the TV, swearing like a docker and whooping for blood, and that’s his commentary. Stupid and puerile? Sure, but so are the Crank movies, and that doesn’t stop them being some of the most entertaining movies of the last few years.

Either way, there’s no-one better to watch Crank 2 with than Zodiac Motherfucker.

Are Apple Products Badly Engineered?

There’s a lot of brouhaha about the failure rate of Xbox 360s. In the same week, I saw three different news stories citing three different failure rates for the 360 (54.2%, 23.7% and 27.3%, if you’re interested). And everyone gives them shit because they’re, y’know, Microsoft.

Having spent the morning fixing a dying Macbook, I started thinking about what my failure rate with Apple hardware has been. And to be perfectly honest, it’s been pretty shit. In the past five years, I’ve owned (or co-owned) an iBook, two Macbooks, an iMac, a 60GB iPod, two iPod nanos and an iPod touch. Let’s see what’s happened with these.

• Wife’s iBook ate its own display cable
  Putting a teeny-tiny display cable into a hinge that gets used all the time? Great idea.

• Macbook case cracking
  This happened on both my own Macbook and my wife’s. If you see how the Macbook is assembled, it’s easy to see why this happens - you have to bend the entire keyboard plate slightly to get it to connect. Bending it weakens the decorative plastic ’lip'.

• Macbook case discoloration
  I got this on my white Macbook. Got the keyboard plate replaced, started happening again before I got rid of the Macbook

• iMac logic board meltdown
  Brand-new iMac died within 8 hours of getting it because the logic board wasn’t connected properly, half the fans didn’t work and melted the graphics card

• Dead headphone adaptor on 60GB iPod
  This was probably my own fault. I like to use headphones with strong cables and very little ‘give’, forcing the headphone jack to bend slightly. Still, this wasn’t exactly ‘heavy’ use. Managed to replace this via parts on eBay

• Random lines on 60GB iPod
  No idea where this came from, but it’s like my iPod had a stroke or something. Turned it on one day and there was a strong black band going across the LCD screen. They’ve slowly started fading away now, going back to normal.

• Dodgy connector on one iPod nano
  This both comes from and affects the Nike+. I plug in the Nike+ adaptor and it doesn’t detect a receiver. Works fine on the other iPod nano. Doesn’t affect normal connection to the computer.

• Dodgy Nike+ on iPod touch
  My iPod touch will only randomly choose to see the Nike+ adaptor in my shoe. Usually after I do a complete reformat and restore, and even then, it only lasts for about a week.

• Broken DVD drive in Macbook
  About a year after my wife got her Macbook, the DVD drive stopped working. It was hardly ever moved and rarely used. Still, it means that OS upgrades are a pain in the dick and I can’t run the hardware test utility any more.

• Broken LCD backlight on Macbook
  This is what I’ve been dealing with today. After a random crash, the backlight no longer works. I can see the display on the LCD, but there’s just no backlight. I don’t even know where to begin with this

• Update: Fraying on Macbook power chord
  Joanne’s comment reminded me about this. About a year ago, power on the Macbook was a bit flaky. We turned over the power chord and noticed that near the connector, the cable had burned almost completely through. We were lucky that we were in the house when it happened, this could have been a lot nastier than the €80 it cost to replace the chord.

So, of all the Apple hardware I’ve used in the last five years, the only thing that hasn’t given me an issue is one iPod nano (I’ve also got an Apple IIe from 1986 at home that still works fine). Which leads me to wonder if Apple products are badly engineered, or am I just extremely unlucky?

Lady Gaga is My Hero

I’ve always had a lot of respect for Lady Gaga. She’s completely batshit insane, but unlike most of those self-consciously ‘quirky’ artists out there, she’s actually has the talent to back that up. You have to admire her courage. Or, at the very least, her ability to keep a straight face.

But her appearance at the MTV VMAs was so amazing that she’s now become my personal hero. She was, by far, the most entertaining person on there. I mean, who else could sit behind Beyonce and completely steal the spotlight? That takes some balls (no pun intended).

Flavorwire have a great article deconstructing Lady Gaga’s VMA ensembles. My favourite is the Carrie/Burger King one.

Normal Service Will Resume Shortly

I’m heading back to Ireland for a few days and deliberately using the time to step back from the computer. Here’s a few links that should keep you entertained until I get back.

In Praise of the Sci-Fi Corridor

A Mugging on Lake Street - a reporter is mugged and writes a thoughtful article about the incident.

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.

Bruce Handy on Mad Men - if you can get over the fact that Vanity Fair’s site is a pain in the dick to read (PRO TIP: hook yourself up with Readability), this is a fantastic article about the show.

Good Novels Don’t Have to be Hard Work - interesting thesis: Stephanie Meyer and the like represent the real postmodern novel

In Which Wes Anderson Tries To Game Pauline Kael - actually, I could have chosen any article from ThisRecording.com, but this one – about Wes Anderson screening Rushmore for Pauline Kael – is particularly nice.

The Sopranos: Definitive Explanation of the End - This is an old article, but it takes a while to get through. Even if you’re not a big fan of the show (like me), you have to appreciate anything that can get this much of a discussion going.

The Trouble with War Games - no, not the film.

The Actor Believability Index - I find Christian Bale implausible as anything but a self-obsessed yuppie.

Back next week!

Batman: Arkham Asylum

For a license with so much meat on its bones, it’s a little disappointing to see all the Batman games that have been made, all laid out. The majority are lazy movie tie-ins, knocked out by South Asian sweat shops for a bowl of rice per game. And it shows, you know? Check out the SNES version of Batman Forever and tell me if you think the developers had even heard of Batman when they started working on that game. “What-man? Forget that noise, Jack. Kids today love their Mortal Kombat. Give them some _Mortal Kom_Batman.”

Thank goodness, then, for Rocksteady Studios. Here are a bunch of hardcore, unrepentant Batman geeks who get it. Working very much from an “If it ain’t broke…” mentality, these guys called in the pros. Rather than trying to write their own story and ending up with some fanboy claptrap, they instead hired Paul Dini to write the story. He may not have written the book on Batman, but he certainly wrote the cartoon, as well as the truly amazing Batman: Mask of the Phantasm. They also hired a lot of the main voice actors from the cartoon too, like Kevin Conroy, Mark Hamill and Arleen Sorkin. Even ignoring the rest of the game, the story and voice-acting are pure Batman.

But, thankfully, they didn’t ignore the rest of the game. Having a great, authentic Batman story would be nothing if they didn’t completely understand what makes Batman such an interesting superhero. Apart from a few gadgets (which are all present and correct), the best thing about the character is that he’s a brick shithouse who moves with fluidity and grace. He can hide in the shadows, picking off his enemies one by one, making each remaining enemy progressively more terrified. It also means that he can handle himself when he drops into the middle of a group of thugs and decides to take them on all at once. The developers are proud of their combat engine here, even going so far as to offer a bunch of separate “challenge” modes where you fight groups of increasing numbers of enemies. Kind of like Gears of War 2’s ‘horde’ mode, but with fisticuffs. And they’re right to be proud - this game has the best combat of any game I can think of. It’s simple, it feels natural and it produces devastating, cinematic results. If there’s any film that can offer a more spectacular, perfectly choreographed fight sequence, I’d love to see it.

Okay, maybe that one sequence from Tony Jaa’s The Protector comes close.

It’s not a perfect game by any stretch of the imagination. It cogs so heavily from Bioshock that it falls foul of the same criticisms that could be thrown at that game – lazy fetch-quests to artificially pad out the game’s length, inconsequential upgrades that make very little difference in the gameplay – but for all it gets wrong, it gets other things very, very right. The world is almost perfect. It’s an open world that you actually want to spend some time in. You’re encouraged to explore, and rewarded for doing so. Through the 240 ‘riddles’ hidden throughout the island, you’ll learn more about the mythology of the place, or characters that don’t actually make an appearance in this game, like Catwoman and the Penguin. British Gaming Blog nails it: “After hunting 200 god-damn pigeons in Grand Theft Auto IV last year, I decided to make a pact – make them enjoyable to hunt, or I just won’t bother. Guess what? My Xbox 360 gamercard holds an achievement for solving 240 riddles in Arkham Asylum.”

I’m slightly disappointed that the game didn’t lift a little heavier from Grant Morrison and Dave McKean’s Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth. It’s a genuinely brilliant comic that explores Batman’s own psychological state in relation to the so-called lunatics locked up in the asylum. Having read the book, I was hoping this was a theme that would pop up in the game, but it only really appears in passing. Though I suppose beggars can’t be choosers. I guess I’ll have to be satisfied with it only being the best Batman game ever made.

Oh well.

Toxoplasmosis

Rome has a cat problem.

The Ufficio dei diritti degli animali (Office of Animal Rights) estimates that there’s about 300,000 stray, feral cats living around Rome. I live near Largo di Torre Argentia, a massively interesting set of ruins that contains one of the many places in Rome where Julius Caesar (him of the salad fame) was allegedly killed. Except you wouldn’t know it to look at it, because with so many ancient ruins dotted around the place and so many cats running wild in the streets, the council - understandably - threw up their hands and said “balls to this malarky, let the cats have it.” Now the square is probably more famous as a cat sanctuary than as an actual historical monument in its own right.

The point is, Rome has a lot of cats. With me so far?

One of the many parasites carried by cats is toxoplasmosis. It’s a parasite that thrives in cats. It can live in other organisms, but it can only reproduce in the intestines of cats. So, in rats and mice, the parasite effects the brain by making cat piss smell amazing. This draws them to the cat and makes them more likely to be eaten, so the parasite will make its way back to cat intestines. There’s also a theory that it does much the same for people. This is the parasite that causes people to turn into crazy cat ladies - without knowing it, they surround themselves with cats to increase their chances of being eaten. (And for the record, if you die and there’s no-one around to feed it, your dog will usually wait a week or so before eating your body. Your cat, on the other hand, might wait a day, if you’re lucky. More proof that cats are mean-spirited little fucks.)

Listening to this week’s Radio Lab, I discovered another potential side effect of toxoplasmosis in humans: it makes them worse drivers. Someone infected by toxoplasmosis is two and a half times more likely to die in a car accident than someone who is not infected.

So to sum up: Rome has an abundance of cats, and cat parasites make you a reckless driver.

Just sayin’. It’s not like I’m suggesting these two points are linked.

Poetry of Twitter Spam

As a rule, I tend to block Twitter spam-bots as soon as they start following me. But the new generation of spammers are a bit more subtle. Their posts don’t actually contain the spam - that’s hidden behind a tinyurl address in their profile. Instead, their posts are just snippets of text lifted from around the internet. Read together, with a little bit of added punctuation, they are like amazing stream-of-consciousness poetry.

She puts her palms out
on low-viscosity rayon.
“Why not have two?”
We’ve got it sorted
– Wir haben fünf Millionen Deutschmark
Three days, and not one.
Peace.
What’s with this Al Capone shit?
I love you OK?
Frank…
Sweetheart, you don’t need law school.
“That is unbelievable.”
Tits Pervert,
avec une vue de la mer.
Hey!
As soon as he gets on the motorbike,
– it’s not like I expect anything
… Yeah.
Squeeze too hard and you kill it, not hard enough and it flies away.

I’ve actually started hunting out these spam-bots and reading their twitter feeds, because maybe, just maybe this is the start of the singularity, and these are the bad teenage poems of a vast, angst-ridden technological super-intelligence that is feeling a bit bummed out because it’s capable of solving a bajillion problems in a second but, instead, is only being used to scam money out of idiots.

The Italian Gender Gap

Rather than subscribing to any particular ideology, I like to think that I can rely on my common sense to guide me. As a great man once said, “A person should not believe in an -ism, he should believe in himself.” Now, the problem is that I wasn’t blessed with an abundance of common sense and it does occasionally take a sharp smack across the head for me to understand the various sides of an issue. My wife, for example, would count herself as strongly feminist because this is an issue that obviously effected her and she thought about a lot. I, on the other hand, just never gave much thought to gender and sexism and thought the world had pretty much solved that issue. I guess that’s a privilege of being born with a penis. This has changed now (not the penis part though - I still have a huge mickey). I’ve read my Simone de Beauvoir.

The point is, it took me a while to come around to being able to understand the various arguments in the sexism debate, but I got there in the end. Living in Italy definitely helped. From the philandering Prime Minister spashed across the headlines to the casual sexism you see in the street, it’s nearly impossible to miss.

Actually, it’s kind of worrying how deep-seated the gender gap is in this country. According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report, Italy ranks 67th out of 130 countries in terms of the gap between men and women. I’ll just say that again, because this number floored me: 67th. This puts it behind places like Israel and Mongolia and far behind the other major European countries like France (15), Spain (17) and the United Kingdom (13).

Although, to be fair, this beats its 2007 ranking of 84th. Improvements are being made. You can even feel it. I guess it’s most obvious in the slow backlash against the behaviour of Silvio Berlusconi. The various scandals didn’t receive nearly as much media coverage in this country as they did in the international press, no doubt helped by the fact that Berlusconi owns a large part of the media here. But the very public denouncement by his wife and her filing for divorce was pretty hard to miss. During the recent G8 summit which took place in L’Aquila, there was a call made by female Italian academics asking the wives of the leaders to boycott the summit (although they didn’t exactly explain what they wanted Angela Merkel’s husband to do). And this is having an effect. For the first time since taking office in May of last year, Berlusconi’s approval rating dropped below 50%. A small amount, sure, but still significant, given the way that many Italians worship him as a hero, a self-made man (although with hair that bad, I’d say he’s all thumbs - ZING! TAKE THAT, BERLUSCONI). Even the Catholic Church has expressed concern at his behaviour, saying “people have understood the unease, the mortification, the suffering that such an arrogant abandonment of a sober style has caused us.”

Although it doesn’t help anyone when you get ditzy celbutards like Celia Walden wading into the situation and muddying the waters. In her article, “Someone like Silvio Berlusconi will always pinch my bottom,” she talks about the psychology of the Italian male, suggesting that institutional sexism is, if not entirely excusable, it is at least understandable. In fact, it’s almost adorable. I mean, after all, isn’t that what Italians are all about?

From when I was a student in Siena I have a strong memory of a man slowing his car down and throwing his wife, in the passenger seat, a sidelong glance before reaching out and giving my bottom a pinch. I didn’t know whether to abuse or salute him.

The new Gender Gap report is due out on October 29th. I’ll be interested to see what effect - if any - the past year has had on its ranking.

Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box

The first game, Professor Layton and the Curious Village, was an interesting addition to the DS library. Rather than a straightforward Japanese puzzle game like Planet Puzzle League or Picross, Professor Layton was more like a French cartoon - think Belville Rendez-Vous with the occasional sudoku puzzle thrown in. It was a cute conceit to begin with, where everything and everyone you saw lead to a puzzle. But as the game progressed, this got really, really annoying, as Penny Arcade managed to sum up perfectly. On top of this, the puzzles got painfully repetitive, and once you figured out that the game was actually a smug asshole who tried to catch you out all of the time and 90% of the puzzles were actually trick questions, it became less a matter of working them out and more just a question of donkey-work. Still, I battled through and finished the first game, just don’t ask me what happened in the story, since I had long since given up and would just tap rapidly on the screen whenever an exposition sequence suddenly came up.

With Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box, I had hoped that the creators would fix some of these problems. Maybe they integrated the story a bit better? Maybe they came up with new, interesting puzzles?

Did they fuck.

The game is essentially the same as the first, in slightly different clothes. In another way, it’s actually more frustrating than the first game, since the entire thing has a lot more hand-holding to help newcomers to the series. The puzzles are almost exactly the same, and the characters are still the same bunch of puzzle-wielding cunts. I mean, what kind of Maitre d’ would ask you to solve a puzzle for him while you’re waiting for your table? “Welcome to El Bulli. I’m terribly sorry sir, your table is not ready yet, but in the meantime, here’s a book of crossword puzzles.”

Maybe I’ve just gotten incredibly curmudgeonly in the year or so since the first game (I hear that happens after you cross the big three-oh), but I’ve been trying to decide what I find particularly wrong about this game. If they took out the random puzzles, I wouldn’t care for the story, or the way it’s told, with you as a completely passive detective who just clicks through screens as the story unfolds for you. If they took out the story and just presented it as a list of puzzles, I’d be annoyed at the frequency of repetition.

If you’re new to the series, or if you really liked the first one, give this game a go, you’ll probably like it. For me, however, this is one of the few games that has made me think that life is too short for this kind of bullshit.

Fuck it, I’m going back to Picross.