Kieron Gillen's workblog

2005-05-21T13:56:00.000Z

And after just under three years, that's all, folks.

www.kierongillen.com

Thanks to all and sundry for reading. Bid farewell to the little earless robot, update your bookmarks and move on. It's been a pleasure.

2005-05-20T13:12:00.000Z

Welcome to the official "Please by our comic" post!

Please feel free to pass the word onto other, wrong-minded individuals, you may know. Ideally, not loyal employees of major libel-hungry corporations. For sample art and stories, scan this friendly thread at the ever-lovely Isotope Comics. The US ordering will be set up shortly, but buyers of a more European persuasion should get right onto us.

Those with Paypal should head to the Commercial Suicide Site to order. £8+P&P.

Those without paypal, mail me (kieron dot gillen at gmail dot com) and we'll sort something out.

Those with copies already, feel free to comment.

And later, hopefully, something entirely unexpected.

2005-05-17T09:00:00.000Z

Request from the management. Can anyone using the comments add their name at the bottom of the posts? It's beginning to really annoy me.

I know everyone before only ever used pseudonyms, but that's not really the point.

2005-05-16T15:25:00.000Z

When I heard which courier company was making the delivery, I knew something would go terribly wrong. Last time they were meant to be delibvering to my Bedminster hovel, when I finally managed to locate the errant package at a Bathroom-tile warehouse a half-mile away. For no discernable reason.

So, just because we've taken every precaution to make sure the incredibly expensive boxes full of Commerical Suicides and Alex's own Defective Comics turn up in time to sell, it doesn't mean that I had much hope that we'd actually recieve them. We throw down the money for guaranteed pre-lunch delivery. Knowing that people have trouble locating my masonette, due to it being above an empty shop, I attach my phone-number and inist that they call me if they can't find the place.

And then we sit back and wait. At 10:30 the bell sends me running to the door to discover that it's actually another delivery which went awry: the Router to allow Jane to get online. It's the second one Amazon have had to send out. Grateful, but still antsy, I return to the wait.

Phone rings at 11. It's the dispatcher from the company, saying that the driver can't find the actual building, and wanted to know where it is. I tell them to go around the corner, and sit back.

Time passes. Neurotic energy is funneled into increasingly baroque web-postings, including the the 1500 words of nonsense about post-punk down the page.

It's now 2, and I decide to check up on where the bastard thing is. I call the printer, who tell me they'll phone the courier to check on its process. They do so, phone back and tell me that the guy had left the area before the dispatcher phoned him back, so he's going to make a second delivery later in the afternoon.

More time passes. I've gone past the point where it's possible to turn the nervousness into anything other than sweat.

I phone back the printer at 4, getting the parcel number and the actual depot number. At this point, I've been hammering WHERE! IS! THE! PARCEL! in increasingly large font size to all my online IM friends for the majority fo the day. People, being lovely, are occasionally messaging me, asking if it's there yet. They mean well, but it's a torturous drip-drip-drip on my head.

Wired, with details in hand, I phone the depot. Chat to a woman who says she'll phone the guy to check up. She says that the notes say that he'd go back at the end of the day "If he has time". I stress how this really isn't on. I need to get them to the con by six, so we can actually set them up. I say that I'm willing to go anywhere in the city to get hold of the bastard things rather than them be delayed. She says she'll phone up the guy, and get a meeting place if he isn't going to delivery soon.

I wait. At 4:50, knowing they phone people will probably fuck off home at 5, I call again. I'm so tightly strung now that you could use me to garotte someone, which is exactly what'll happen if I don't actually get those bastard books. I stay on hold while she calls the driver. She returns to say that he was apparently waiting at a place for 45 minutes for me to turn up there. Of course, the original woman never actually phoned me back to tell me any of this. I finally get the actual driver's number, calling him up.

His next drop off is in an industrial site outside Bristol at 5:30. I, resisting the urge to ask why he didn't just phone the fucking number as he was meant to this morning since he *has* spent the last 45 minutes doing nothing due to the incompetence of his swotchoard, shower (having spent the entire day stinking, worried that I'd miss a call or door-bell ring if I have a proper wash) and run to the local taxi firm. He drives me out into the middle of nowhere, before having another series of quick-exchange phone-calls with the Delivery van to get us all to the next identical-looking bit of layby.

Eventually, we meet, lob the nine boxes of comics in the back of the taxi, and drive to Bristol Meads Station, just in enough time to lob them into the con to be sold in the mornings.

I then get awesomely drunk. Because it's the only sensible thing to do.

The name of the courier company is being witheld from the story until we find out whether we can get a refund or not. And if any of you with Paypal want a copy, the ordering system for CS3 is up at the site.

In short: Bastards.

2005-05-16T11:38:00.000Z

"Guild Wars is my favourite game of the year so far, but I'll get back to that.

It's also a bit different. In one of the more ritualised and obscenely formalised sub-genres the PC offers, being a bit different to most Online RPGs isn't the hardest task in the world, but Guild Wars takes it further. It also confuses expectations, in that a glance at the screenshots could lead to you just filing it alongside every other persistent-world fantasy game playing across the net today. So we're going to break it down into bullet points, press the review's barrel against your temple and fire each one home deep into your brain, just to make sure everyone understands.
Advertisement

Also, get yourself a cup of tea and a tasty biscuit. This is a long one."

Guild Wars for Eurogamer. As the intro says, a long one.

2005-05-13T10:13:00.000Z

Alisdair posted some interesting things about Post-punk, which set me thinking, related to what a few other people wrote. And then Joshua Ellis set me off, thinking about what it means when I listen to the period described in Simon Reynold's (brilliant) RIP IT UP. And... well, here's the ramble:

I was born in 1975. I was listening to my parent's Motown rather than post-punk in 1980, so it's not really a question of nostalgia, but of *history*.

Except, to steal Blur's phrase from when they were vaguely relevant circa Modern Life Is Rubbish, legislated nostalgia - Having nostalgia for something you've never experienced. One of my takes on Britpop (at least its start) was less ancestor worship, rather an artistic Oedipal thing. I want to fuck what Daddy did, and have the wife, the house, the swimming pool, the reputation.

History is a different thing. I remember when I started seriously thinking about music that I was aware there was SO MUCH MUSIC that I knew absolutely nothing about. Or rather, I knew about, but hadn't had a chance to listen to. If you take 1990 or so as my year zero, that's 15 years since punk and thirty since the start of the modern age of pop. That's a lot of records to listen to before you can talk credibly about the whole flow of things, in terms of real understanding as opposed to a sampledelic dillentante thing.

I don't think the generation after me even think of things in those terms. It's post-pop-history now. While 15 years post-punk was vaguely dealable with, 30 years post-punk is an obscene figure. It's that sensation I get when I walk into a decent library and realise I'm never going to know even a fraction of it. So you just take what you can, and live with it.

So, People may know that there was once a Band called the Gang of Four who The Futureheads rip-off, but don't care at all. While someone like Elastica reappropriated early-Wire, it was reappropriated *for their own purposes* (which I always read as a indie-fication of sampling culture in a guitar-set up, a paradoxical mix of absolute respect (Ace! We'll use it) and disrespect (Why shouldn't we use it if we like it?)), most modern hair-cut Indie doesn't even *care* about history enough to attempt to remix it. To the Futureheads, the Gand of Four are just some angular guitars. Nothing else matters.

And, by their succcess, The Gang of Four are just reduced to some guitar sounds. A Futureheads fan's responses to the noise are conditioned to see them in the context of the Futureheads, and since they're just a four-square band, that's what the Gang of Four are. The Rapture's (brilliant, annoyingly) House of Jealous Lovers reduces the Pop Group's We Are All Prostitutes, and so on.

This leads me to thinking that there's always been different sorts of revival culture. Two-Tone could be read as a sixties-Ska revival, but actually was infused with the post-punk scene and used for a specific, urgent purpose. Britpop was nothing but a revival movement, but was actually talking about specific, current state of mind in the Mid-nineties (and was mostly shit, but isn't really the point). Conversely, the Mod revival of the early eighties (and the mini-one in the UK of the mid-nineties), is nothing but coping the stances of the earlier period, and in doing so, missing the point entirely. Modern Mod takes are quintissentially English, taking it as a traditionalist conservative thing. Actual Mod was virulently ANTI English, based around black American music, italian suits, etc. It's an obvious point, but real mods today would be listening to hyper-tech R&B or similar, not Paul Weller. And the array of eighties/post-punk indie at the moment are nothing but pure formalists.

It was mainly music about ideas. Why, if you're in a synth-edged band like the Bravery or whatever, should you dress in clothes similar or inspired by the period? They haven't even engaged their brains (or even REALISED they should be engaging their brains enough) to move past that state.

I only got around to reading the Julian Cope autobiographies recently, but one thing that struck me was how absolutely literate everyone in the scene was. People read the reviews, and tried to apply the belief structures of the journalists (which were processed from other sources) to the making of music. It's notable that the absolute intellectual emptiness of the mainstream music press (Which has expanded from just the inkies to coverage in "real" papers) just begats more intellectually empty bands. If it's music about ideas, and they're not digesting any, they're not going to create anything which has them.

As a corroloary, these sorts of leap of creative faith I'm describing require exactly that: faith. Belief. That's one thing everyone is deeply short of in the music scene, and the population at general. Believing in something is deeply unfashionable. Being Reasonable is the watchwords, and all that begats is reasonable, small things. Great pop is always based on grand, stupid designs. And this is why kids today (from the same social niche as the people who were primary forces in Post-Punk), despite having better tech and access resources than the period described by RIP IT UP, aren't doing as interesting stuff. They don't have the ideas, they don't have the grandeur, they don't have the absolute stupidity. Which is stupid.

My other thought about RIP IT UP that, despite the general disdain for what Pete Wiley coined Rockism, and eventual embrace of Morley's Popism, that's a very different thing from what people today mean by Popism. What's interesting about that cusp-of-the-eighties was that it was people from a Rockist culture (and totally infected by it), trying to deliberately take a Popist stance. It was a volunary thing, rather than them coming from a culture where that's actually the dominant belief structure. Religious converts have, on average, more faith than those who are born into it. In the same way, people in my generation - where Rockism has always been dumb and evil - are popist by default. We don't really BELIEVE in it. It's just what we're supposed to think. So the popist escapades are a simultaneous smaller, lesser thing.

Which leads me to start thinking about a possible useful synthesis position, but that's a different rant.

2005-05-12T16:42:00.000Z

My card has just taken an enormous biff on the head and is wandering around the room in a confused state, due to having to pay for the printing of Commercial Suicide The Third.

Copies arrive tomorrow, and we'll be selling them over the weekend. I want to sell as many as possible to avoid Jane ever finding out exactly how much money I've just spent. This means that there's a possibility - remote, admitedly - that they may all sell out. Since this is the entire UK print run, if you want one, mail me now to say so. I will put one aside for anyone who wants to purchase the thing.

£8 to you, squire. Over 100 pages. Mail me at Kieron dot gillen at gmail dot com.

And don't tell Jane.

2005-05-11T09:23:00.000Z

Four recent, vaguely amusing things.

1) Gigs. Arcade Fire at the Academy. Regulars will be aware of my terrible love for the Arcade Fire, but finally managing to see them was simply glorious. References which I've previously only been aware of intellectually suddenly come into focus, like the Talking Heads structures. Simultaneously, the records are reworked from 3.a.m. Existentialism to 11.p.m. at the best Wake in the World. In terms of propulsiveness and the shared voices, I find myself thinking of the legend of Live Dexys. The entire band sings, all the words, even the ones without microphones, like the secular hymns they are. I find myself wandering home, rambling to The Concubine about how they were part of a recontexualisation of the rock idiom for talking about the 20-something experience of genuine young adulthood and fear of that rather than perpetual adolescence. The exist exactly at the cusp where you realise that it's pointless rebelling against your parents, as they're either dead or soon will be and you know it's all too late. Still, despite this as the formative factor in the music, it's about life. They're an indefatiguable, relentless band.

2) Gigs 2. Had only caught the Kills once briefly at a festival, and despite thinking their second album lacked teeth and lapsed into self-parody, I did want to see exactly how they operated live in a more appropriate (i.e. With a roof and bad ventilation) venue. Was amused by how right I was about them. As I wrote in the singles of the year list, God This Makes Me Wanna Fuck. And yes: It's all about the fucking, to the point where we end with simulated fucking punctuated, girl on her knees, flat on the floor, back arcing while geezer brandishes guitar like a sexual crucifix before her. Subtext becomes text to the degree that it's actually funny. So, sure, they've got a limited musical repertoire (Girl saying "Fuck", Man saying "Fuck", a retro drum-machine and a guitar going crunch once a bar) and Alison Mosshart looks like a model GQ would get as a stand-in for a Jennifer Herrema, but no-one cares. A big, sexy noise. Ended up with Tinitus so bad that it sounded as if an ocean was washing around in my right ear, which is always an added bonsu.

3) Games: Been playing Guild Wars to death. Review on Eurogamer in the next couple of days.

4) Gamespot do an editorial on the NGJ in a prodding-beehive manner. Splendid.

2005-05-08T15:00:00.000Z

Yet more CS teasing: Alex lobs up a PDF of her, Jamie Boardman and Dave Marquez's NECROCOMICON up on her site.

Go Read.

2005-05-07T11:34:00.000Z

EDIT: And I've decided it was about time we had some form of commenting back. I was delaying on it, as I was planning on moving the site to another home, but since that's going to be delayed the masses must have their voice returned to them.

Try and make up some new running jokes.

2005-05-07T11:32:00.000Z

"Whenever someone mentions Stronghold, two facts immediately jump to the fore of my consciousness.

Firstly, the original Stronghold apparently managed to outsell Grand Theft Auto III in Germany. Despite its regressive tech-base and distinctly unglamorous premise, the economic powerhouse of central Europe far preferred to make economic houses of power than join the rest of the world in beating up prostitutes like good little consumers.

Secondly, apparently four monarchs listed cause of death is by consuming a "surfeit of lampreys". One would be enough, but the idea that four bluebloods would chomp down upon piles of slithering eels to the point where their guts just burst is completely bewildering.

Like most of my favourite facts, I'm not actively interested in discovering whether either is actually true. Believing that a chirpy niche RTS/Management game can outsell the Biggest Game In The World in the right marketplace and that lampreys really are that moreish just makes the world a better place."

Eurogamer lobbed up my review of Stronghold 2 while I was away. Next review is Guild Wars for some point next week, possibly followed by Imperial Glory depending on whether I'm all RTSed out or not yet.

2005-05-06T14:25:00.000Z

Back in England after a biz trip to SF, which I'll try to write about at some point. Maybe later, but I'm chewing over the election results (General mood: Boyant. It's about the best result I could have realistically hoped for - Slashed Labour Majority, significant Liberal gains).

Alex also inserted the CS-cock deep into the flesh womb of the printers. The foul spawn will gestate over the next week, arriving in seven dirty boxes at my place next Friday. Josh finished the design work on my ULTIMATE POL POT later, which I'm very pleased with. In fact, will probably lob up the mock-cover here later.

Just showed the PDF to Walker, who says ""It's far better than everything Nathan Barley tried to do in just five pages.""

Which is what we call in the biz "nice".

2005-04-29T00:27:00.000Z

Charity puts the first three pages of our Busted Wonder online. It'll have a proper home built around it at the site over the coming months, but for now lives in the purity of livejournal.

The plan is for all eighty pages to be put onto the site in small narrative-beat sized chunks. They'll probably average around three pages or so, depending on what's happening in the story.

Comments remain down here, so if you have something to say, do say it in Charity's comments. She'll want to hear anything you have to say as much as I do. Well... except if it's any of the comment-threads standard running jokes, in which case I recommend the Triforce comments as a new home.

2005-04-26T18:10:00.000Z

McKelvie's back cover for CS3. And, no, I don't know what's wrong with the comments or when they'll come back. And, yes, it's lonely without them.

2005-04-26T10:11:00.000Z

"It's always been a good title for a videogame. Where most real-time strategy games seem to fall into the X of Y nomenclature, Empire Earth had a certain militaristic grandeur to it. It captures the game's themes better than competing titles like Age of Empires or Rise of Nations. That is, that the entire history of humanity has been the tale of two groups of cavemen hitting each other with increasingly large rocks. No matter who's the victor, the Empire remains.

It's a good name. It's a good game. But that's all."

Continuing the theme of the week, another RTS. This time, Empire Earth. Next: Stronghold 2.

On other gaming notes, I'm playing WoW again, as a Warlock. On a RP server.

Fearful.

2005-04-25T08:30:00.000Z

"When is a real-time strategy game not a real time strategy game? Keep that question in the back of your mind. The answer will be revealed later.

Cossacks 2 takes the formula laid down by its forebear, and stays true to the spirit of Napoleonic Real-time wargames by setting it in space and turning it into a console-orientated platformer. Jump, Welly-Wellington, Jump! Ultra-Napoleon must be stopped."

As I consume Cheese on Toast to aid with a speedy recovery from a surprisingly mild hangover, Eurogamer posts my review of Cossacks 2. Bless 'em.

2005-04-24T23:42:00.000Z

The Garricks is dead.

Well, probably, anyway. It's changed ownership four or five times during my time sitting in the corner of the bar next to the Iceland eternal-summer window, and none of them have significantly altered the pub's tone. While there was whining about one landlord adding flowers to the bar or similar, it's absolute surface level stuff compared to the real change in the Garricks. That is,the slow tick of life around it.

When I arrived there for the first time... well, when I arrived there for the FIRST time it was the first bar I wandered into when I arrived in Bath as a Student, where we stayed for a drink and then ran out ASAP. When I arrived there as a more regular patron, it was the favoured drinking establishment of Future Publishing PLC, and on a Friday night both sides were full and the crowds collapsed onto the streets. Even at its busiest, it hasn't been like that for a while. Even when I was still employed on a full time basis on GAMER, it was often only the crew of the magazine sitting around a table and slowly drinking themselves into secretly ironic liver failure.

So the fact it's changing ownership may not change anything about the trajectory of the Garricks. However, rather than previous owners which while changing the make-up and keeping the central purpose (that is, a bar to serve Theatre visitors and whomever from Future would would wander in), the new ones apparently have a grand new vision. It's going to be a Champagne bar. If that's true, it seems the last of the children will depart the nest for new homes.

And so, as we know it, the Garricks is dead.

So, I spend the night in a honky-tonk Piano drink-the-bar-dry style gathering. In a momemt of rare resonsance, half the people there decide to depart for somewhere else equally as dull as the music is annoying them and/or they've decided to have a tedious time no matter what, leaving a smaller group of devoted booze-hunters. Which is perfect, as that's what happened in the Garricks on most visits, and ultimately the reason why its trajectory in my stay there has been from popular drinking hole to cultish pit.

People can forgive anything but popularity.

Still, in my first week on Gamer, my editor turned to me and said "You'll learn more in a night in the Garricks than a week in the office".

So I spent every night for five years there.

And he was right.

2005-04-20T14:11:00.000Z

Finally recieved my copy of Issue 5 of Plan B. Only had chance for a quick skim, but looks like yet more good stuff. The cover feature about the Arcade Fire is particularly well-timed. Only a few small pieces by me, and probably stuff of more interesting for the games heads in the audience (Take a test run through some sex and The Sims rambling which I plan to expand to feature-length at some point).

It's a beautiful magazine, and I'm still amused, pleased and amazed to be involved.

Plan B arriving also pushed me towards posting the following. It's a comics script fragment which I wrote this morning in an effort to get my brain starting working. Its the sort of thing that while not actually part of any of McKelvie and my PHONOGRAM I have planned, is clearly from the same narrative place. The spoken words=computer lettering sung words=hand lettered trope certainly is one of PHONOGRAM's.

And I've given it a title, if only to keep in with THE ICE STORM tradition of comics inspired by music on this blog. And, for the pedants in the audience, it becomes a tradition when something happens more than once in my world.

THE CROWN OF LOVE

1.1
On The Girl, lying on a mattress on the floor of a house that exists on the boundary between an actual squat and just a particularly downbeat house. Behind her is an Arcade Fire poster, of the “Funeral” album cover, tattered and frayed towards the edges. Her hands are tied behind her back, and is obviously confused. Understandably, as she’s just come too after being drugged.

NO DIALOGUE

1.2
Line of sight from the girl. Crouching a couple of metres before her is The Boy. He looks at her, face solemn, and is quietly singing. Behind him we see the rest of the room, similarly dilapidated. A kitchen unit is on the far side, one drawer open. Since it’s a singing thing, hand lettering as usual. Tiny, crackled thing to try to show that he really hasn’t the voice.

They’re the lyrics from “The Crown Of Love” by the Arcade Fire.

BOY: THEY SAY IT FADES
BOY: IF YOU LET IT.

1.3
Pull back to show the pair in profile. The boy has turned away from the girl and is starting to walk away, hands swinging by his side. The girl is looking around. She’s probably less panicked than you’d expect as she takes in her situation.

His voice is raised a notch, the words with bolder lines.

BOY: LOVE WAS MADE: SO FORGET IT.

1.4
The boy holds onto the sideboard, one hand in the drawer. His eyes are closed now and he’s tunelessly shouting the words with all the passion he can summon. He’s singing them as absolute gospel, with no fear what anyone listening may think of him.

Frame should pay most attention to the face and the actual shape of the words, which are enormously warped things to show his crackled inflection. The “My Name” and “Your Eyelids” are particularly pronounced.

BOY: I CARVED MY NAME!
BOY: ACROSS YOUR EYELIDS!

1.5
On the girl’s face, her eyebrows narrowed. She’s picked up a mistake.

GIRL: NO. THAT’S WRONG.
GIRL: IT’S “CARVED YOUR NAME ACROSS MY EYELIDS”

1.6
The boy turns, looking surprised and somewhat quizzical at this new information. In his hand is a large kitchen knife, held at an oblique, casual angle.

BOY: OH REALLY?

//end//

2005-04-19T15:48:00.000Z

Wasn't sure whether to link to this or not. Not because of the NGJ-dissing, but rather that it's not exactly brilliant. I've decided to do so because, if it's a choice between rampant cheery unprofessionalism and ugly careerism, I'll side with the former every time

Anyway, this is the blog of an anonymous games journalist, fresh to the career. I don't think it's particularly well known, as there's a complete lack of comments, so I'll give it a bit of publicity in hope that it encourages him to raise his game a little.

Obviously, eventually he's going to get found out. Until then, let's see what he has to say.

EDIT: And he's gone. Which was the sensible thing to do, but WEAK!

2005-04-17T17:47:00.000Z

Shimelle posts her collage work based around my script, which was in turn based around The Go Team's The Ice Storm.

2005-04-16T16:11:00.000Z

In a typical case of always being last to the party, I've finally finished Half-life 2. Am scanning a few friends old blog posts to compare their impressions to mine. I read them at the time, averting my eyes from spoilers, but with the benefit of actual experience I wanted to see where we divulge and where we come together.

Great game, randomly. And that "Great" would keep its capital even if it wasn't at the beginning of the sentence. Valve aren't just at the head of the class in terms of first person shooters, but rather have been put ahead several years and are doing their degree at 15 like some kind of wunderkind while their abstract peers are still choosing their GCSEs.

It's not my favourite game, but like the original, I can see exactly how important it is for the future. Admitedly, it's not as greater herald of the future as the original - unless we're talking in its assorted array of technologies, in which case, yes, it is - but it's still a considerable prophet.

And, yes, it can inspire a certain fanboy timbre when talking about it. Excuse me.

(It shares its main fault with its parent. Namely that as long as you're making forward progress along its linear path, it's almost perfectly atmospheric. The second you can't work out which direction you're meant to be going, it breaks. This is most obvious early in the game, in the extended motorboat chase sequence. As long as you're trundling along, it's as if you're being pursued by an unrelenting foe. When you hit a puzzle or just get lost, it's as if the Combine got bored and wandered off to do something else.)

What most strikes me is that, more than virtually any other single-player game I can think of, it best fits the "Travel Journalism to Imaginary Places" idea. In terms of being a place, City 17 has few peers. In fact, as a Fictional entity, Half-life 2 constantly excels.

I say "Fiction" rather than "Story" to avoid preconceptions. Not all Fiction has to work along a what-a-ripping-yarn! axis. Lots of people have played the But The Story Is Shit card, but I'll link to Richard's, as he was the first - and one of the best - I read.

Essentially, people who say things like this seem to be looking for one of two things. Firstly, exposition. They want to know why all this is happening - which isn't actually a need for story, but a need to know more about the workings of the world than the developers have chosen (Tim Fletcher, over at AB's forum, seems to be among these). Secondly (like Richard) it's because they believe they're lacking motivation because there's no clear objective or reason for you doing it (Not that I agree: your motivation's fairly clear. At first, survive. Secondly, help the revolution.)

I've got a bit more sympathy for the first than the second. Some people just want to know more. Conversely, the "Where's my motivation" is just bizarre.

A couple of months ago I found myself in Spain, seeing Pyro's new Commandos game, Strike Force. Rather than the Squad-RTS/Puzzle game of lore, it's gone into a first person world, with new characters and a proper plot. So instead of just being soldiers, the characters have motivation. As an example, the developer mentioned the Spy's Father was killed by one of the Nazi officers you're fighting against.

We accept it at the time, but it re-emerges at around 1am in a Madrid bar where (despite the game actually looking fine) we suddenly drunkenly decide it's actually the Worst Game Ever. Specifically, the plot stuff. What? Motivation? Why does the Spy need motivation? They're fucking Nazis. We imagined the recruiting session:

"Right, Spy, we want you to help stop the Third Reich"
"Pah. Why should I?"
"Er... the Holocaust?"
"Jews, Schmews"
"They killed your dad"
"THE SHITS!"

Similarly, Half-life 2. You're placed in a world which reiterates, at any opportunity, exactly how brutalised the populance is. Through the actual acting made possible through Valve's tech, we can see in the facial expressions and how they're standing how the world operates. On the other side, the Combine are repressive monsters. Much has been made of scene which introduces the interacting with objects, where a guard knocks a can onto the floor then demands you put it in the bin. While you can obey, what the game actually *wants* you to do is throw it right at him, in an act of rebellion. What a shit, you think.

If placed in that world and given the power, who *wouldn't* want to help overthrow their oppressors? So, no, you don't know why Gordon is in the city or why the Combine have such hate for him. Why does that matter? Rather than taking the line than human life is purely about our pasts and how we got to where we are, it posits that we're more about the situations we find ourselves.

You recall the amusing short IF piece 9:15, which started with you waking up on a bed, with the phone ringing. Someone asks you where the hell you are, as you're meant to be at work. You get ready, washing off the mud and find your way there, only to discover that you're not actually the flat's owner. You're a burgular who fell asleep. The game's simple gag makes the point - we respond to contexual clues which establish our actions. Even with no prehistory, if put in someone elses world with all previous knowledge of what's gone before removed, you'd find yourself acting in a logical way. Half-life 2 takes that insight and runs with it, entirely sidestepping the usual issue of backstory exposition which haunts anyone who attempts to do a more narrative lead game. It realises it doesn't matter how you got there. All that counts is what happens to you when you are, and that you recreate yourself every second by your interactions with the world. In many ways, we're all water flowing down pipes.

In fact, this means that Valve have entire embraced their technological structure on a philosophical level. Half-life is a linear shooter, so at any point there's only one way to go. This is also true on both the physical and emotional planes. If placed here, and presented with certain stimulus... well, there's only one reasonable way to go, yes?

Half-life 2 doesn't do something as simple as telling a story. It doesn't need to. It does something unique to the form of games, which no other form can attempt to match. Rather than trying to ape other linear narratives, it teaches that there's more than one kind of linear narrative, and other types are far more applicable to games than the most obvious. It certainly creates for itself a strong position in my continuing "Games' best method for imparting narrative is Context" theory.

Essentially, how the Combine came to power is of far less interest than what you see them doing after there. After all, imagine a game set in Iraq with you as a Bedouin whose village has been bombed to shit. That game isn't going to be about the globalpoltical reasons why your Uncle or whoever has been blown into pieces: it's going to be about your reactions to the events.

The shotgun is also good.

2005-04-15T13:42:00.000Z

"Neo24375 jacked out, "Mission's gone bad."
Tr1n1ty turned to him, "What went wrong?"
"Pretty much everything."

No matter what you make of the Matrix films, the Wachowski brother's commitment to trying something with their trench-coated melange of leftist-pop ideas is admirable. When someone goes as big as the Matrix did, the tendency is to simply comply to the consumerist process and sell as many toys to geeks as possible, Lucas-style. While they've hardly taken a Bill Waterson No-Calvin-And-Hobbes-T-shirts line, their involvement in all their spin-offs implies they genuinely care. It would have been easy to just give their Enter The Matrix title to a developer and leave them to it. Instead, they integrated it into the plot of the film in a devotedly cross-media exercise. Similarly, while they could have just licensed the Matrix name to any MMO maker, they're using it to actually continue their universe. Where the films stopped, the game continues and it's here where they'll tell the developing story of the Matrix.

It's a big idea. It's admirable.

Sadly, The Matrix Online, much like Enter The Matrix, is a piece of genuinely visionary computer entertainment which succeeds on all the levels except the one where it actually matters. That is, being a good game."

The Matrix Online for Eurogamer. Expect wailing fans for this one, but fuck it. If I knew before writing the review that I had to call the US to cancel my account, I may have even took another mark off.

Also: 10 Gig install. In the language of the internet streets, WTF!!!!?!?!!

2005-04-12T08:55:00.000Z

Two reasons why it's going to be a beautiful day.

1) The finished collage art from Shimelle of my "The Ice Storm" comic arrived. Haven't quite dared open its pages yet.
2) This.

2005-04-11T08:30:00.000Z

"I just want to slam my fist into this whining hostage's face. Is it too much to ask?

Clearly watching the first two series of top ultra-corrupt cop show The Shield in a couple of weeks have left dirty marks on my consciousness, but I haven't quite gone native into the world of missing Mitchell brother Vic Mackey yet. I'm not asking for the full strike team experience of holding a man's face against an electric oven or urinating over suspects in the street or anything. I just want fist in face. Right now.

He's just not co-operating. I need to handcuff the wretch to secure him for extraction, and unless he gets on his knees, I can't do that. I know I can pull out my handy aerosol of MACE to forcibly hitch him to my train of thinking, but why hurt Mother Nature by releasing more nasty chemicals into her lungs when she gave me five fingers thick enough for the job?"

My review of SWAT 4 for Eurogamer, making passing reference to my current TV obsession. I never said I was quick on the update.

2005-04-09T22:58:00.000Z

Am just finishing the last dregs of the bottle of Argentian Chardonnay I've been swilling back while watching the end of Vanilla Skies with the Concubine on our crackly portable aerial, and idly inspired to write. Or more inspired to think about a story which I want to write.

Problem with Vanilla Skies is... well, there's dozens of problems, but give me the luxury of a figure of speech.

There was a phrase which was dropped in the middle of one of Banks' Culture novels: Carbon Fascist. It's one that stuck with me. I still don't know if he knabbed it from someone else, or conjured it from his mental space, but it struck a certain truth. AI-rights are, for me, the single issue of the future which have been failed to be dealt with, to my satisfaction, in fiction.

This interest comes clearly from my whole videogame thing. Cassandra's main theme was the relation between Authority and the opressed, taken to the logical extreme of the relation between the Gamer and the universe. I remember being interviewed for some BBC show, and a question - entirely tangential to the issue we were actually talking about - came up, which was about the videogame experience altering human perception. And I ventured that videogames would be the first place which most of humanity would experience a life-like interaction which was not actually life itself - they're a device which intrinsically prepares us for the posthuman exercise. They are nothing but a bridge on the edge of human experience.

In other words, Unreality is getting more real every day. People like - say - Grant Morrison who hide the observation between metaphysical nu-magical extravagence are essentially foggying the issue. There's no need to hide this in fiction suits. This is a real issue which while /we/ won't have to deal with, our followers - assuming the continuance of the current society - will.

Suppose it come to this. If true AI sentient AI ever comes into existence, it will be capable of functioning precicely like a sentient being. However, legally, it won't have those rights. The gap between the point where AI exists and where AI is recognised as /really/ being AI is the place of the next mass slavery.

Christ: like many others, I distinctly remember my reaction to the Matrix being... well, the Machines are the good guys, yes?

The story in question exists only on file. It was the original thing I was going to write for Charity, until the far more suitable Busted Wonder downloaded into my headspace. I don't think it'd have suited, despite being an Apocalypse Romance of sorts, but... there's something there. Science Fictions job, or at least /one/ of its jobs, is to prepare us the issues which face will face us. I /think/ I have something to say.

We'll come back to it after the current projects are done with, I think.

2005-04-06T15:12:00.000Z

Looking for excuses to avoid Jacking In for ten minutes, I turn to my ever trusty blog.

It's time to write some nonsense.

Oh, just been distracted by an e-mail that's arrived in my inbox and provoked a distinctly girly OH! MY! GOD!

Er... gotta go. Precis: Bedminster is cheap, I'm reading military history books alternating with Julian Cope's autobiography and I'm sleeping more conventional hours.

2005-04-06T08:38:00.000Z

"Remember 'toothing'? Last year the BBC, Reuters and (inevitably) Wired all reported that Bluetooth phones were instrumental in a wave of casual sex sweeping Britain.

"Brits Going at It Tooth and Nail" (geddit??) screamed Wired, with Daniel Terdiman opening his report with the discovery, "The Brits sure are randy".

According to his and similar reports, phone users were using the Bluetooth radio on their handsets to send suggestive anonymous solicitations to people within range. Who then copped off.

Now a British journalist has admitted to making it all up. Toothing never existed, and it was only hoax on a gadget-fetishizing press. The British, it seems, rely on tried and trusted pick-up techniques such as a furtive smile, a wink, or dropping an umbrella."

I have the best friends.

EDIT: Also have a look at Byron's gallery of shame.

2005-04-03T15:44:00.000Z

From sublime to ridiculous, I note that Ben's put something up on his site.

A fellow V-ite, he popped to Bath a couple of years ago accompanied by his parents, and I showed them around a bit. However, while he was there, he appears to have done a little bit of filming.

Now, people have commented on my gesticulations before, but this is the first time I've realised that I really *do* gesticulate. I also see exactly why I spill so many drinks now.

Go have a look.

2005-04-03T10:30:00.000Z

I've stopped linking to NGJ-related commentary here in all but the most extreme cases, but this... well, is one of the most extreme cases.

"Most reviews of computer games cover only the bells and whistles: how quick was the action, how cool the villains, how original the story line. Over the last year, however, a handful of gaming writers have been bringing a more personal touch to their work, using a narrative, experiential approach that acknowledges the effect of the game on the player. Their young genre even has a name: New Games Journalism, after the New Journalism of the 1960's and 70's."

The New York Times Arts section on the New Games Journalism. Registration required.

Ha.

2005-04-02T11:33:00.000Z

A year and a half ago Steve Pierce, gregarious head of the OPM2 conglomerate and I had a cheery lunch about comic strips. Particularly, he'd seen Scott McLeod's fairly high brow game design scripts in one of the US mags, and fancied something similar, if taken down a few notches. I gave him some advice and eventually said that I'd find an artist and do a "test" one for him, then see how it went.

McKelvie and I have been doing them ever since.

Probably about time I stuck a few online, eh?

The link below connects to a gallery of the first year of Save Point strips. 13 of the bastards, because magazines work to a very different drummer to the rest of the world. The concept was a middle-brow observational comic, purely using stuff which gamers have to deal with every day which never makes it into the magazines. No jokes about specific games or response to current affairs, just general trends and thoughts in gaming. We've managed to stick relatively close to that mandate. I thought they'd just be a year's worth of ideas, but we've just hit twenty and we haven't quite reached the bottom of the barrel. Dunno what we'll do when we do: probably have a RAGNAROK OF THE SAVE POINT story or something as a final self-indulgent flourish before running off to the hills to count our enormous piles of cash.

Anyway: Here you go. Thirteen of the bastards, made often under tight deadlines (because we inevitably forget when they're actually due for and/or McKelvie having to run off to sew a new badge onto his bowling jacket or something), including the double-size Christmas special.

Read, if only to follow the recurring motif of hot punky girls. We must play to our strengths.

EDIT: Seems that Playstation.com has been lobbing some of them online. Here they are (In a slightly odd format): One.And the other.

2005-04-01T01:08:00.000Z

"With the massive success of World Of WarCraft, many of those in the MMO space may be trying to emulate the extremely detailed, in-depth game world of Blizzard's smash hit. However, this certainly isn't the case for the ex-Blizzard staff at ArenaNet, who are now owned by Korean-headquartered MMO giant NCSoft.

Philosophically, despite all the trappings of the fantasy RPG, Guild Wars is on an entirely different pole from the traditional massively-multiplayer online game. First off, it features no traditional subscription fee, with the initial purchase providing unlimited access and further investment rendered optional in the form of bi-annual add-on packs."

Interview with Jeff Strain for serious developer-focused website Gamasutra. First work I've done for them, and pleased to have the opportunity. Completely different audience to the usual crowd.

Er... I quote the intro, as it's late and I'm tired and can't be bothered finding a quote by Mr Strain saying something controversial. Go see yourself.

2005-03-23T13:50:00.000Z

The New Games Journalism: Year One.
Or How Not To Herd Cats.

I’m sorry.

Really, I had no idea.

A year ago today, I arrived home from a Bath bar, having spent the entire evening running through well-worn theories with some colleagues, hammer out a few thousand words and release them onto the web thinking that all it’d do is cause a little mocking from my peers in the Garricks for a week and possibly garner the displeasure some of the suits. In fact, it caused a little mocking from my peers in the Garricks for about a year, a splash of displeasure from the suits and accidentally created and named a faux-movement.

Sorry.

It’s all got entirely out of control. To choose an example of how perceptions and opinions have altered as it mutated in the public eye, Stuart Campbell went from saying the manifesto was the single best thing I’ve ever written the day after, to memorably describing it as “an excuse for a bunch of over-educated geeks with no communication skills to wank themselves and each other off for hours and hours and hours and hours without ever actually getting to the point”. /Despite/ the fact that Stuart actually likes a fair chunk of the writing.

I was aware I was playing with fire. I didn’t think things could catch fire as much as they have, but I tried my best to create firebreaks to contain the blaze.

The piece was peppered with caveats and exceptions. It’s probably one of the least definitive of any relatively widely discussed manifesto. Hell, it never even /describes/ itself as a manifesto, and makes apologies in case it turns into one. It explicitly states that it’s just one interesting approach to games writing which you should consider playing with, and not meant as a replacement for any previously existing form. It states that while pretentious writing and poetry is certainly one approach, it’s probably not the best and then proceeds to use the perfectly-accessible normal-language Bow Nigger as its exemplar. It says that it’s something lots of people are thinking about and doing anyway, so trying to reduce the sense that I’m saying I'm some kind of genius for making this shit up.

But it didn’t stop people immediately calling it the NGJ Manifesto, saying that it demanded an end to all reviews in favour of indeterminable open-diary emo-speak and in one particularly amusing case, somehow reading it as me claiming to be the New Tom Wolfe.

Still. I wrote the piece, and should have made it clearer to reduce such misunderstandings. Not starting with a rambling talk about the pub, what records I was listening to and a lengthy analysis of the British Games press would have probably helped, but that would have involved me not writing it in the early hours, on a whim and then lobbing it online. I get the feeling if Marx didn’t collapse in from the pub then wake up in the morning to somehow find he’d written the Communist Manifesto before turning in. If he did that stirring stuff about a spectre sweeping Europe would have been replaced by about how much he liked the Barmaid.

Similarly, if I knew it would be as widely propagated as it was, I’d have taken more time and got a production editor to proof it. For some people, it’s easy to dismiss something discussing writing if it’s got any grammatical or spelling errors, let alone the array of incompetence you’ll see on my average blog post. I shouldn’t have given them the chance.

So sorry for that.

While I’m pleased – or at least amused – with much of what’s happened, there’s a selection of regrets about which I’d like a final word before hopefully never posting about the theory ever again. I’m especially sad that there ended up being more New Games Journalism Journalism than New Games Journalism. Yes, magazines like PC GAMER have been doing something that fits under the NGJ flag of convenience every issue and there’s been plenty of stuff online, the discussion of the concept has sort of taken over. While I don’t object to writing about writing, the point of doing so should be to /do/ something with your earned insight.

Which is one reason why the “Stop Writing About Writing” position fails. Writing doesn’t appear out of the ether. It’s a product of concious thought and application of techniques, and you have to analyse how something works before actually doing it. Any writer worth anything has had “writing about writing” conversations inside their head. All making them public does is share whatever insights or mistakes you’ve made. Similarly, while readers can throw the “Only sort of writing that matters is Good Writing” position with justification – after all, why should they care how something is made? - if a writer tries to do similar it rings hollow. It’s a true statement, but a totally banal one. Good writing isn’t a genre or an approach, and to /create/ good writing – no matter what sort of good writing it is – requires understanding and application of its techniques. For a writer to shun discussion of those techniques at best seems disingenuous.

Linking off that, probably the most unintended side-effect of coining the phrase was how its definition has been warped to something it was never originally intended. Among those who like the concept it’s that any piece of “good” games writing is New Games Journalism through simple matter of quality, rather than limiting it to NGJ’s stated group of techniques. Among those who dislike the concept, it’s that all New Games Journalism is prissy, insufferable English-Lit kids masturbating in public, when there’s nothing at all which suggests that the techniques have to be used to create anything pretentious, deep or even meaningful. It’s anecdotal games journalism, so is meant to be as personal as each person doing it. A funny story about something that happened in a game is as NGJ as it gets.

Worse, these bent definitions have even warped my own view. Christ: I call the piece the New Games Journalism Manifesto despite never titling it so. When compiling the Top 10 list at the Guardian I ended up suggesting some material which is about looking at recent games with a critical eye, which while tangentially referenced in the piece was never near its central thrust. I only realised how much the debate had twisted even /my/ conceptions of the piece when I re-read it for writing this.

Broadening the phrase to include more and more material, while tempting, is counter-productive. It isn’t the only approach to games writing I’d be interested in seeing, just one which caught my attention. When many of the piece’s critics argue they’d prefer to see some investigative journalism or similar, sympathise entirely. It’d be amazing to see that. PC Zone writer, Rhianna Pratchett, half way through the year, was doing a lecture about Games Journalism and in her preparation idly asked me which way I could see the form going. While I think she expected me to trot out some of the usual NGJ-styled nonsense, I was actually struck dumb. The question was far too big, since there are so many directions that games writing could and should go, picking just one seemed obscene.

In its widened state, New Games Journalism has become a slightly meaningless label. I’ve seen music sub-genres like Trip-hop, post-rock and Emo referenced, normally in a “No-one seems to know what it means” manner. It’s a fairly accurate, even more so than most of the people who make the comparisons know. All three labels actually have a very specific, accurate definitions, and the confusion has only come through people applying them on a whim and not really knowing what they’re talking about. It’s also accurate because, as words, they get a shuddering reaction from anyone with half a brain.

All of the above was accidental fall out. Even if I can justify some of it, I’m still especially regretful about coining a horrible description which has been applied to people who aren’t actually doing anything approaching what I was talking about. It really wasn’t deliberate. That goes double for anyone aggrieved at being put with in any group with Tim Rogers.

In actual fact, the manifesto was written for two reasons.

Firstly, to get people up to speed.

This function was for a very small group: that is, people who wanted to write about games. Since most people don’t live in a place where they can sit in a pub and talk this nonsense with their peers, I wanted to get isolated individuals who are only exposed to more mainstream games a chance to think about this stuff. Writers, to begin with, learn by imitation. If all their role models are doing the traditional games journalism, they just create more traditional games journalism. Most writers on games of note usually have at least a couple of other strong influences, which they fuse to create a synthesis (For me, it’s mainly music journalism). However, for someone who exists primarily inside games, the standard review may be all they have. So the manifesto existed to tell these people – and just because you don’t come from a more liberal background, doesn’t mean you’re dumb – “why bother wasting their time doing a trad thing when they could do something else instead?” Especially, in the case of GAMER, the magazine would be actively pursuing this work from new writers. “Let’s see how fast it can go” was the inclusive challenge. Let’s have some fun.

Yes, that paragraph comes across as arrogant, but honestly is coming from the opposite pole. It’s because I know how *I* learnt and what pushes I needed to get me writing, I know that there’s people like me who /do/ need permission to do something like this. And a little more on this point later.

Secondly, it existed as gaming’s most glorified referral post, specifically for AB's stuff. Put simply, I wanted as many people to read it as possible. While liking that, some of my friends have noted that Bow Nigger had already been printed in a games mag before the whole manifesto thing, and appreciated and loved. Why hype it again? That's true. It had been printed in Gamer already (But only because Rossignol and I brought it to Donald’s attention). However, its audience post-NGJ is by several factors larger than pre-NGJ, even including Gamer’s 50K+ readers. A grotesque number of people have been exposed to what I still think is a phenomenal piece of game writing, purely because I tied it to an over-arching theory and gave it a name.

Ah. The name.

Reeeeeally sorry.

The name was my biggest, deliberate sin. While it’ll still have caused some confusion, if I was transparently honest I should have called the piece “Games’ New Journalism”, to stress that I was talking about a specific approach and how it applied to games, not New in its Year-zero revolutionary sense or that it was a new approach to writing about games full stop. Because of that, some people can’t get past the idea that some New Games Journalism is over a decade old.

I didn’t because “Games’ New Journalism” simply isn’t particularly exciting. While it’d have caused far less annoyance among those who just responded to the title, it wouldn’t have reached even a fraction of people. In short, I swapped intellectual stringency for soap-box politics in a Faustian deal. I’m sorry for that, but still think it was necessary. The cost was muddying the debate, but without that I don’t think we’d have even had the debate – or the publicity for a lot of interesting work - in the first place.

Labels and names are powerful things, and you should only use them with care. They have clear benefits and costs. The benefit is that it allows people to get a handle on a larger collection of concepts in a simple manner. It swaps complexity for directness, and journalists have always reached for them for that reason. Selling something with a name is hugely easier than selling something without one.

The cost is that the name – the label, the definition, whatever – eventually becomes a cage. It stops being about the work it describes and starts being about the description of the work. People fail to realise it was only ever a map, and mistake it for the terrain itself.

Let’s choose an example thousands of times more important than what we’ve been up to. In the mid-seventies an arty-anarchist-dada-rock scene in London imports the name “punk”. A group of complicated ideas gets brought into focus, and mass popularity. However this very action kills the scene, making it miscarriage onto the surgery floor of pop culture. Revolution is turned into money, with copyist bands who miss the point completely. Punk became a laughable blur of spiked hair and spitting.

But that same rush of explosive energy exposed the philosophy to millions who’d otherwise had lived their life entirely without this onrush of ideas. Punk’s influence echoed through pop-culture ever since, with every band of note owing something to its primal scream. And not just bands either. I wouldn’t be writing this if it wasn’t for Savage’s “England’s Dreaming” selling the Fanzine-ethos to me and reaffirming that, yes, it was okay for someone with no training or cool or culture to write, just to let the A-bombs in their head out.

So, for punk, the cost was worth it. It got the ideas out there to the right people – that is, people. It killed the scene, but it was worth it.

That’s what labels allow. It’s a gamble. It could work. Or it could not.

I’m not stupid. I was aware of what I was playing with. I didn’t think, for a second, that it’d have worked as well as it has, but I knew this would be the potential fall out. So, yes, perhaps I’ve inadvertently sacrificed a small part of the form’s future for some easy publicity for friends, peers and talented strangers. For that, I really am sorry.

But you know what? For the number of people who’ve read pieces they’ll have never had otherwise and the small possibility that there’s someone out there who’s been inspired by all this noise, I’d do it all over again.

So it doesn’t appear that I’m /actually/ that sorry at all.

Sorry.

2005-03-22T23:46:00.000Z

Guess what I was doing one year ago today?

2005-03-21T23:47:00.000Z

"While discussing Playboy: The Mansion last week, we lamented the state of the modern Sim Clones. Despite Hugh Hefner's digital love child being far from a brilliant game, it was still one of the finest things that have sprouted in Maxis' long shadow, because the rest of the lineage are incredibly rubbish rather than merely midly rubbish. The Sims has, perversely enough, proved to be the only huge-selling, genre-creating game in history which hasn't lead to an army of imitators. Doom begat endless Doom clones. Dune II/C&C begat a tank-rush of pretenders. Hostile Waters... well, we can't win them all.

Sims begat virtual nothing."

Sims University review over at Eurogamer. Not hugely pleased with it. The problem with writing the infinite-form review at EG is that you find yourself gravitating towards actually going back to root-logic every time and showing all your working. While this transparent honesty is why I tend to prefer long form reviews (compared to the short form review, where if you're trying to say something too clever you use assumed knowledge to justify criticism. To choose a regular example, saying that Quick-load is a bad thing without ever justifying it. I don't like the arrogance inherent in making such a blanket statement without saying why. It's bullying to the reader, because you're implying if they don't understand why they're just stupid - when in fact, it could be *you* that's stupid if you don't show /why/ it's so. And what a long bracketed statement), it can end with you just hitting an old argument and looking for a fresh spin. It's what I find myself trying to do here, and not really succeeding.

2005-03-20T19:25:00.000Z

Attachments attached. E-mail sent. Fingers crossed.

2005-03-17T12:57:00.000Z

Picked up from Slashdot, but the first issue of PDF magazine "The Gamer's Quarter" has been released online. Looks interesting, though the name does give me the chills. I prefer my pseudo-intellectualism with a sense of humour and life, and the name suggests a rather dryer inclination.

Thankfully, and though I've yet to really read it, scanning seems to point towards something that isn't that extreme. Vaguely reminds me of the Say Something style - though perhaps not as militarised or passionate - of early State, though a couple of notches less of the purple prose and a tendency to perhaps be a bit more intellectually coherent. Though that could very easily be wrong.

Even if don't like it, I'm glad it exists and consider it worthy of discussion and download. Hence, linking here.

Thoughts on it, anyone?

2005-03-16T13:48:00.000Z

"You walk into every review with expectations. Basic critic's prejudice. With something like Playboy: The Mansion, this Sims-esque Hugh-Hefner-'em-up, you walk into the review buried alive in the things. Can't approach the work cleanly, which says something about humans but a lot more about the game.

Anyway, the plan was simple: I was going to rate the game purely on whether it got me off or not. It seemed the only way to be fair. Action games should be rated on how excited they make you. Strategy games should be rated by how much they make you think. Logically, games based upon the world's most famous soft-porn brand must be based upon per cubic centimetre of emissions produced."

Reviewing Playboy: The Mansion for Eurogamer, which I enjoyed far more than I really should have.

2005-03-16T09:31:00.000Z

2005-03-15T14:00:00.000Z

I'm sorry, but I've got to spread this running joke a bit so people don't look at me as if I were insane whenever I use it.

Walker's been reviewing a game called Legacy. It's the usual sort of thing which ends up in his lap, being a foriegn rendered adventure. Putting aside its quality - though you may be able to guess, knowing Walker's reputation - it has one absolute stand-out feature.

A theme tune.

Available here.

It plays over the credits. Listening to it, you may wonder how on earth it relates to the game. Thankfully for our communal sanity, this piece of seemingly nonsensical - yet highly quotable - europop nonsense that *somehow* reminds me of Brassy, really doesn't. It also never answers the question that if the woman is actually the Sheriff's fiance and they've been engaged for eight years, how can he not have asked not asked her to marry him? That's what "engaged" means.

So - now when Walker or I say "You strike me as a VERY jealous woman" (Which I'll do to the concubine every time she gets in a bit of a tiff) or "You don't look like a Burglar to me" (Whenever his house gets robbed), you'll know what's going on.

It's not "War's never been this much fun", but sterling show. More of this sort of thing, B-developers. It'll get you bonus marks, and - let's be honest - you need them.

2005-03-15T09:29:00.000Z

Guest editorial time, from Graham whose extended thoughts wouldn't post in the comments section. Take it away Graham:

*****

There was one thing from the talks that confused me:

"Then there was the Nintendo keynote. This was the company who established the business model that has crucified the industry today.. Iwata-san has the heart of a gamer, and my question is what poor bastard’s chest did he carve it from?"

This is from Greg Costikyan, and to me it seems like he's taking a dig at the only company that has any clue right now. While Microsoft prattle on about the HD era, where everything is bigger and brasher and so on, Nintendo are the ones who are being innovative in hardware and software. Nintendo are the ones who are making these small, fun games that pay little attention to graphics (though still, it must be said, look nice). So I guess it just seems like he's kicking the only ones who might be in his corner.

Aside from that though, it's nice to see that developers feel this way. Developers are the ones that need to carry out the change, so it's good they're convinced.

Really I'm of two minds. On the one hand, I think there are a lot of people who play games without ever really thinking about them. There are those who go into stores, buy the occasional magazine, and simply go for the latest racing game or football game that looks good on the back of the box. I'm worried that there's a lot of people who are happy with that, and perhaps aren't brave enough to try the odd looking new thing with the 2D graphics that doesn't have wheels OR balls.

Then, on the other hand, my right hand, I have this feeling of "If you build it, they will come." Did anyone think The Sims was a marketable concept before it became the biggest selling game of all time? I'd doubt it. I mean, I watch the full Revenge of the Sith trailer that was released a few days ago, and I think "Man, I want the game that looks like THAT." But what have I been playing most over the same space of time? Tower of Goo, which was created in 4 days and is available for free at http://www.experimentalgameplay.com. I have an XBox, a Gamecube, a powerful PC, a bookcase full of games, and what I'm playing has no discernable end, no menus, no nothing really. I've reached the goal of 25 feet - nothing happens. Yet I keep going back and doing it again in new ways, or just going back to mess around, making odd blob-idols that I then tip over in sacrifice to some imaginary God. It's just fun.

So really I agree with Spector's view, that it's the distribution model at fault. I'd wager considerably less people try out new games at £35 than would at, say £15, or £10, or £5, or if it were downloadable online. Case in point: music. All new music I hear I discover because someone online mentions it. My brother writes about The Go! Team on his blog, so me and my other brother immediately download it from iTunes. A week later and you write about them here, coincidentally, and a week after that and I've already prompted another three people - two of whom were complete strangers - to go and get it themselves. If Thunder, Lightning, Strike were only available in a store, hidden behind a long train journey, would the same thing have happened? No, it wouldn't. Because I'm lazy, because train journey's cost money, and because FOPP, HMV and Virgin all suffer from limited shelf space and never stock the things I'm looking for anyway. It all comes back to an article I read some time ago called The Long Tail (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html), where it's explained why Amazon make more money from the niche markets than the rare megahits.

The same could hold true for games.

If they build it.

2005-03-14T18:52:00.000Z

"We’re the only medium that lacks an alternate distribution system. All we have is boxed games sold at retail. This is changing a little. But think about our competition for your entertainment dollar. First run, broadcast, reruns, DVDs.. you name it. hardback, paperback, e-book. Theatre release, pay-per-view, video, DVD. We put our thing on the shelf at Wal-Mart, it sells or it doesn’t, and OMG you just blew 10m dollars. The publishers not respecting developers, this is not the problem. We have a flawed distribution model. There are very few ways of getting a game done these days. Developers.. why should we get a huge return? We’re taking some of the risk, but the $10m, the marketing space, the retail space all belong to someone else. We have winner-take-all business that carries a lot of risk. So .. we have to find alternative sources of funding. Chris Crawford used to rant about how we need patrons.. I don’t care if it’s wealthy patrons, I don’t care what it IS, but it’s critical that we divorce funding from distribution.

We need alternative forms of distribution too. I’m not saying publishers suck, although I do believe that in many cases. [laughter] If the plane went down who would care about the marketing guys? We need another way of getting games out there and in players' hands. If any of you bought half life 2 at Wal-Mart, please just leave the room. Has everyone bought Bioware’s online modules? JUST BUY THEM, OK, even if you don’t have the original games! We HAVE to get games into gamers’ hands. So I’m not saying publishers are evil.. if we do all this and go direct to our consumers with games funded some OTHER way than EA or whoever.. we’ll keep more of the money.. we have to find someone to pay for it and find a buyer after. We need Sundances. Independent Film Channel. Equivalents of those. Just try to find some way of funding your stuff that doesn’t come from a publisher."

Graham forwarded me this on Friday, and it's been all over the games feeds and blogs since, but I didn't get a chance to read it until now. Interesting stuff. Angry, angry people.

I've quoted Spector just because it made an interesting compare and contrast between what I rememebred him saying at a previous GDC, where his speech was on developers not worrying that they're working on a licence and just concentrating on creating the best licences they can.

Something's changed here.

Oh - and another quote which nails a central issue for next generation, this time from game designer Greg Costikyan: "Those budgets and teams ensure the death of innovation".

2005-03-10T09:58:00.000Z

"It's a Real-Time Strategy Game.

This, if nothing else, makes Act of War: Extraneous Subtitle something of a rarity in the busy gaming world of 2005. While every other game seems to be integrating elements of everything from role-playing games to platform games (at least in the case of the widely anticipated Command & Conquer: Its-a Me! Yuri!), Act of War keeps things familiar. If you brought someone forward in time from those crazy salad days of the mid-nineties, and put a line-up of games before them, they'd identify Act of War with a cheery "Yes - that's the RTS". It has Strategy. It's in Real Time! It's a game! It has Strategy and it's in Real Time and it's a game! It's a Real Time Strategy Game!

[Actually, it's a Flight Sim -Inevitable Pedant]"

Act of War review over at Eurogamer. I'd have named the inevitable pedant Taurus, but that's too injokey even for me.

2005-03-08T10:48:00.000Z

Panelbleed is playing up at the moment, so I post this here for now. I just wanted something not related to that TLA on the page.

“Crying Yourself To Sleep Over Your Losses, Regrets And Loneliness”
MEK #1-3
Warren Ellis/Steve Rolston

That Mek stays with me proves that brilliance alone is never enough.

Mek was one of the barrage of pop-comics Ellis penned towards the end of the WEF-infamy. The reception was mixed to say the least, with the best – Red features some of the finest action comics of the last five years – getting mixed up in the general apathy that the genuinely abominable Tokyo Storm Rising. Mek sat quietly in the middle of the group, engendering little more than a shrug in most comic-based discussion and a little affection in the cultural-sub-sects it mirrored.

This is understandable.

It’s slow paced. Not an awful lot happens. It hits a fair selection of Ellis’ more familiar tropes. Certainly, at a glance, the tenet of the piece seems terribly close to something that’d be thrown away in a panel in Transmetropolitan. Equally, with a couple of memorable exceptions, Rolston’s art proves wholly unsuitable. While managing the fashion and feel of a real pop-culture, never even vaguely convinces in its central conceit.

The conceit being a pop-culture set based around elective cybernetic surgery: Mek.

Sarisa Leon, Original Mek-scene-former and now Washington Lobbyist, returns to the place of its birth to find that while she’s been away its mutated from an art-culture to street-violence. Her old lover has been killed in a Bad-Mek deal gone wrong, and she needs to find out why. And then she does so. And then she does something about it, and it’s not quite what you expected.

The “it’s not quite what you expected” is why Mek sticks with me when better comics – hell, even better Ellis comics – have been forgotten.

Until the third issue, you believe that Sarisa is a driven, sympathetic protagonist disappointed with the scene she helped created and trying to get to the heart of it.

At which point you discover that she’s actually a monster.

Re-reading, you realise it’s been there all along and you just didn’t notice it. The fact that we were following her is the real reason we find her sympathetic: she must be the good guy, as why else would we be spending so much time with her? Her hard expressions and occasionally abrasive attitude… well, Ellis has produced so many hard-characters working for the greater good, we’re accepting of it. Even Rolston’s art helps convince us, with its personable, even cute, characters.

But, no, she’s a monster.

Here’s the problem that Mek illustrates beautifully: that the people who change the world are the people who want to change the world. After all, what sort of person would actually attempt to manufacture a movement from disparate strands of social fashion? Someone who lacks something in the current one.

Circa Baader Meinhoff there was another group in Germany who formed around a radical psychiatrist. He militarised his group of patients, arguing that rather than change people whose mental disorders mean they can’t function in society, the problem actually lay in the society itself. If society changed, then their disorders would cease. Hence, terrorism by the insane to destroy an insane society.

That sticks with me even more than Mek does, because it makes a similar point. There’s something severely wrong with anyone who’d attempt to manufacture something like Mek, to push it further, to try and tie it under an easily digestible banner and… well, you’d have to be someone like Sarisa Leon, crying yourself to sleep over your losses, regrets and loneliness yet still prepared to kill anyone who dares get in her way or crosses her plans.

But it’s not quite so simple. The Bad Mek society of Sky Road is shown to only be the hardest edge of Mek culture. While it’s a social problem, Mek is accepted in a lesser form by the whole of society, exploding from her and her friends attempts to get the message out. Would Mek have happened in the same way without her efforts? As quickly? Been picked up by as many people? Been accepted? Been even talked about? Probably not.

Mek leaves me thinking two things:

1) Monsters can do good things too.
2) It doesn’t make them any less of a monster.

2005-03-07T15:18:00.000Z

"Time for a Monday neologism: Post-genre.

The theory goes like this. If we're looking at computer games, when videogame manufacture was first democratised by the appearance of home computers, no one had any idea what they were doing so they were forced to invent by necessity. Ideas were thrown together just to see what operated well, or even operated at all. These times I'll describe vaguely as "pre-genre".

Eventually, however, they hardened into solidified idea-clusters which were the modern genres, each with specific characteristics. In fact, if a game failed to fulfil some of these criteria, it could often be dismissed as a bad game, when in reality it was just a bad example of a particular genre and really succeeded as something else. Games reached the "genre" state at different rates. A late appearing genre - like the first-person shooter - was still pre-genre up to the point where Doom appeared. Take the original System Shock, developed by Looking Glass. Since there had never been anything quite like it before, they created something that still stands slightly apart from the FPS. If it appeared a year later, its controls would have probably been more akin to Doom because the genre had properly defined itself.

Genres are a great aid for the gaming public as they get used to thinking about and playing games. We reached the point where there are people who don't just like the idea of "games" - they like specific genres or sub-genres. Or even singular mods of games: I'd imagine there are people out there who haven't played another game seriously since Counter-Strike appeared all those years ago [in which case, get help! -Ed].

Except we've started to move past that."

Mind download time with my review of Darwinia over at Eurogamer. For once, including an Ed comment that I didn't actually write myself.

2005-03-04T11:43:00.000Z

"Last week’s blog on the state of videogame writing, and the possible solution offered by New Games Journalism, attracted plenty of debate, but many of you wanted to see a few more examples of the NGJ style.

So I got together with Kieron Gillen (veteran games journalist and comic book writer, responsible for the NGL manifesto), Ian ‘Always Black’ Shanahan (writer of seminal NGJ article ‘Bow, Nigger’), Jim Rossignol (another veteran games journo and NGJ stalwart), and Mark Donald (editor of PC Gamer) and drew up a list of ten articles available online and indicative of the New Games Journalism approach.

This is a varied bunch, but I think what connects them is emotion, insight, and often a narrative rather than methodical structure. Whatever, just read and enjoy."

I keep on getting the bit in Talking Heads' "Once in a Lifetime"'s where Byrne yelps "And I think to myself... MY GOD! WHAT HAVE I DONE?!!) playing inside my skull this morning. And not in a good way.

2005-03-02T21:05:00.000Z

""I have a confession to make." typed BabyDoll."

AB's Possessing Barbie goes online. Originally appeared in Gamer a few months ago. My current favourite piece of games journalism of all time.

2005-03-01T20:32:00.000Z

"Maybe it’s the novocaine – is that what it’s called in the UK? Perhaps not; still, it’s such a pretty word – but right now, frozen in the dentist’s chair, RedEye’s never been more in love. The dentist looks like an angel, her white light halo made from anglepoise medical lighting. She pushes some cotton wool firm against RedEye’s gum, and then touches the grinding tool back to the lower left molar. Everything inside his head vibrates; above the buzzing and the clean hiss of the moisture suction pipe, the assistant hums whatever’s on the radio. It turns out to be Nelly vs *NSync. Man, that just makes everything perfect. Good stuff, novocaine.

“So, you write about computer games?” she asks.

“Riggiogamegh,” replies RedEye. The dentist nods sympathetically."

Ste Curran comes out.

"Other journalists have their press trips, but it's the sheer quantity and unlikely decadence of the games junkets that sets them apart. At virtually any time in the year, there will be a bunch of pasty hacks living it large in LA, San Francisco, Vegas, Tokyo, various locations in Europe (which doesn't really count), and the UK (which is considered an insult). In the last month, as a freelancer across several titles, I've visited Paris, Dubai, New York and Limerick, with the forthcoming week offering a launch party in Berlin segueing into three days' snowboarding in Val d'Isère."

Steve Hill on the glorious excess of life as a games journalist. Or perhaps, more accurately, the glorious excess of life as Steve Hill.

2005-03-01T09:26:00.000Z

"It's a bad time to be a fanboy.

If you want an overarching theme for the last couple of years on the PC, then it's the tender hopes of the devotee being stomped upon. You buy your identity into a videogame, only for a sequel or - hngggh - "re-imagining" to Kill The Woman You Loved. Cue screaming. From the reactions all over the web, you may suspect that certainly developers actually did creep into gamers' houses under cover of night to kill the family, have sex with their expensive furnishings and then leave the toilet seat up at the exact moment to annoy to the point of apoplexy a passing aunt."

Settlers V/Heritage of Kings review for Eurogamer. Enjoyed writing this one, for no discernable reason.

2005-02-28T17:36:00.000Z

"With games on the brain we sat in the pub, chatting, laughing, drinking bottled beer that we couldn’t really afford. That was okay - all money is relative. Then one of the party leaned in to me and says ‘I don’t really think of Warcraft as a game anymore, I think of it as a place.’ Since then I’ve been boiling thoughts, simmering theses on the coals of conjecture – just what would drive a man to say such a thing? Why can’t we dissolve discussion with a well placed ‘it’s only a game’?

It’s like this: we’re not in fucking Kansas anymore. This thing has gone too far. And the changes are no longer confined to a few fringe men, this is a shift in consciousness, one that we’re all sharing.

These big changes happen without you really noticing. Television, cinema, the car, cellphones – these things all had profound changes on the way we thought about the world. We mix up our own imagination with that of cinematographers – people didn’t have filmic dreams before TV and cinema, they didn’t have driving dreams before the car. Now these things are ubiquitous, they impinge on everything from the way we sleep to the metaphors we use. Did we notice? Did we even have a choice? These days we can barely imagine what that primitive state before the screen must have been like."

Jim, on fire. This is what we do this thing for.

2005-02-26T12:54:00.000Z

"The week that Hunter S Thompson committed suicide seems like an appropriate (or staggeringly inappropriate – I can’t decide which) time to talk about the state of videogame journalism. A couple of weeks ago, I posted a link to a Maoist game review site and briefly mentioned the rise of New Games Journalism, a highly subjective approach to videogame writing in which the player’s own experiences within the game environment are brought to the fore. Of course, this style has its roots in the gonzo journalism practised by Thompson and his contemporaries, which partly explains my timing."

Somehow missed this long piece over at the Guardian Games Blog by ex-flatmate Keith Stuart about the whole New Games Journalism malarkey. Interesting also for the thread of comments streaming afterwards, from games journalists past and present.

Random thing that's been nagging on my mind recently: we're approaching the one year anniversary of the manifesto. Probably a good time to collect my thoughts on the issues into something more coherent.

No, not NGJ V2.0.

Perhaps worth giving a plug for AB's Blackbored forum where I found the link. One of my current favourite web forums, for its high signal/noise ratio.

2005-02-25T12:39:00.000Z

"First up: games magazines. I regularly get into obstinate, pedantic word-flinging matches in comments threads across the Internet on the subject of games mags. Usually it’s because I’m just feeling like fighting, but sometimes I have a point to make too. Recently I’ve been hearing a lot about how games magazines are broken in one way or another. One of the issues that gets dragged up by my interlocutors is that games magazines fail, in one way or another, to address the needs and requirements of ‘casual gamers’. As writer Gillen regularly points out, if you’re a casual partaker in any subject you’re probably not going to be buy a magazine about it. We all enjoy music, but how many of us actually buy Q or the NME? Is that the fault of the magazines themselves? Have they been too elitist? No – the fact is that most of us simply have other priorities than reading reams of text regarding music, no matter how delicately orchestrated to cater to our casual palette these words might be."

Jim writes about writing and World of Warcraft, and has interesting things to say about both. I dare say most of you are already reading his blog, but consider this your reminder. Obviously, I quote this bit as he references me. Natch.

2005-02-21T17:56:00.000Z

I was genuinely floored.

I phoned Jane, who was at work so didn’t answer, so is the possessor of another one of my patented nonsensical rambles on her messaging. Then I phoned Jim. And then I booted up the computer and to write… something.

Only have one story about Thompson which connects directly to the man rather than the influence of his work. When I was living in Denver, in Thompson’s neck of the woods, a friend of mine claimed that Hunter S. Thompson hit on his wife on a distant bus-route. Which is a good way to picture him. Of course, I always suspected this friend was an inveterate liar, but I choose not to let that detract from the story. Lies were part of the fun with Thompson. Little lies that got you closer to bigger truths.

Suicide sticks badly when thinking with Thompson, though conspicuous anger and quiet despair are often bedfellows. As Jim idly speculated, him fucking around drunk and accidentally killing himself fits better with the image of The Man. As more news emerges, we’ll know.

It feels like an important passing. Like all too many writers, I owe Thompson too much to easily describe. Not least that fact the people who I initially appropriated my voice from took from him, making him – well – sort of a literary Grandfather, and the sort of family elder who you might suspect fucking your mom and making the link a little more direct on the quiet.

Hunter S. Thompson. Quite literally, a man who wrote a lot of words, took a lot of drugs and owned a lot of guns.

2005-02-18T14:34:00.000Z

Wasn't expecting this to be a difficult review. Having Played and loved the Beta of World of Warcraft already, I was expecting this to be easy. Play some more on the Euro servers, slap a 9/10 at the end and wander down the pub in time for a swift round before closing.

The problem was that I realised I wasn't quite having the ball of a time I remembered. Something was amiss.

World of Warcraft review for Eurogamer. Not that it's going to stop me playing it, I dare say.

2005-02-17T10:10:00.000Z

For those who have been following the long germination of my feature on The Cradle and want to examine the results, the issue including it should be in all good news agents today. It's the new PC GAMER with Knights of the Old Republic 2 on the cover. Worth at least a browse, if you've even played the XBox version, as all the information applies to both formats equally.

I'm told it's good by my peers, but I've long since past moved past the point where I'm able to ascertain its quality or lack thereof. One thing I'm relatively sure of: there's never been anything quite like it before.

2005-02-15T10:36:00.000Z

Wanted to wait until after the move to post this, as I knew they were going to be several long posts in my final week in Bath, and wanted it to stick around...

*****

Now we are three.

COMMERCIAL SUICIDE, the 'zine of wrong, is gearing up for its third issue, to be launched at Bristol in May.

To that end, Gillen and I seek your submissions. We're looking for 1-8 page stories, the wronger and funnier, the better. No comic strips, nothing over 8 pages unless we know you and love you. More details here. We don't care if people have been published before or not; we only care if the script is funny.

The deadlines are: Scripts in by 30 March. Finished art in by 1 May.

You're welcome to find your own artist, draw it yourself, or ask us to match you up with an artist (or a writer!).

Email myself (alex_de_campi *i really hate spam* at hotmail *yes I do* com) and Kieron (kieron at gillen7 dot fsnet dot co dot uk) for more details. Those of you who saw or bought COMMERCIAL SUICIDE 2 (we love you) can attest that it was quite a lovely book indeed.

*****

And she's not lying.

I'm working idly on my script at the moment, with a structure in mind to hang the jokes off. Unless I change my mind and/or decide it's not actually funny, it's going to be ULTIMATE POL-POT.

2005-02-15T10:28:00.000Z

Move completed and finally have a copy of the new issue of Plan B. Worth reading generally - it's certainly the most beautiful issue of the magazine yet. Smoosh cover is fun, and reads like - patronising mode on - an indie version of Kids Say The Funniest Things (Paraphrase: Did you introduce Courtney and Kurt, Everett? So... did you kill him?). I've got a selection of stuff in it, most of it which just makes me decide to stop using as many full stops in my shorter pieces. It's the first games column which *really* works, for me, and have to work out a way of creating something of similar timbre in the future. And there's one line in the Dresden Doll interview which I really like.

Get yours today.

2005-02-14T10:59:00.000Z

"It's the last diary entry. We knew we needed some vague climax to our four-week mission into the heart of Paragon City. We thought we'll save the universe. Or something.

And - you know - really save the universe. While you're averting some disaster every third second when playing the game, some challenges are bigger than others. We thought we'd go for the biggest. That is, take on the expanse of a Task Force."

Last of the four Diaries, which have been fun to do.

Move is completed. Currently abusing Jane's old flat's internet connection until we manage to fix up our own. Can recieve mail to my usual address, but will have to send *from* my panelbleed one. Though my panelbleed address can't *recieve* mail. Which will be amusing.

2005-02-12T01:30:00.000Z

Before leaving, I want to get a little bit of this town beneath my feet.

I’m not sure where the idea comes from. Probably from somewhere on the meniscus between Ian Sinclair’s London Orbital and William Gull’s trip around London in From Hell. Perhaps just that I felt I owed this town something, and two and a half hours of slogging a slow circle around it is the least I could offer. Or maybe it was an act of magic. Or maybe it was romanticism. You decide.

The concept is as such: I head out and walk in a vague circle around Bath, with the places I’ve lived as the waypoints. I originally planned to go in order but with the way I skipped between town it’d have doubled the route, and this is sufficient. Besides – I’d sliced my foot open earlier in the week, and wasn’t sure whether I’d be too uncomfortable to make the several mile trip.

I’d lobbed together a playlist of MP3s on my player – stuff that moves me from now and then, basically, arranged with no real thought – and stepped out of the back door, in to the centre of bath, and turned left.

And immediately it starts hitting me. It’s the reason why I’m leaving Bath – that the memories bury me at every corner. My entire (very) late teens and early twenties were spent fucking around in Bath, and so every street corner bears my mental scars. And, with a prepared sound-track and an attitude that borders somewhere between that of a nostalgia addict and a blank historian, it feels like I’m drowning in the past.

First thing, as the Bluetones’ spit out the venomous Bah-bah-bah’s of Are You Blue or Blind’s, is a Newsagents. And it’s the Newsagents where I wandered daily to abuse my teeth by purchasing the most artificial foodstuffs I could imagine as an offering to the Great Gods of Games Journalism during my stay on Gamer. Especially when I really believed, secretly, in the Great Gods on Games Journalism. I don’t know how many years Irn Bru and Flamin’ Hot Monster Munch has taken off my life, but it’s got to be worth it.

Bear a right as Betty Boo’s “Where Are You Baby” cuts in, passing the Garricks, which is one of the places where the memories are so thick and so loud that it’s like white noise passing over you. I can’t choose one. All I know that it’s a place who’s artificial lighting inside, making it appear as if it were late afternoon constantly, ruined my bodyclock for months at a time. It’s one of the drinking venues which looms large on the horizon of my imagination.

I leave it behind, turn a right past the remains of the Theatre, past Future Publishing’s head office where – as a 19 year old – I once distended a balloon through the letter box with assorted Team 4.5 friends as… oh, I don’t know. Pilgrimage. Tribute. Whatever.

I head up the Upper Bristol road out of town, immediately hanging a left onto the backstreets, walking parallel to the main traffic. These stink of lust and failure, as I wander past a couple of Exs place. The first was only a kinda-Ex – the sort who everyone knows is a real Ex, but no-one would be as undignified to admit it. She enters my story as the first time I met a girl and realised… no. Too broken to save. I can’t put myself through it. This is called, in some circles, growing up, but still doesn’t rest on the palette well.

100m down the road, past the place where Kid With Knife tore a signpost from the ground and lobbed it in a tributary of the river Avon, we pass another. And it’s one which raises up in my consciousness like… well, the white noise and dimming of the senses that you get at death. No-one hurt me as much as this girl, and the whole dirty tragedy of our multiple failed affairs warped my entire personality. In my circle, my sullen aggression was described as the “Evil Kieron” period. And I was absolutely monstrous then, breathing vodka, snarling and spending three months drunk.

So I step past there, and onto an earlier memory. St George’s Buildings, where I spent my final year of university with the group of friends I whittled down to from the masses I had in my gregarious first year. I preferred it that way: these were the only people who counted. “Born To Run” kicks in as I pass, and I grin. I was the only person from the house to stay in the area, the rest scattering to the extremes of the Earth. I’m glad they got out when they were young. It’s what they were made to do.

A couple of hundred metres past there, I hit the perfectly pun-worthy 1, Comfortable Place where I lived with the last friend from that house to leave the area, when her boyfriend pulled out of moving in together at the last minute and we dug around trying to find a place. I look at it, and think of its damp, our drunken solidarity during my early Future years and our desperate attempts to cover our bad paint jobs during the house inspection for our money back, where myself and KwK leant against the dirty parts of the room when the landlady was nosing around.

I turn back, turn south and head across the ramshackle bridge whose graffiti I photographed to use in the first HIT, my first comic… comics. Telling as I turn south that my first memory kicked is my relation to that, as the next house on my journey is tied into that whole immersion into the subculture. I look left, at the centre of the circle I’m cutting, and browse over assorted memories from there, places I’m just missing – specifically, standing in Sainsbury’s car park and screaming poetry at the glistening capitalist temple.

I hit the lower Bristol Road, and cross, past the terrible Chinese which I subsisted from for a year and my friends bought food from every new years as it was the only place that was open. What other choice did we have? Onwards, through the traffic, to Lorne Road and my penultimate home in Bath. A terraced house, rented, with Real Humans instead of Future Facsimiles. Got on well enough with one, but despised the other so much that I’d rather spend my time in my soot-smeared room rather than venture in the living room. I stand outside, considering it, and most of my memories are tied either to being Alone or being with the Girl, who I first met during my stay there. This is the one we destroyed the bed in. The landlord suspected the mattress was some kind of dirty protest.

I smile, as that’s always worth remembering, and turn back, heading deeper into Oldfield Park.

I walk past a Girl’s School as the theme tune from NGJ Evangelion hits for no discernable reason, and I laugh. Despite getting so many jokes, the two years I lived in the neighbourhood I never even saw a schoolgirl. I feel robbed. I look right down the road where brother Z lived, and can’t help but get a little bit of a premonition for the memories that lie deeper in Oldfield Park. I try to dwell on sitting in his suburban basement, him smoking, me ranting, and planning something resembling a better future with Agents AD. I still laugh that he’s managing bands now.

Across the bridge – eyes scanning right to the rail-track which recalls drunken collapses onto carriages due to brief sorties into that western metropolis – and I’m in the heart of it, and every step makes me think more of… well, what I was doing when I was living this far into Oldfield Park. It was the time when I just left university and before I got a job, and when my housemate and best friend went mad and had to be sectioned. “Boys of Summer” kicks in, which makes me smile – a song that exists between fear and love of the past. While there’s girls connected with the house, none stick – bar, ironically, Emma Forrest’s book “Namedropper”, which uses Healey’s song as a central motif, and which I read first in the place, and tangentially links to my other friends – and it’s the breakdown and sadness that stays. And the drunkenness. But when passing, it’s the despair for my friend that overwhelms me. What was destroying me is saved for later on the journey.

Through the back of Oldfield Park, I’m walking the boundaries of knowledge. I don’t know how the backstreets connect, and want to find out. The Coral’s “Dreaming Of You” kicks in, lifting the mood away from introspection – and the fact that song’s permanently tied to one particularly funny moment in a shitty Bath club helps. I find that my theories are correct, and find myself in a tiny mini-highstreet buried high on the hills above Bath. I turn north again, downhill, towards Magdalen Avenue.

On the way, I’m thinking of the girl connected to the house. There’s several – this is the period when I got drunk every Thursday night and, more often or not, pulled a random girl whose name I could never remember - The eye-rolling from Kate Little on Friday morning in the office became almost traditional, when I came in stinking of Vodka, Redbull and girl. And it connects particularly to one girl, who I dumped with because I feared she was actually insane. Not in a usual Oh My Girlfriend Is Mad way, but rather that she seemed to be hallucinating. So close to the Oldfield House friend’s breakdown, I couldn’t handle it. Especially when I suspected her love for me was a symptom of her madness.

But when I get closer, that gets wiped away, and I just think of me, falling to the floor, clutching my gut and screaming harder than I ever did before. Pain’s the strangest sensation. It never sticks, no matter how intense. Love, fear… these things you can recall, but you can’t summon pain. I’ve never felt anything vaguely like what I did that day, and I’m sure that the week I spent in hospital until they sliced me open and realised it was an appendix problem… but my appendix was in the wrong place, so they didn’t notice, was the closest I ever came to death. I don’t think my health’s ever been the same since – though probably not helped by the Evil Kieron period that directly followed.

But it’s lightened as I approach as Spandeau Ballet’s Gold kicks in. And I recall that the first thing I wrote when I left hospital, a gaunt ghoul of a man, was a piece about being indestructible. The optimism of the song reminds me of the overarch of my time in Bath. I came to the town as a Games Journalist fanboy. I leave it as a Games Journalist who’s begat more fanboys than anyone since… oh, probably Cambell. I’m at least on par with Curran, I think.

I came to Bath, and became Good at what I do. That’s a rare opportunity, and I love it.

Cutting down the Exorcist-style stone steps towards town, I head towards the streets of Widcome, shaking my head at the Bridge where I tried to talk J Nash into pissing off, turning to look back at the ditch where Curran lay, refusing to walk any further with me because I was annoying him beyond all human measure. And the events leading up to that would take an entry the size of this one alone, so use your imagination, pups.

Widcome is a small mini-high street beside Bath. The second hand shop where I bought my Bass Amp for my cheerfully shitty early-twenties bands streams past on my left, and I smile, and turn right towards my first real house in town away from Campus. Echobelly’s gloriously, horrifically Banal “Great Things” makes me check the chorus to see where I hit and where I missed. (Great things? Er… dunno. Don’t wanna compromise? No. Wanna know what love is? Yeah. Try everything? Oh, I gave it a shot).

The house itself stinks of the past. I looked at my diaries from the time when I was in Stafford a year or so back, and was surprised to find that the major emotional touchpoints in my life all happened within a couple of weeks or so while living her. And one girl particularly emerges, the creature who taught me what jealousy really was and how I should control it. Well – at least as much as I can. It’s good to tie her memories to a place, since most of my thoughts of her live either in clubs or in indeterminate houses which I couldn’t quite locate, not knowing Bath back then. She’s in a commune now, sleeping with some Comic Artists who used to draw Transformer comics or something, apparently. Thinking of her still makes me laugh.

As does remembering how Peter and Ruth’s fucking each other’s brains out in their room above the living room made the window-frame in the front room shake constantly. God knows that made it hard to watch Thunder in Paradise in peace.

Head back, then up Widcome hill, the steepest hill which I ever had to deal with. Memories either tie to the girl in the previous house of the long trudges up and down to university. The odd, spiritual breakthrough I had when I realised the universe is Analogue, not digital – which seems remedial, but that was me then. I needed England’s Dreaming permission to write about something other than I felt qualified to, remember – It’s worth remembering I was a professional games writer before I considered hammering some nonsense/scripture about pop music. Me? No, surely not.

One moment on the walk up the hill. That is, the moment. It’s the only reason I wander up this way now. My favourite view of the town is half-way up Widcome, where the trees disappear and a frame of green farm-fields gives you a clear view of Bath, nestled in its valley. It can be stunning. Today, as the early evening falls and the fog rolls in, it’s almost invisible, like a gothic horror or… something leaving.

The fog stays with me until I reach the University campus itself, peering over the ancient town of bath like a bastion of bad sixties architecture. Pulp’s “My Legendary Girlfriend” kicks in, reminding me of another long walk through the streets of Bath, wrapped in fog, on the way home from a one-night stand, a slip of bone and flesh in a skinny-fit at 4am with the obsessional, fearful “Feeling Called Love” playing so loud inside my head I could literally hear it. There’s a reason why I didn’t wear headphones for most of my stay in Bath. I didn’t need it.

Making my way around the university meshes. I wander up towards the band practice rooms, where Agents AD postured and Fixation screamed, and cut ourselves a little slice of the future, before – since the upstairs is closed – deciding to face the Parade bar.

Barely went in the Parade bar as a student, so the only memories are connected to those six months after graduating where I worked there, with no prospects and no future. I was a trained biologist with no desire to meddle with things Man Was Meant To Know. I wanted to be a writer. As did everyone else, but they had degrees in English and training and nepotism and… well, everything. All I had was what I’ve always had – what counts as my brain and what counts as my personality.

I don’t think I’ve ever been as down as I was when working here. While my year in the lab in the US was horrific, it was a defined period. I treated it as a prison sentence. I knew it would end, and I could go back to my life. My time there… well, it could have been that forever. I had no future, no prospects, no clue. My life alternated between furious fanzine writing and serving in that bar, dressing in a Hawaiian shirt and listening to M People’s third-album every day at three o’clock exactly because we weren’t allowed to change the CDs.

So I stop here, pull out the headphones, have a drink and look around. Just to stare down the old place, and ignore the feeling that they could capture me and drag me back there.

And I think of how and why I got out. And that’s luck tempered with… well, me.

I head out, headphones back on and head towards Quantock 5, my first year university block, with Johnny Boy’s “…Generation” welcoming me. As much as I love the song now, I wish it was written then. When I was dealing with a 11am Coffee rush, it would have been an absolute gospel. I’d have lived for that song.

Quantock 5 seems identical, bar letting them let girls live there now. I laugh a little, thinking of the horror stories involving there. I wasn’t happy, to begin with, and was disliked. And then I decided I didn’t care what anyone thought of me and started acting like – in the words of Alec Meer, ten year’s later – “More Kieron than you can possibly Imagine”, and I was a popular little foul mouthed snarling indie-kid. You might try to tie a “Be Yourself” style moral to that story, were you of the inclination.

As I turn away, “Waiting for the Great Leap Forward” comes into play. Now here’s a song made for today. “… Generation” exists for anyone who tries and hasn’t succeeded, yet still believes. Bragg’s opus needs a certain perspective to truly love, to have had small successes mixed with grander failures and with a small hope for the future to grasp. A hope for the future? I wander down the exact route Jon Telfer and myself made every day on the way to our Evolution or Genetics or whatever old rubbish lectures and wonder about these people.

And only realise now that while I could have connected Quantock to any number of girls, none came to mind when I was there. Not even the one I was having a secret affair with, to avoid a mutual friend who was obsessed with her knowing. Which surprises me.

Heading out of the back of the university, down a newly lighted path past the medical centre – previously just a muddy strip across the playing fields – I head back down to Bath. The fog’s gone, and I start getting the panoramic views which were the main reason I stayed here for ten years.

And Blur’s Pop Scene kicks in.

And after that, Pulp’s Glory Days.

Which seems appropriate. In my own, personal, timeline the pre-Bath Popscene was the start of what can really be considered Britpop, a clarion call to action, now, fuckwit. And walking down the slope… well, there was only reason anyone walked down the slope. If you were going to a club in the town proper, you’ll catch a bus – it’s too far. There was only one club at the bottom of the hill: Fusion. So indie-kids, Goths and the assorted pop-leftist tribes congregated on Fridays and Saturdays beneath a Hotel which, I’m sure, could have done without a few hundred dirty children emerging at 2am and snogging each other outside it. And, essentially, PopScene sums up the anticipation of heading towards that place, whose echoes – see the post for Wednesday Night – I still resonate to occasionally.

Glory Days, conversely, is the official end of Britpop. Or rather, its requiem. It had been dead a while, and all that was required for a suitably perceptive mind to lay out the contradictions and joys. Cocker was really the only man who could manage it, the one sane, populist man in the province. I can’t just think of Fusion and get my famous carpet-bombing flirt-tactics of bringing glasses of water to every girl in the building, or dancing to Shampoo on an Empty dancefloor or whatever. I have to think of slashed wrists in the dancefloor and the people who I knew there who are now dead.

And Anubis weighs our hearts, and we ignore his verdict. Doesn’t matter. They were still our Glory Days.

I head on, heading back towards the light of Bath, hungry. I’m missing stuff now – I’d like to head down to the far side of the weir on the Avon, down by Ts, but an unhelpful Council have barricaded it. Instead, I glance back towards a perfect white building which I can’t look at without thinking of KwK pissing in the tiny perfect white decorative huts, and decide to get a Kebab in his honour.

With a handful of cow and chilli sauce, I skirt the edge of the weir, past the Abbey – which I still can’t look at without catching my breath – and down to the corpse of one of my favourite lovers. The Swamp Club was renovated in my year away from the town, transforming from a place which required a jet-engine style heater to be dragged into the centre of the room to be vaguely survivable through a winter’s night out to a downbeat pseudo-kitsch club for retards. I’ve been there since, and it’s like seeing an Ex who’s become a trophy wife and had a cosmetic surgeon slice her away to a smear of a person.

I turn right, on the final leg towards home. Past the Huntsman, the late night pub where I sat doused in glitter, eyeliner, attitude and uni-sex spin the bottle. Still can’t believe no-one decided to pulp me with fists, which says more about Bath than anything. On past Vermouths, my favourite restaurant in town (In terms of food. Otherwise; Eastern Eye followed by the Chianti and Pizza FuckinG Express), and who I once wrote a review of in the voice of Minister Drill-cock! For a local arts mag. Past the tree and the stones where I ended Negativeland with Gril, Rossignol and Walker’s help.

And then, cutting past the Abbey one more time, back to my flat overlooking the beautiful white-stone bitch.

Arcade Fire kicks in. “They say it fades, if you let it”.

I smile and open my front door, nibbling on the remains of the kebab.

There’s too many memories in Bath now. You’re getting a tiny fraction of the insides of my head as I made this circle. On some street corners it was like my mind’s eye was in a stroboscope, or directed by an overactive MTV director.

Too many memories. You can’t leave them behind.

Except – perhaps – by leaving.

2005-02-11T01:41:00.000Z

Ion Storm dead.

Shame, but I'm not as physically sad as I was when Looking Glass closed. Perhaps I was more naive and emotional back then: perhaps more that we saw this coming from a long way off. It's like having a friend who's been sick for a long time finally die. Yes, it's terribly sad, but you were expecting it.

No matter what you made of Invisible War and Thief III, I do think it's probably a disaster for anyone vaguely pushing a progressive immersive sim mandate.

Or put it another way: I doubt I'll see anything released that I'd consider myself the one and only choice to review for the next two or three years.

Which leaves me poorer, in any way you choose to define it.

2005-02-10T11:32:00.000Z

Respected blog Ludonauts picks their favourite pieces of writing on games for 2005. Some interesting stuff referenced, some which I missed (I'm just off to read Chris Crawford take apart the Emotioneering nonsense now).

The NGJ and Bow Nigger turn up there too, which deserves a bit of a plug, methinks. Go read.

For those who follow my adventures with alcohol - that is, everyone who reads this - No hangover today. Despite the 1000-word piece of material evidence included downpage.

2005-02-10T03:01:00.000Z

The thing I most hate since stepping behind the media curtain and becoming a journalist is that I can no long look an at image of a beautiful woman without a veil of cynicism.

Because when I fall down the street drunkenly, crashing against a plane-glass window of a shop, and look up into the flawless gaze of some model… well, I know what was done to her. I know how the pigment of the iris was inched up a couple of notches. I know how the cheekbones were raised with a skilled photoshop hand. I know how even the tiniest blemishes of the skin were smoothed to an unblemished sheet of skin. I know that everything that's been thrown up, above human size, has been deliberately constructed to lie to us about the potential of human beauty. It's not like that. It's never like that.

The thing I most love since stepping behind the media curtain and becoming a journalist is that I can no longer look at an image of a beautiful woman without a veil of cynicism.

I know it's not real, so it frees me. I'm not distracted by these lies scaled up on the high street. Beyonce isn't really that hot. No-one's really that hot. And so… as I scan my eyes around the dancefloor, there's a half dozen people that hot there, in that moment. Some skinny five-foot thing with a ludicrous cap and no sense of poise and decorum, throwing her gangly - and at that height, that's some feat - body around as if the skin's a prison and she needs to break out, right here, right now. And in the smile and the movement and the moment, she's more beautiful and precious and anything. And because I know the statements of aesthetic perfection are an impossibility, there's never a second-guessing part of me playing the dick.

So. Tonight was my last night at Resurrection. Resurrection's gene-pool travels all the way back - by the hands of DJ-emperor Ian - to Club Fusion, beneath a shitty hotel at the edge of the town where my pop-hymen was fucked away. It's great. It's terrible. And that's the point, and if you can't stand the contradictions, do fuck off. Logic's a small enough cage to hold you.

And, for most of the evening, I was pretty much lost. Yes, every time I glanced towards the dancefloor, I couldn't help but smile, packed full of people in love with whatever was playing, at least for this one night stand. Even to the songs I despised. Especially the songs I despised, because it's not really about me - it's taken me a while to really grasp that about pop music, and being able to identify the pure joy in other people and relate it back to *my* own pure joy and take pleasure in *that*… well, you can see the continuum. Even if you despise it, you're a nihilistic self-centred shit if you hate crowds for the mere fact they're crowds.

(Christ - at 2.a.m the girls stumbling out of the club, shouting the Killer's "I've got SOUL! But I'm not a SOUL-DIER!" break what remains of my heart in two with pride for my species.)

But I'm lots. It's not me, and I know it. I have no friends here anymore - well, I do, but I'm not able to actually reach out and treat them as such (There's an exception - and he'll know it, but it was a very non-club conversation, so stands outside of this ramble. You know who you are). And I'm downing expensive alco-pops for no other reason than… oh, I don't know. Like mountains and they're there? That sounds fake, even to me.

Okay - try this: Because the drink gives you a chance to commit and express to something inexpressible. That I was a supplicant in a great temple, and my sobriety was an offering to whatever God's out there to give me a little enlightenment.

Eventually, an intercession comes. It's an old acquaintance, who I've known for about eight of my years in the town, and she's been a friend of friends throughout, but never really know. The conversation, from my position, is my artfully constructed bullshit - a miasma of amusing, distracting lies that I throw up around me. So she stalks among them, cuts a couple and tells me - for no reason other than that she feels like it - the two choices in clubd-dom that await everyone. You sit still in your seat, and die, or you go and dance, and live. Well - she didn't phrase it as such, but I understood all too well what she meant. I'd given it myself, upon occasion.

So I went out and followed, wandering off to try and commit rather than deciding I was a substitute before even trying out for the team.

Kicks off truly in my head when Ian drops Common People at 1:50. At first I fall into my usual role, and play to people. And eventually I decide that's inappropriate, and reach out, inwards, and somehow find that deep vein that let me surf I Am The Resurrection for its period, and disappear, arise into pop, and become ether. Eventually, I hit ground again and play against my friends, at which point SOUL and SOLDIER rhymes arrive and its time to go.

And I don't care.

Earlier in the evening I had the thought - when The Clash's Rock the Kasbah was followed by the Prodigy's Outer Space, that the kids on the dance-floor were as far away from the period that the Prodigy recorded that as I was when I started clubbing away from the Clash's.

And I don't care.

Jim tells me "3am sentimentalism can go fuck itself", then logs off. He's got a point.

2005-02-09T14:46:00.000Z

As part of a writing thing, I'm planning to listen to pretty much everything that was stinking up Indie clubs (and post-parties) from 1994-1996. In other words, Britpop. I'm not doing much in terms of actual quality, just trying to get as much of the period together and listen to it en masse to note connections. Pile it into the Ipod mini and shuffle until it starts making sense.

(It's already, oddly enough, vaguely worked. I always knew the heart of the piece was about drawing a line between Blur and the Auteurs. I didn't forgotten that their two albums of the period were direct mirrors of each other - PARK LIFE and AFTER MURDER PARK)

Anyway - if you have any of these, and are willing to rip either the entire album (Or, in most cases, just the Singles. As that's what's important in these things), give me a shout. This especially goes out to my friends in Bath, who I'll happily wander to your houses to borrow the CDs for my purposes.

I owned a fair chunk of this stuff, and somehow have misplaced it....

List will be modified as and when I manage to locate stuff, and recall other stuff I want. It's in rough order of how important it is I get hold of it.

~~THE GREAT ESCAPE - BLUR~~
~~DUMMY - PORTISHEAD~~*
~~IT'S GREAT WHEN YOU'RE STRAIGHT - BLACK GRAPE~~
~~THE BENDS - RADIOHEAD~~
NUSIANCE by MENSWEAR
~~Either WE ARE SHAMPOO or GIRL POWER by SHAMPOO~~
~~SLEEPER's first two albums.~~
~~GENE'S first Album, OLYMPIAN~~
LEFTISM by LEFTFIELD
~~CASSANOVA by THE DIVINE COMEDY~~
~~THE CHARLATANS by THE CHARLATANS~~
CAST'S first album and/or single after that - FLY AWAY, wasn't it?
DODGY's FREE PEACE SWEET
~~CHANGE GIVER by SHED SEVEN~~
Any of the Singles by POWDER
~~MARION'S first album~~

And, yes, file-sharing could probably solve this problem, but Soulseek has been incredibly rubbish for the last few weeks. I got the fragments of - hnnnghh - OCS and Kula Shaker (Downloading the latter being one of the most physically revulsing things I've ever done) which I need, but have hit blanks on something as common as The Great Esape.

Thanks in advance.

*I've owned three copies of Dummy in my life, and have given every copy away to some girl, for the usual reasons.

2005-02-08T18:24:00.000Z

"When we talk about wanting more information on the non-technical aspects of games in our game reviews, is this what we're actually asking for? The New Games Journalism seeks to recreate one player's experience of a game using a gonzo record of that player's experience, with all biases intact. The reader then uses their emotional response to the article to determine whether the game is worth experiencing personally. In order to make a review long enough to feel substantial, in order to actually find meaning worth talking about, doesn't the reviewer have to put forth some sort of bias with which to identify any meaning at all? Isn't New Games Journalism's harbinger, Always_Black's "Bow, Nigger" an article about online race relations, with Jedi Knight II as the stage on which the events actually take place?"

Clockwork Grue finds an interesting angle on subjectivity in games journalism over at Game Girl Advance, touching on the NGJ and the Christian reviews of videogames. Perceptive, with not much I actively disagree with, bar the traditional not-much-NGJ-in-US-mags-therefore-there-is-no-NGJ-in-mags assumption.

Also, while you're there, have a read of their amusing investigation into the CoH and NCsoft versus Marvel law suit. Which inspired Walker into doing something similar.

2005-02-08T16:14:00.000Z

"Are You... A Games Journalist?

Do you...

- Carry a hideous, oversized satchel emblazened with the logo of some tedious little action game you only reviewed to get a free satchel?

- Have listless posture, a thousand-yard stare and gaunt, sallow cheeks?

- Breeze around PR events smirking and nibbling on Twiglets trying to look aloof, when in actual fact you're a hateful little sell-out who's only there for the free lager.

- Think you're a proper journalist as opposed to an inconsequential, talentless little fuckcrest who would probably be better off dead.

- Listen to impossible drill 'n' bass at full volume through your awful, tinny headphones just to alert everyone to the fact that you're a horrid little muso cunt.

- Feverishly defend the merits of a game everyone hates because it makes your tiny little balls swell with self-importance.

- Sculpt your awful hair into a sickening quiff in an attempt to stand out among an office full of pot-bellied, sweating dullards.

- Smear your face with a repellent shit-sucking grin and embarrass foreign games developers by asking impossibly-worded questions about insipid little shortcomings in their presentation that only shits, fucks and buggers care about."

AK has a little vent at the mirror.

And, yes, I do have work to be doing, thanks for asking.

2005-02-08T15:09:00.000Z

I've just been rumaging through someone else's rubbish while listening to Heartless Romantic by the Dears. Thought I'd get some practice in for my inevitable vagrancy down the line.

"Heartless Romantic", handily made available on their site, is an atypical example of what the Dears do. It's more ramshackle. It's relatively sparse. It wears its gimmicks more proudly than is fashionable (Off topic, but I've added people decrying anything for "gimmickry" to my list of critical red signals (See also: Dumbing Down). Use the phrase, and I automatically crank how much time I give your opinions down a couple of notches). But, it's still distinctly them, as it features the restless intelligence and emotional commitment. It's excellent for walking to.

Its a song that's suspended from two deliberately constructed peaks.

The first is its deliberately extended intro. The your-first-drum-beat enters, sounding as if they're walking down a long corridor on the way to the recording studio. Piano notes arrive next, on the expanded chord change, louder. The drums crecendo slowly to match it, then continues until it's a pummelling child's-foot-stomp thing. It's almost a minute by the time anything other than this arrives. Just before the expectant point where you know something else must *surely* happen arrives, a distorted vocal hits you, purred down a speakerphone. And before you've recovered from that, a single extended organ note rings from the left speaker, suspending the voice above it. This gospel-soul sound rubbing against this crackle of a scream...

Well, the song continues, adding more elements as and when it feels like it until it's a glorious tired and broken mass of noise, until it reaches the second peak.
Instrumental break. Everything bar the bass drum and the organ drops, and we're gifted with the presence of a a deliciously sarcastic set of taut hand-claps. It's like the re-animated corpse of the Supreme's Baby-Love.

It simply the best song in the world for rooting through other people's rubbish too, and carrying the remains back to your home. There I found several large cardboard boxest. Fuck you, Major Supermarket chains. I don't need you anymore.

As Calvin said, There's Treasure Everywhere.

2005-02-08T14:02:00.000Z

Try as I might, I get disheartened easily. Reading the news. Studying history. Examining genre-fans endless conversations on the Internet. I sometimes sit down and try to work out which sub-set is the worst for pure whining hate-mongery.

Today's it's the RPG-fans.

I don't know where to start.

Oh, sorry. I do: fucking morons.

2005-02-08T01:55:00.000Z

Re-reading the NGJ manifesto, and suddenly think... what on earth were you doing name-checking a random bar you go to in the second paragraph of something with an actual purpose?

I mean, I already knew that I should have proofed it before posting it, but this is just ludicrous.

EDIT: "Frontier Psychiatrist" comes on and I excitedly reach out for a wine glass, sending it crashing towards the floor and its future as pseudo-crystal. So let's tell a story.

Boxes have changed.

I'm in the process of preparing to move house. This is never my strong point, as a human being. Working out what X thing is so good about Y game, yes. Putting everything in a box so it can be easily carried before the day I have to move... no. But in the two years since I've last had to drag my carcass from one shithole to another... well, as I said, boxes have changed.

When I last moved, Sainsburies provided piles of fruit packing trays. Now, you must understand, that even this was a step down from the mid-nineties height of the humble re-appropriated card-board box. Then you could walk to any major supermarket and get a grand array of assemblies of carboard.

But when it comes to packing this time around, I scour supermarkets to discover that even the fruit-tray option has disappeared. Now all that remains are wine boxes.

Wine boxes.

Now, you can see the logic. Shoppers who want to pack items in a cardboard box will be able to still pack them in a selection of cheap Pinot Grigio containers. It makes no difference, and is far more convienent. And if it fucks people over who want to steal boxes from shops... well, fuck 'em. If they're moving, they probably won't even be shopping here anyway.

There's other solutions which I'm sure I'll resort to before the weekend, but my current one is simple. Also, fiendish. I go to the supermarket, every day, and pick up an armful of boxes and run, run away.

Simple, I know, but that's always been my strength.

The only problem remains that the wine-cartoon size boxes are among the more awkward objects to carry in the universe. Three, in a pincer is about the best you can do. More if you cheat and include slightly smaller boxes inside the larger ones, but that comes with the cost of destroying all the muscles in your hands when you attempt to somehow support such a gargantuan weight with a clenched mass of digits. Christ - I tried to carry eleven from Waitrose today, and my it felt as if my fingers had been sliced from my body for a half hour afterwards.

But, slowly, I've appropriated boxes. And filled them. A metre behind me is a mound of sealed packages of assorted books and CDs, waiting for transport. But if you just look into the room, it does look like I'm the world's worst middle-class alcoholic.

So packing and carrying packing. You may think I wouldn't be that happy.

But, as a side-effect of my rumaging, I've located my copy of the Avalanches album that's been missing in action for over a year. It's playing, so everything's delirious, everything's painful, everything's... well, in boxes in the floor.

But they're my boxes. And I'm taking them to the future.

2005-02-07T11:33:00.000Z

"Well, it's been my magic word, which is all that counts. Were you to take a straw poll of people across the worlds of Paragon City, you'd have different results. Most common would be "Issue 4! Issue 4!" Probably followed by "Where have the Winter Lords gone?" and "I have way too much debt." Well... if you let people expand "Magic Word" into "Magic phrase" anyway.

The latter two are obvious - the winter event has drawn to a close, with every lake in the city having frozen solid. This has added impromptu ice-skating to the various non-supercrime-fighting activities for the metahuman massive. And everyone worries about their debt, because they keep on dying because they are weak while the forces of crime are strong. Or that may just be me."

Another monday, another City of Heroes Diary.

2005-02-05T14:42:00.000Z

The Warwych returning to Peregrine Island's research facility after a trip to answer an SOS from an alternate dimension invaded by Ritki.

2005-02-04T15:06:00.000Z

"And remember when you're learning the techniques, remember what you're actually doing – don't kid yourself. If you think there's a huge amount of difference between you and Paul Joseph Goebbels, you're kidding yourself. Any form of art is propaganda. It is propaganda for a state of mind rather than a nation-state but it is propaganda nonetheless, and it's best if you accept that and understand what you're doing and be honest about it: you are trying to change the mind of your target audience. You are trying to change their perceptions, you are trying to stop them from seeing things how they see things and start them seeing things the way you see things."

Genuinely phenomenonal interview with Alan Moore. Could have quoted almost any paragraph of it, but I'll choose this one because it's something I've always believed in - that writing is mind-control, the annexing of someone's personality, lebensraum for ideas.

It's an interview which tatters your preconceptions of Moore's working routine, frankly. If you have delusions of being a writer, you'll find yourself asking some increasingly difficult questions.

2005-02-04T14:16:00.000Z

"Cute fact about Pharaohs; some, apparently, ceremonially ejaculated into the Nile to secure the requisite inundation of the Nile to replenish the farm-lands. Ruler of an empire, cheerfully knocking one off the wrist while an anxious crowd waits and an uncaring Nile sits there. Don't see any developer building that into a game.

Sadly. I wonder how we'd react if they did."

Immortal Cities: Children of the Nile review for Eurogamer. "As a group though I think we're starting to exhaust masturbation based intros," Tom Eurogamer comments, "Which is probably a good thing".

Oh, I think we can push the New Games Onaninsm a little further.

2005-02-02T19:48:00.000Z

Jamie McKelvie interviewed over at the ever-readable Sequential Tart about his involvement with the Four Letter Words anthology over at Image. The "Thing" we're doing together gets name-checked, and there's a little bit of me-baiting too, which is always worthwhile.

Also does a terrible piece of hackwork on the cover. You drew... people, Jamie. I don't understand. How could you? You shit. You fucking shit.

Er... In joke.

2005-02-01T19:49:00.000Z

Richey Manic fucked off 10 years ago today. And may write more about that later, but first things first.

This list of who's hot Hot HOT! in male comics creators has been linked to widely across the comics Blogosphere. It also reminds me of an idea I had a while ago, and have tried to wheedle friends into since and somehow failed. I'll release the idea, and hope it finds a seed.

A few years back, I remember a female-lead pseudo-Suicide Girls-esque site which mixed in a healthy selection of comics alongside . I forget its name right now (My Thingie?) but that's not the point right now. I thought it would be a good idea to rip off, and inverse genres.

Up and coming male comics wanabees. In the buff. For your pleasure, ladies.

Think about... Beautiful Jamie "Kitten" McKelvie exposed at the drawing board for all those punky ladies. Nick Locking, flaxen locks all slime-light sweaty for all the modern strain of goth. LA Cutie Charlie Chu for that more exotic dollar. You're hot already.

Plus - y'know - some comics.

People say the anglophone comics market isn't interesting anymore. We'll show you interesting.

Sadly, my peers are cowards, so I offer it to the next generation of no-hoper writers and artists. Go forth and do your clit-teasing best with it.

2005-01-31T10:47:00.000Z

"My main activity in City of Heroes this week has been dying."

My Second City of Heroes diary.

And, as a general apology, sorry for not updating more in a casual basis over the last couple of weeks. Things have been odd, busy and look like remaining in a similar vein for most of February.

Oh - just to note that the position for an artist has been filled, so hurrah for that.

2005-01-26T10:15:00.000Z

"Reviews traditionally start with either a joke or an anecdote. Ideally both. Here it is: When typing "Demon Stone" I find myself actually writing "Demon Stoned" by accident in some Freudian hellish dope-head accident.

Onwards!"

Demon Stone on the PS2 for Eurogamer. Slightly more ditzy than usual, I fear.

2005-01-24T13:49:00.000Z

"I'm soaring across the skyline of Steel Canyon, simply because I want to, I can and it's been a while.

I want to, because it's the traditional Oldest Dream Of Man. I can, because that aforementioned Oldest Dream Of Man led me to choosing it when I reached level 14 and true flight was finally selectable. And it's been a while because... I haven't been at Paragon City for a while. And I've missed it."

My first City of Heroes diary for Eurogamer.

2005-01-21T01:13:00.000Z

Fashionably drunk, so this may lean towards the more incoherent, so forgive me.

When I say "drunk" I mean "Have just knocked over a glass of wine and had to go and get another one". People who know me know exactly what that means.

(And I take a moment to smile at King Missile's Gay/Not Gay on my MP3 player. Just because... y'know. It's it)

Anyway.

I like responsibility.

Yeah, I know, but drop it. Yes, you. No, especially you. Leave it alone.

I like responsibility because I'm a catholic who... no, that wasn't the argument I meant to make.

Responsibility is the difference between being functionally human and not. It's the one single thing which makes me dump a girl more than any other. If you're the sort of person that moves blame for the situation you find yourself to someone else, you're not long meant for my close circle. It happens a lot. If someone spends most of their time explaining exactly why everyone they know has fucked them over... well, fuck off. You interest me not. Get over it.

I've always found myself fundamentally aligned with existentialism, even when the dirty expanses of the philosophy breaks anyone's will. Whatever happens to you is your fault. It's the sort of philosophy which falls apart at any point further down the economic spiral of advanced capitalism, but vaguely around where I am... well, it's right. It's not that things go wrong, but rather things happen and you choose how to define them with relation to your life.

Yes, it falls apart with people who have relatively little power over their life - the classic example being the mentally handicaped. But that's not the point. Philosphy is calculated on a personal basis. Since, post religion, the idea of dictating society's flux from a pulpit seems ridiculous, a philosophy that makes sense only in your context is fine. I mean... I'm not the sort to argue a universal unifying theory for the human soul. I'm not that smart. I wish I was.

But the boon for taking responsibilty for everything within reason that happens to you is that the future can be remixed upon any design you choose. The cost for someone who declines responsibilty for their situation is to have everything that happnes to them be, basically, random.

I can't have that.

I currently want to take what's happened upon me, but I'm not sure that I'll be able to. In hope I may.

The post is dedicated to John Walker, who noted I am the number 1 "Kieron" in google, for no other reason that it amuses me.

2005-01-17T14:24:00.000Z

"Lifeblood is the last thing anyone was expecting from the Manics right now.

That is, a good album.

It certainly confused me."

The much-delayed for reasons beyond any human's control 50th issue of Robot Fist updates with a mass of content, including my take on lifeblood.

Their retrospective on Kenickie's "At the Club" is missing the point horrifically, however. Kenickie weren't just good-time gals, downing alco-pops and running around and falling over. They were deeply manic-depressive.

Standard line I use for Kenickie: Days in Darkened bedrooms, Night in Darkened clubs.

And that's why they were important.

2005-01-17T01:18:00.000Z

And we interupt our regular service for a commercial break:

******

"ARE YOU SURE THEY WON'T KILL ANY OF THE HOSTAGES?"

"YES, SIR.
ALMOST COMPLETELY SURE."

Me: Award-winning professional consumer-media journalist of 10 years standing. In terms of comics, I’ve sold scripts to Warhammer Monthly, have a monthly strip in 200,000 selling OPM2 Magazine and co-edit acclaimed underground Brit-anthology Commercial Suicide. I’m looking to step up from my assorted short work and try a serial action comic.

You: Pro-quality artist looking for an adventure comic to call their own. Interest in both the full-bore action and the emotional moments which make the action actually mean something. Ideally, you both pencil and ink, but a suitably brilliant master of the pencil is just fine. If you like to colour your own work, even better. Most schools of art considered, but the project lends more towards moody atmospherics than day-glo positivism.

Us: What each other desperately needs.

The comic: Modern-day military-action/horror comic. If you’re in a Hollywood mood and fancy a cheap and nasty high concept: Hellboy meets The Losers.

References in terms of tone apart from them: ABC Warriors and Bad Company from 2000 A.D. WE3. The Dirty Dozen. Global Frequency. Bravo 2 Zero. The Clash circa Combat Rock. Blade 2 (Without the Plotholes). The Ultimates. Where Eagles Dare.

Personality notes: While the book is aimed at a teenage and up readership, it doesn’t play with kid gloves. The artist shouldn’t be easily offended. The fundamentally religious, for example, will probably have trouble with some of the material. And it’s a small advantage if you’re British, if only to make phone-calls more affordable.

Financial: While I wish I had the resources to do so, I can’t offer payment in advance.

If a publisher picks it up, it’ll almost certainly be a back-end deal. If so, all monies gathered will go to pay your pre-agreed page rate before any reaches me. That is, you get paid to an agreed level before I get a cent. Once (and if) that is reached, the monies will divert to me until they reach my page rate. After that point, all cash is split according the page rate’s ratio (That is, you want seven shiny gold coins a page and I want three shiny gold coins a page, all shiny gold coins after we’re reached our would be split 70:30). This strikes me as the only fair way to do something like this, considering I’m an unknown writer in the field and the sacrifice of time is so large for a serious artist.

In short, you get to eat before I do.

The Artist will also have co-creator credit and 50:50 ownership. Because to do otherwise would be insane.

Art required for the pitch: Six pages of art.

Contact: Mail me at kieron@gillen7.fsnet.co.uk. Ideally, provide a link to your art samples, but if you haven’t got any online, will accept attachments.

Thanks for reading.

Kieron Gillen.

2005-01-15T13:16:00.000Z

New webcomic by Mark Nicoll and I over at Always Black's.

A unexpected, if welcome, surprise this one.

After I finished my HIT work a couple of years back, I started idly thinking up another webcomic project. That ended up being Homo Depressus, with the idea being it would be a series of short comics, all set in the same constructed world, by the same artist. Something more of a coherent statement than the Let's Learn Comic Scripting of the HITs.

Anyway, one night Mark and I were chatting, and he expressed an interest in drawing a comic. It was a while ago, so I forget the exact details, but when we came out the other end of the chat, I'd promised to lob a short comic at him to experiment with from the Homo Depressus sequence, deliberately weighted to be relatively easy to draw and leaning towards his organic strengths as an artist. If it went well, we'd consider moving onto doing the whole thing.

It went well, but very slowly. Hadn't heard from Mark for about a year, only for him to arrive with the art in a comlpeted state one drunken night. A couple of fixes, and I can fulfil my promise to AB of lobbing him something to show off to his delightful readership.

I'm especially glad to publically do something with Mark. He was a core member of Cassandra who somehow got written out of history, working as hard as anyone in creating the baroquely beautiful Underground Base levels. However, this would have only appeared in what would have been Episode 3, his work never got a public showing. Shame, but that's Cass all over.

Anyway - enough, especially considering there's another good few paragraphs of wibble over at AB's to contexualise the story for you to work through yet.

And, yes, it's a transparent attempt to get some of Locking's famed spooky booty.

2005-01-14T11:20:00.000Z

"Writer Annie Dillard suggested - and I paraphrase - that a writer should never leave the price-tags. This means you shouldn't let the reader know the effort which it took you to create a piece of writing. If it took you four years of research to cobble together a paragraph, you shouldn't leave anything that implies it was anything other than a few sentences glued together with word-plastics. Specifically, anything you created which purely exists to justify the research should be snipped by the holy hands of editing.

With the greatest of respect to Anne Dillard, she didn't spend over twelve hours a day for four days running to save the Goddamn universe.

See that face? That's the face of a man who's faced the foul touch of the Sith. It's a game that took me so deep that I've even started to look like a Jedi. Or, failing that, a tramp. It's so difficult to tell with these modern haircuts.

No, I haven't got time to shave. The Sith are going to destroy Dantoonie!"

KOTOR2 at Eurogamer.

2005-01-13T14:25:00.000Z

"If you disagree with me, you do so at your own peril. The industry is in a malaise. As you know, most game publishers are losing money and have cut back on advertising. Many magazines and webzines have perished. What seems needless to me is the often overly negative tone that gaming editorial takes.

Most of you have editorial staffs that are dominated by angry young men that are poorly trained and represent a narrow and anarchistic element of the world's population. They have a negative attitude and are looking for what is wrong with something, instead of looking for what is right and who might like it.

It reminds me of boys at junior high school dance. With their fragile egos, they stay on the sideline and say the band sucks, the girls are ugly, and that those brave enough to dance are lousy dancers. Your reviewers have no idea how to make a great game. None of them have ever made one. But they sure have fun telling us in a nasty tone how inferior we are to them.

I truly find it astonishing that magazines like yours seem willing to slit your own throats on occasions like this. You have so much more to gain if you are enthusiasts for gaming, and try to find the audience for a new game. You are so much better off if you do not bite the hand that feeds you. And do not patronize me by telling me the reader is the customer--your real customer is the one that pays you your revenue. And it is game industry advertisers. If you need to be able to be constantly negative you need to accept that you are like a parasite that is killing its host. In God's millions of years he has not created nor evolved a creature that would have such a stupid strategy for survival. But it is a common attitude among game magazines, despite the evidence all around them that it drives many of them into bankruptcy. You have been around long enough to know that this is true, but you have not adapted your publication."

3D0's bossman writes to GamesPro over a 2/5 review circa 2001.

I've had worse arrive in my inbox, in my time. But it's still funny.

2005-01-13T01:17:00.000Z

"So I finished Knights of The Old Republic 2, and I headed out to get drunk. It made sense at the time. Bear with me."

It doesn't relate to anything else in my review, so I had to cut it, but I still like this opening paragraph to my KOTOR2 review.

Whole thing up on Eurogamer tomorrow.

2005-01-09T17:54:00.000Z

"People ask, 'Where's the Lester Bangs of video-game criticism?'" he says. "And I'm starting to think that might be the wrong question. Video games are a different kind of medium, and they need to be covered in a different way. We can't just borrow all of its idiom from film and rock criticism. But it should aspire to the same kind of quality that critics like Pauline Kael and Robert Christgau established.

Denver Westworld writes about Serious Videogame Journalism. Its heart is in the right place, but bits grate. I'd imagine it's because I'm too close to the subject matter and having a wood/trees problem, but still.

Everyone does always mentions Where's Game's Lester Bangs? in these debates. My standard answer's "We don't need a second Lester Bangs. We need a first someone whose name we don't even know yet".

It annoys that Bangs always turns up in these debates. This is because he was good, and died young - in the same way Bill Hicks got canonised. But what people should remember is that you get the nagging feeling that Bangs (and Hicks, for that matter) would have despised half the sentimental bollocks that is said about them. What they did has become less important than who they were. And as much as I like symbols, that annoys.

What most grates is that no-one has ever had to write an official "Style Guide" for music journalism, except in a magazine by magazine basis. Lester Bangs didn't go to school to learn how to be a Music Journalist. He learnt to be a Music Journalist by staring at records until his eyes bled and his brains started to leak from his ears.

This is warped by my general perspective on the world - a lot of the people quoted are trained journalists trying to apply their skills to games. I'm an untrained journalist from a Fanzine background, with an inbuilt dislike of Authority.

But I don't think what Games Journalism needs can be taught in a class.

Except - in my case - Grammar and Spelling.

2005-01-05T13:58:00.000Z

"Please remember: as you read this, Cybertron is under threat.

The planet-destroying Chaos God, Unicron, is approaching the Transformer's home-planet. While already ploughed a path through the civilised Galaxy, it seems he plans to consume its two moons before moving on to devour the errant silver globe that Cybertronians call home. And even worse, due to a surprise strike by the Decepticons, the Autobots are going to have to try and stop him without the leadership of Optimus Prime. Since that kinda puts Ultra Magnus in charge, things are looking pretty dire. What are they going to do?

While "We're living in the future!" has become - well, at least in my terribly cool circles - a catchphrase to be cheerily chirped whenever the slightest technical jiggery-pokery rears its head, from text messaging upwards, as the 2005 inches onto the Calendar a horrific truth becomes apparent... this is the year which Transformers: The Movie is set.

We are living in the Future. And thinking of the sub-par RTS I've been playing, I can't help but feel disappointed. Optimus Prime died for this?"

Take on Alexander for Eurogamer.

One line changed from the copy I handed in, though I knew it was probably too far and said that it should be changed if it was. The line towards the end was originally "Fair Marking can go fuck itself".

Which amuses me still.

2005-01-05T01:06:00.000Z

While I've promised several people further commentary on the Tracks of the year, I really should post about this:

Will Eisner dies, aged 87

Here's what a couple of enlightened comics writers are saying...

First, Neil Gaiman.
"I interviewed my friend Will Eisner a few year ago, at the Chicago Humanities Festival. At one point I asked him why he kept going, why he kept making comics when his contemporaries (and his contemporaries were people like Bob Kane -- before he did Batman -- remember) had long ago retired and stopped making art and telling stories, and gone.

He told me about a film he had seen once, in which a jazz musician kept playing because he was still in search of The Note. That it was out there somewhere, and he kept going to reach it. And that was why Will kept going: in the hopes that he'd one day do something that satisfied him. He was still looking for The Note...

Will Eisner was better than any of us, and he kept working in the hope that one day he'd get it right."

Secondly, Brian Michael Bendis.
"You can’t die if you single-handedly invented the language of an entire art form and the concept of the graphic novel. Its impossible. He is immortal.

Will Eisner is the most inspirational, most inventive and most sincerely passionate man I have ever met on this planet. I was not friends with him and my run ins were very brief, but for me very meaningful. They probably could have been more than they were but I felt completely unworthy to be in the same room with him.

Years ago, I had the honor of having my work critiqued by him. He was honest and generous and has given me words to live by that has stayed in my head every day for the last decade.

It was very close to a religious experience. It is one of the true gift’s of my life."

And for those of you who don't know anything about the man, here's DC's obituary. The short version is essentially what Bendis started with: he invented the western graphic novel with "Contract With God". He's as important as anyone in comics has ever been, I think.

I don't think I'm particularly qualified to write more, in addition to what's linked. I'm the absolute opposite of someone like Bendis: I never met him. I'd have killed to met him. But I can't end the post without saying something.

Okay, try this: He's the absolute model of what any person who wants to be a creative should be pushing towards.

2004-12-31T19:24:00.000Z

I present my Tracks of the Year list, which you may remember from previous Evanescence related amusements. It exists because – well – I like doing it, and at least once a year I think it’s important to write something sizeable for the blog that doesn’t exist for anything other than to amuse those who pass by. It’s kind of a thankyou.

It only works if you like reading my junk, of course, but… well, if you didn’t… well, fuck off, big-nose.

Odd year. But aren’t they all?

I’ll be hitting the important notes as I work my way through the list, but the lasting impression – for me, anyway – is one of my more indier years. That is, whiter. Haven’t spent much time listening, or searching, for new hip hop or garage, to chose a couple of genres I’ve conspicuously dabbled in the past, to a lesser or greater degree. I’ve been a dirty little Indie-kid for these twelve months or so.

So, like all of these charts, it’s a personal thing. If it turns out being a white-wash, it’s more because that’s where my head’s ended up in the last year. And to pretend otherwise, would be a whole different selection of white-wash.

Anyway – as tradition dictates (i.e. What I did last year), these are my Top 40 tracks of the year. That is, primarily singles (Because Singles Are The Best), but with any album tracks I desperately feel the need to work in.

Unbreakable rule: No more than one track by a single band or artist. This exists solely to encourage cheating by the list-writer.

Oh yes – and may go through this and fix some typos tomorrow. You’re having it raw and bleeding.

And Happy New Year.

WORKBLOG TRACKS OF THE YEAR 2004

40) Take me Out – Franz Ferdinand.
Oh, the temptation to do the Stalinist revisionism thing here, but I nobly resist. Since I was planning on writing this all year, I actually planned ahead – instead of doing what I did last time around, and making it all up at the last minute – and kept a document on my desktop I added titles to as and when something struck me as worth remembering. Take Me Out, at the birth of the year, was one of the first entries, hammered in with the tiny note “For the ballsy intro alone”. So here it is, for the aforementioned Ballsiness.

39) 17 Years – Ratatat
Is this Laptop Rock? Let’s hope so. I’ll look pretty stupid otherwise.

38) Bad Ass Stripper - Jentina
Nothing quite as glorious as a failed hype. Cynical like wars for oil and faked terrorist outrages, Jentina was ignored by the Kids On The Streets for the Franken-pop monster she clearly was. Oddly, however, adored by ageing games journalists in Bath, especially when they were feeling slutty. Which was, somewhat predictably, often.

37) Irish Blood, English Heart - Morrissey
Not racist, John.

36) 80s Matchbox B-line disaster – Rise of Eagles
Don’t think they’re ever going to hit the garage-stooge-cramps-kennedys thing as disgustingly as they did with Psychosis Safari, but this – and most of their second album, actually – is pretty vile, and recommended for any devotees of The Hard Fucking.

35) What U Call it? – Whiley
I call it “Brilliant”.

34) AK-47 – Weird War
Cheating, as was a single towards the close of last year, but I only got hold of it with their album. Wired Weird War with Ian still, in the age of US-military hegemony, believing in the power of AK-47. Also: being funky.

33) Diefenbach - "Make Your Mind":
Less a single, more a breath, captured.

32) Outkast “Roses”
Cheating again, as included Hey Ya as my Outkast representative last year, referencing it included everything else on the album. But since this was released as a single, it was more part of my psyche in the last twelve months, single-handedly leading to an eight-hour bout of insomnia when flying across the Atlantic. Thanks a fucking lot, Andre. In a song rife with glorious pop-moments, top-prize must be given to “Ihopeshe'sspeedingonthewaytothe club
TryingtohurryuptogettosomeBallerorsingerorsomebody
likethatAndtrytoputonher makeupinthemirrorandcrash! Crash! CRASH! ... INTO A DITCH!!!!

Just Playing!

Yeah, Andre. As if.

31) What Am I Waiting For? - Gwen Stefani
Good points include the general tone of hysteria, tick-tockisms, supa-hot-FEE-mahle and even the million dollar contract. Bad points include a vaguely patronising Occidental response, which comes across like some Edge fanboy extolling the virtue of something particularly rubbish that must be good because it’s only been released over there. Included because, ultimately, I still like her belly.

30) Your Cover’s Blown – B&S
Taut as B&S have ever got, with Stuart playing out his oblique-takes on Shaft fantasies in a Scottish bedsit.

29) Misread – King’s of Convenience
My favourite album cover of the year is the straight-out-of-Wallpaper cover of King’s Of Convenience’s second entirely-as-you’d-imagine-it album. It screams of affluence, comfort, desirability, of people happier, better looking, more sophisticated and smarter than you. Misread’s opening muted shuffle of a guitar and crisp piano confidence manages the same trick.

28) I Can Do Anything - Gene Serene and John Downfall
Arrived without fanfare from the every cheery Alec “Furious” Meer, and for an afternoon stole everyone’s hearts. May have come out this year. Could have come out five years back, but it’ll break my heart to check. As if Peaches decided to stop trying to insert the largest possible synthesiser inside her as possible, and instead decided to try hugging.

27) Float On - Modest Mouse
Pretty, fun, indie that moved like the title. The Killers for people who wouldn’t dream of touching something on a hyped debut album without building up the required critical critical-mass. That is, me.

26) Yeah (Crass Version) – LCD Soundsystem.
Even as writing this, don’t know which version I’m going to go for. Pretentious or Crass? Neu versus… oh, fuck it. Let’s go with the Crass version for its sheer dirtiness. There’s times for upwards mobility in pop-songs, and New Years Eve isn’t among them.

25) Call on Me – Eric Prydz
Cynical trance-dumbness which makes its manifesto for heterosexual orthodoxy tyranny actually sound like a good idea. Fascists always look good. Health Fascists, more so.

24) Stay Tonight – War Against Sleep
Lo-fi Bristolian Scott Walker-esque lust and cigarettes. Of all the tracks on this list, the one you’re least likely to have heard of. It’s worth the effort of locating.

23) Mono – Courtney Love
If it wasn’t Courtney, it wouldn’t come anywhere near the Top 40. But it /is/ Courtney, and Miss Love has earned the right to stand on a soap-box and discuss the state of Pop in 2004 whenever she wants. We should be thankful that there’s still people involved in pop who take it all seriously enough to actually do something as stupid as this. The tone of desperation, frustration and a chorus raging against the dying of the light is all her – despite of her vocal range of three notes, she’s never been anything less than a great singer – and it brings to mind a woman being dragged to the gallows kicking and screaming. God owed her one more song. This was it.

22) She Wants To Move – NERD
The second album was a complete muso-disaster zone, with more noodles than whatever casually racist metaphor you choose to throw at it. Conversely, the single entered my body at the base of the spine and made me want to fuck strangers strangely. Totally Wired.

21) Scissors Sisters – Comfortably Numb
Amusing to think that the Scissors started the year as one of the usual-internet’s suspects favourite things. I mildly despise Scissors Sisters now, if only because their 70s leant more towards X-rated Elton John than the glacial cloud-banks of disco they summon here. One of the songs that sounds better the latter at night you listen to. Since I’m rarely in bed before 4am, it turned Bath’s cold spring into melodrama.

20) Too Drunk To Fuck - Nouveau Vague
This ironic album of new-wave/early-eighties classics covered in an easy-listening style, most heard in all manner of TV advertisements on Channel 4, found its way into my heart. I don’t know why. Especially, this version of the Dead Kennedys, which giggled, simpered, fluttered its fake-eyelashes, fell down in the gutters in its replica of a designer dress and looked up at you in a way to let you know it was exactly drunk enough to fuck.

19) Terrible Angels - Cocorosie
Two voices. One with a range of two notes, both squeaky. One who sounds classically trained. With farmyard found-sound noises rearranged into a sound-scape full of clanks, given some structure by an insistent nagging circular riff. Early morning 21st century blues.

18) Dreams – Dizzee Rascal
Okay, I’m cheating again. Dizzee’s finest track of the year was Imagine, from his second album Showtime, but I’m not including here as I’m seeekritly hoping that he throws it out as a single next year so I can ramble about it at length in next year’s poll. Oddly enough, it hits the same notes in terms of message as this deliberately, provocatively novelty hit, but with by its form leaves an entirely different impression. But this is about Dreams, which caused me to laugh more upon first hearing it, both at its humour – which is expansive, extensive and considerable – and its audacity – which is simply beyond anyone else in the poll. Sampling Happy Talk? Hilariously Off-key singing? And, best of all: Made an album! 100,000 people bought it! THANK YOU!

You can only sit back and gape, and hope that someone else manages similar disinterest in the collective consensus of cool.

17) Uptown Top Ranking – Scout Niblett
“Got no style/I’m simply roots” recontextualised to be the saddest thing in the world. Sounds like foot-shuffling, vagrancy and the last scant dregs of resilient defiance.

16) Under The Sun – Junior Boys
They said it was the Associates Go Two-Step. They were right, so I steal the line.
Last Exit was one of the albums of the year, and this was my favourite track. Propulsive, elegant, metronome bedroom-dance pop. Makes the walls of your flat lower to reveal motorway asphalt stretching in all directions, and nothing in the sky except a wall of smog and a ghostly whist of a vocal.

15) We Formed A Band – Art Brut
I think, with the proper consideration, that my best review of the year was the one in Plan B where I just wrote “ART BRUT! TOP OF THE POPS!” then repeated it a few dozen times. It was the best because it was both inspired, brave and almost impossibly stupid. Art Brut’s single did exactly the same trick. When they atonally yelp “LOOK AT US! WE FORMED A BAND!” they sound just as surprised as we are.

14) Who is it? – Bjork
It’s Bjork, stupid.

13) Empty Souls – Manic Street Preachers
Blogged about this at length earlier in the year, but I’m still surprised that I’ve kissed and made up with the Manics. They had to write me this love-letter to do so. Nu-80s-style Stadium Atmospherica from the waist up, Motown pulse below the hips and a sadness in the eyes that can cut you still.

12) Rachel Stevens “Some Girls”
Rubbish year for Pop. At the time of writing, don’t like the Annie stuff. Didn’t even like Toxic, if only for the simple fact that the cat whiiine reminds me of Lovecats, which is sure to aggravate. Destiny’s Child’s “Lose My Breath” is a brilliant song, but it’s a brilliant song that’s three seconds long. However, Richard X presses the right buttons here, through a blank enough filter to make the lyrics about blank-filters scream true. Doctoring The Tardis meets Pop Stars to the sound of donning of Zipper Boots and the best “Hey” of the year. As a devotional hymn to the God Pop go (literally), it’s as good as it gets.

11) 99 Problems – Grey album version
The “real” 99 problems was aces too, but I’m going for this one just to commemorate this cheerfully audacious mash between Jay Z and the Beatles. Less of a rhythm track, more of an opening of offensives against your speakers and, in its central verse about interactions with US traffic cops, a useful grounding in knowing your rights for the aforementioned avoidance of one of your problems being a bitch.

10) The Streets – Dry Your Eyes
Chav culture insults have quietly begun to bug me, especially when applied to the Streets. No-one seems willing to actually narrow it down to /what they mean/. Most seem satisfied to keep it as broad as “poor people”, which strikes me as missing the point somewhat (And isn’t a lot more acceptable to say “I hate chavs” than “I hate poor people”?). It’s kind of embarrassing for them that the most intelligent and articulate love lyric of the year came from The Streets, who somehow have been widely associated with the word (Inappropriately, really. Skinner’s not the lout most actually mean to decry by the word). Anyway – this effortlessly alternates between Skinners faltering, ignored monologue, analysis of the tiniest physical movements in the break-ups and the tragic, ironic chorus, and captures the ambience perfectly. Best Number One of the year, by a fucking mile.

Not bad. For Chav scum.

9) Common People – William Shatner
The End of History.

8) The Death Of All The Romance – The Dears
Second best over-wrought Indie-song of the year. And even better, a duet. Clearly a love song, but with the nagging sense of scale that it’s talking about something bigger than just the girl/boy thing.

Saw the Dears live, and The Death Of All The Romance was almost painful. The girl, a pale wan blonde slip, with tears in her eyes even before she opened her mouth to utter the opening “I have never cried/In anybody’s arms/the way that I’ve often cried in yours”. The singer, a black skinny slip of a Canadian anglophile, with a voice that alters between the oft-referenced Morrisey and the less-oft-referenced Albarn cutting the song in two half-way through with extended baritone throb of the Anna-Karenina-esque “I shall avenge the death of all the romance”.

Queue tortured falsetto, weeping and a noise so big that it can only be an Orchestra.

The album’s called “No Cities Left”. By the time the song ends, you begin to understand why.

7) Milkshake – Kelis
The genius seconds in Milkshake are obvious, but it’s worth reiterating why it gets in here instead of the almost-as-awesome Millionaire.
1) The bell (CHING!)
2) “Their life is better than yours. Damn right: It’s better than yours.” (Their life is so much better than yours that she must reiterate it just in case you missed)
3) That dirty, squelch of an eastern synch (which sounds like some unnameable, mysterious orifice)
4) The most bored la-la-la in history. (La-fucking-la-fucking-la)
5) Milk, shaking. (Obv)

6) Crown of Love – The Arcade Fire
Moment at All Tomorrow’s Party. In our chalet, and someone puts “Crown of Love” on the stereo. The entire room yelps at once. Everyone knows and loves it. Two people in the room actually have /copies of the album on them/. It’s an album that hasn’t been even released in the UK yet, and they’ve stole it on Import. Yes, it’s been hyped to death by the usual American suspects but… still. It’s something.

Obvious statement: they’re going to be huge.

Crown of Love is cleverly structured. First listening it sounds dreary, like Brighteyes as his most lovelorn and lumpen, until the disco-chords crash in the end and it explodes. However, from the second listen onwards, since you know what’s coming at the end of the sad waltz of a rock song, the anticipation for the eventual explosion sharpens everything. Soon you come to realise that it’s actually a tender, beautiful and ferocious love song, perfectly overwrought and anguished. “They say it fades, if you let it…” is the saddest opening lyric of the year. “I carved your name across my eyelids” the most furious.

Oh, and those disco-chords…

5) Dead Dogs Two- cLOUDDEAD
Ballard’s Crash reinvented as a comedy.

4) Girl Anachronism – Dresden Dolls

And now the rules start to hurt. While the next band down the list have more actual entrants for this chart, they’re often of a similar calibre and tone. They hit similar emotional notes, so is relatively easy to take one as a champion of the group. The Dresden Dolls’ two standouts on the album – Girl Anachronism and Coin Operated boy – are completely different things. Two songs enter, one song leaves.

(And if the chart was slightly longer, both Missed Me and Bad Habit from the album would have been arguing for a place)

I’m going with Girl Anachronism, despite the fact that when live it was distinctly the lesser song, with all the focused bile diffused while Coin-operated Boy’s bridge was probably the closest I’ve come to God in the last twelve months. Maybe it’s because as I’m writing this list I’m feeling angry rather than tragic. If I rewrite it tomorrow, it could be the other way around.

Girl Anachronism is a melodramatic , footstomping, hard-laughing (You can imagine a spat “HAH!” at the end of the wittier selection of lines) frenzy of a pop song, walking a line between the camp and the sociopathic like a tightrope artist with a human-bomb harness. It’s propelled at seemingly ever-increasing velocities by a mass of lyrics (Amanda comes across less like a song-writer at times here, and more like a monologist), a twitching piano that sounds as if it’s being dragged off to be committed and drums which organise the sound into something coherent, like a bad-influence friend egging on a girl with a bad side.

Sounds like trouble. Definitely not the carefulest of girls.

3) Power Is On – The Go! Team

Oh God. Five candidates – Huddle Formation, Power Is On, Junior Kickstart, Bottle Rocket and B-side The Ice Storm – and all virtually equally lustworthy. Thunder Lightning Strike sounds like a greatest hits album already, and they haven’t /had/ any. In terms of albums of the year, only political reasons lift Bobby Conn’s The Homeland above it in my affections. If the world wasn’t in real danger of ending due to Shitheads, it’d be number one.

(Had the odd moment at ATP where James, Jude and I were sitting on the sofa hand-jiving to The Go! Team or similar and Ste wandered in and informed us that “None of us will even remember who they are in six months time”. I still can’t believe Ste of all people actually posed the “Historical importance” argument… and he’s still wrong. Even if he isn’t, the Go Team! Hit the mayfly pop spot right on. Who cares what they’ll sound like tomorrow? Today they sound like imaginary 70s children TV shows staring giant robots. That’s all that matters)

Huddle Formation actually hits their modus operandi cleanest – that is Sonic Youth versus Betty Boo, produced by the Avalanches in a shed. Bottle Rocket has the honour of being the only one with a lyric I actually know (HEY EVERYBODY! LET’S ROCK THIS BREAK!), as singing along with the Go Team! generally ends up with me shouting joyous glossolalia. Extra marks for the Ski-Sunday opening rip too. Junior Kickstart reimagines a worldwhere instead of parping the top-kids bike show kicked off like a cop-show featuring moustachioed men and cars with lewdly sized back ends. Ice Storm… well, it’s the only song which made me write a piece of emo-esque comics work.

However, I’m going with the Power Is On, because it was the first song by them which I actively loved. It hits hardest from the off - the hand claps and the vocals sound like a skipping-rhyme militarised, like something you’d expect kids to be changing in a warzone as tanks scroll past. Best of all, I literally can’t make out a single lyric.

2) We Come In Peace – Bobby Conn
The album felt hilarious and triumphant at the opening of the year. At its close, it feels like dark prophecy.

I always described Steps as what pop music would sound like if Nazis had actually conquered the world. That is, Abba with the Aryan purity chemically induced. It’s not necessarily a bad thing per se – but certainly a thing. Where Bobby Conn works is by taking what would be the most accepted form of Rock to the Republican majority – that is, 70s stadium AOR with a tiny hard edge, and then inversing it. It’s here which it gains its power, and We Come In Peace specifically.

While other songs play this more as open sarcastically, We Come In Peace is more thrilling because a particularly dense neo-con could take it without any irony whatsoever.

“We have no fear of your disgust/You only hate us because you’re jealous of success/God’s on our side/We know we’re right/Step into the light”

This song makes me want to kill people. Better, it makes me think that I could.

1) You Are The Generation Who Bought More Shoes And You Get What You Deserve - Johnny Boy

Despite the loathing of the last– and right now, having rediscovered the blank puritan fury of The Holy Bible thanks to the just-released tenth anniversary edition, loathing is very much my thing – I can’t end the year with a defeatist note.

I’ve written a lot about Johnny Boy’s single this year, and thought about it even more. I don’t think if I wrote this a month ago it’d have been number one – while the song was memorably described in a review as “All Crescendo”, it slackens off in the last four or five seconds, which leaves you feeling deflated.

Except maybe that’s the point – it’s not a song with a happy ending that leaves you running in the street. It’s a song that doesn’t quite resolve, so stops it just becoming a party anthem for those with a taste for bedroom epics.

"Generation" is an odd mixture of triumphant and defeatist, and it gains its strength from the conflict. It’s a song that sounds entirely in love with the possibility of things being different – the Yeah! Yeahs! aren't the song’s real hook, but their presence speaks volumes – while understanding that things are probably doomed. It exists in the space between the knowledge that we deserve no better than what we’re going to get, but the hope against hope that somehow it might all turn alright. And – by the existence of creations like “You Are The Generation…” it shows that there’s still hope. Its content attacks the world in which it finds itself, and in its form reminds us that there’s still the possibility of majesty.

The final line of Se7en comes to mind: “Ernest Hemingway once wrote, "The world is a fine place and worth fighting for." I agree with the second part.”

I think Johnny Boy would concur.

2004-12-25T15:15:00.000Z

So this is Christmas...

No, wrong tone. You're not getting anything Scrooge like out of me. I have a shameless love of Christmas.

Because, for me, there's very little to dislike. It's a holiday about giving presents to the people you love in a celebration of the simple fact you're all alive. There's not really much to object about there.

Of course it's *pointless*. But all celebrations of this sort are pointless. That's the point.

There's much that gets to me, and the picture of human nature you get when wandering the streets is never the prettiest - but that's more based around being forced to look at it. If the right mood hits, you feel the same way at any time of the year. All it takes is a rush-hour tube to make me return to Holy-Bible style visions of mankind as blind worms tunneling through the corpse of an Empire.

I suppose Christmas, for me, is about refocusing on what I consider important. By looking at the world and realising what makes me sad about life, it makes me realise what actually matters.

This is a positive thing. Loot and seeing the smiles on others face when you give them loot's just an added bonus.

What's the important thing in life at the moment?

Par-boiling potatoes. You'll have to excuse me.

2004-12-23T01:57:00.000Z

Been thinking about Games Journalism recently. Or, in a slightly different spin of my usual ruminations, Games *journalists*. As in the people I've known who've done this for a living, and what makes each individual special, different or noteworthy.

Some people are already well ahead of me, with John Walker's careful analysis of his personal games journalist hero Bob Mandel. I recommend you read it.

But not everyone's rubbish.

(And there's far worse paid writers than Bob. He's just picked up Walker's ire because he likes some rubbishy old adventures. And that he's writing check-list reviews. Most of the big site aren't even *trying* anymore, and Mandel's stuff comes across as absolute poetry in comparison)

It's a joy in Games Journalism that despite rubbish pay and with barely respect from anyone, it continues to attract people smart enough to be briliant but dumb enough to realise they should probably spend their brilliance elsewhere.

It's always good seeing new people come through.

I don't really know Tom on Gamer that well. He's Nu-Gamer, so I haven't had the drunk-with-him-every-night-for-five-years thing I share with people like Rossignol or Ross. And he's a disc ed, which always fills me with the fear, especially the odd-ball breed of Gamer disc eds who can both understand technical things, love games and still can actually write. They give me the fear mainly because they can actually *do* stuff, and all I can do is put a few words together (And even *that* needs someone else to come along afterwards to make sure I've remembered to include fullstops). And he has facial hair, which always one of nature's STAY AWAY warning signs.

However, post-falling down the stairs and almost breaking his limbs on Friday night, I've decided we've reached the level of intimacy that I can now read his blog.

And he's only gone and made me give Half-life a deathmatch a try.

For the last hour or so I've been killing strangers by firing toilets at their head with a gravity gun.

Gaming is glorious.

Tom knows this. Go read about it.

2004-12-22T13:30:00.000Z

"It was about this time when a concept solidified in my mind which I've never quite shook.

I was at a major British Zoo - at the time, one of the more dismal places I'd visited in my life - on a University field trip. I walk into the Monkey house, chatting to my friend. As the doors open and we step into the darkened hall, we're met by the sight of two monkeys happily going at it. The male looks up at us and gives us a perfect "Would you mind?", chastising us for our rude intrusion. Laughing, we follow the cage around to the right, until we're confronted with... it.

Three monkeys. One sits, boredly chewing some manner of shoot. While he does this, a monkey sitting along the branch to him has reached over and is in the process of frenetically jerking his shoot-chewing friend off. The bored expression doesn't change one jot. And then, before our eyes, while the monkey-pleasuring continues, shoot-chewing chap slowly curls out some monkey poop which falls to bounce off the head of a third primate on the bar below. Who doesn't react either.

That's not natural.

There's something very wrong about Zoos.

There's nothing wrong about Zoo Tycoon. Or, at least, wrong in that way."

I, eventually, review Zoo Tycoon 2 over at Eurogamer.

2004-12-19T17:43:00.000Z

Been obsessed with The Go Team's "The Ice Storm" this weekend. A Christmas song released back in Summer, it's simply radiant.

Momentarily turning the Workblog into a MP3blog, you can download it from here. Song is provided purely for evaluation purposes, and you should go out and buy the thing if you want to keep it. At least, you shoudl go and buy their lovely album.

I also lobbed it up here as, as an idle exercise, I tried to convert this wordless song into a comic story - or at least write something that hits the same sort of emotions that it inspires in me. Listen to the track then compare and contrast.

Provisos: Hammered out quickly, so some language is sure to be a bit rough.

THE ICE STORM

PAGE 1

Five Page width panels. Not necessarily equal sized.

1.1
White panel

1.2
Fading in from the whiteness: A girl’s face.

She’s beautiful, teenage, wearing a warm hat, with tightly bound pigtails. Her cheeks glow from the cold. We’re looking directly at her. Her eyes are shut, she looks tranquil. Beyond tranquil: radiant.

1.3
Full black lines now, but with a while-back drop still. Her eyes are still closed, with a private glorious smile.

White dots are in the foreground now, whirling around.

1.4
Pull out slightly. Girl is still standing in front of the white background, with her arms stretched out in what may appear to be a crucifix pose – except there’s a lack of self-consciousness about her. She’s enjoying the moment, the sensation of the cold against her skin. She thinks she’s alone. She doesn’t think anyone’s watching.

The white dots remain before her, only slightly obstructing our view.

1.5
Pull out even further. The white background is revealed to be a steep hillside, covered by virgin, untouched snow. The sky behind the hill is black, cut through with the twists of white.

She’s small, perfectly still in her stance, at the base of the hill, captured in her private rapture.

PAGE 2

2.1
Largest image on the page.

The girl has started to spin on the spot, enthusiastically, eyes tightly pressed together. Take this from below her, caught in action. Motion lines could be one way to give the required impetus, but I think with the right pose we can get all the energy required in her, especially with the rest of the panel…

Above her, we have the black sky. The snowflake form a vortex above her, caught in a grand spiral with her at the centre. It should be almost be dizzying, like the view inside a snowglobe once you start it spinning around.

All this is shamelessly romantic. If we’re not in love with the girl by this point, we’ve failed.

2.2
Long thin panel, ground level. It’s a PoV shot from someone else. The girl’s still spinning in circles, arms outstretched. Small, towards the periphery of the panel, with the winter-scenery behind her. It’s a less romanticised panel, more grounded.

2.3
Reveal on who’s looking. It’s a boy, of a similar age. Dressed in winter attire, but still has that emo vibe to him. He looks at the girl with something approaching sadness and a touch of fear.

PAGE 3

3.1
Similar sort of panel angle to 2.2, but while we keep the PoV of where the boy has gone, the boy has started to move forward towards the girl. We can see his footsteps in the snow leading to him from the foreground.

He’s approaching the girl.

3.2
Reverse that, and we’re now behind the still-madly spinning girl, watching the boy approach. He’s moving tentatively, quietly.

3.3
The girl’s falls to her kneels, back arced slightly. Her face is redder, steam coming off her body from the exertion. Her eyes are still closed.

3.4
She’s kneeling, steamy breaths rising up from her. He stands before her, hand half outreached. If he moved forward a step, he could touch her. By his expression we can tell that he’s considering whether he should.

3.5
Pull out considerably. The pair of them, full length, against the white background of the land and the black and white static of the sky. Lots of space either side of them. Panel should be the width of the page and go all the way to bleed. Her kneeling in the snow, him about to touch her.

Similar to last panel, essentially, but taking that moment and trying to extend it.

PAGE 4

Three rows of panels.

4.1
On the girl’s face. Her eyes are closed. If her lips are on the panel, she’s smiling.

On this panel, we have transposed several images. In the foreground, breaking the boundary of the panel, we have a single large snowflake. The images continue its fall, away from us, and onto the girl’s face. It eventually lands on the corner of the eye.

The impression should be the Snowflake arriving from outside the moment, thanks to the crossing of the boundary.

4.2
Back on the boy. He too, for the first time, smiles, sentimentalism cutting through his anxiety.

4.3-4.4.4.5
Three small panels. On the snowflake, resting on her upper cheek, at the corner of her eye.

4.3 The snowflake rests there.

4.4 It’s started to deform.

4.5 And the snowflake melts, forming a single droplet at the corner of her eye.

4.6
The girl’s face, pulled out slightly. She still has the still happiness of an angel, but now a single fat tear is running down her cheek.

4.7
On the boy, eyes tightly shut. Something’s struck him hard. He’s biting back real tears of his own.

PAGE 5

5.1
Page width panel. The girl opens her eyes. She’s impossibly happy. She /glows/.

5.2
Pull up and away. We’re looking at the scene from above. She’s kneeling near the centre of the panel, looking around. The snowy landscape is untouched, apart from a set of footsteps leading up to her from the left, and leading away from her to the right.

In the foreground, snow still moves in lazy spirals, falling to earth.

//end//

2004-12-18T16:00:00.000Z

I may have been a bit drunk last night.

I may have. I really don't remember.

I feel apologies may be in order to some people.

2004-12-16T01:36:00.000Z

Also, New Noise updates for Christmas.

I draw your attention to their splendid Top 100 albums of the year list, which I contributed to. When I say "contributed to" I mean "Insulted the top placers for being rubbish indie bollocks".

2004-12-16T01:33:00.000Z

"I really don't want to write this, but I'll get to that eventually.

For a gamer of the euro persuasion, World of Warcraft exists in a peculiar limbo. No, it's not out over here. No, there's no public euro servers. No, there's no way of downloading the client online and starting to play on a whim - a phenomena which has lead to pretty much all of my peers happily burning out on City of Heroes at least four months before it's available over here. Don't expect to be able to get a European boxed copy of World of Warcraft until next year.

However, despite this, it's a game that's dominating the online discourse to a degree which borders on the oppressive. Even if we're not meant to be playing it, we're surrounded by people who won't shut up about the bloody thing. It's at times like this when becoming the 51st State doesn't actually sound like that bad an idea. Just give it to us already. Still: Copies leak across borders and it's hardly as if an online RPG is the most ping-reliant thing in the world. People are playing it, if they can be bothered waiting for the postage and/or scurvy smugglers to land shipfuls of illicit boxes on a beach somewhere on the Cornwall coast in the early morning."

First impresssions/Diary/Ramble thing at Eurogamer about the all-conquering World of Warcraft, which we'd call a review and stick a score at the bottom if only we didn't think we'd get crucified by the entire internet.

Written extremely early morning. Structure is

Loose.

2004-12-13T23:25:00.000Z

All the NGJ talk has reminded me that it's been at least six months since Gamer published this, which means that I now have republishing rights. So I can lob it up here.

This ZAngbandTk piece was printed in the first issue of Gamer's redesign, which still amuses me. It was my first concious attempt at writing something influenced by my own soapbox. It's not an entirely successful attempt, not least because it isn't *really* pure NGJ. Its more using its tools to do my usual analytical thing with... but still, worth reading.

Copy is as I handed it in, so hasn't been touched by the hands of prod - normally a bad sign with my rudimentary grasp of English, but does occasionally mean that it has something that an Editor somewhere has considered a little too risque included.

I still like how the piece dovetails, because I'm an egomaniac.

*****

ZANGBANDTK: Confessions of a dungeon-hack.

Valarina was my first. She was a barbarian warrior. Plain, though no-one would ever say that to her face for fear of her tearing off their arm and using it as a particularly bloody stole. But she was confident. Hey – with 18/50 strength you would be too. I had her walk into town, confusedly haggle for a pair of leather gloves then hit the bar, demanding a quest. They gave her one. Danger level 25. Hmmm… Is that bad? I didn’t know. So I marched her in and before she even had a chance to look around, Valarina was slaughtered in a single combat round by a Vorpal Bunny. Oh my.

Like the infinite coils of a fractal design, this smallest part of ZangbandTk contained the entirety of it. That is, discovery leading to overconfidence leading to death. Or, perhaps more accurately, death by stupidity.

Valarina died stupidly. This grated. I would have my revenge.

In the beginning there was Rogue. First released on UNIX systems in the 1970s, it proved a revelation and birthed a family of descendants. Rogue was an ASCII based dungeon-hack game, with all the features in the dungeon represented by a text symbol. For example, orcs being the letter “o”. Clearly this was necessary of the time, but it still freed resources up for what was important in the game – a plethora of monsters and treasure, as well as randomly generated dungeons.

To say the least, it was inspirational. Commercially speaking, the apogee of the Rogue-inspired game came in Blizzard’s Diablo, which in its virtually plotless repetition and gradual character improvement proved hugely popular. However, underground, a more direct line from Rogue was forming. Rogue inspired Moria, a Tolkein styled dungeon hack in the eighties. In 1990, Angband was born, which upped the Tolkein ante in including all manner of characters from the books. Angband proved popular, and eventually the variant known as Zangband – short for “Zelazny Angband” – came into being, improving on the original in ways deeper than the simple addition of characters from Roger Zelazny’s Amber series of books (For those unfamiliar: Political multiverse fiction about a warring family of aristocratic utter bastards).

The problem with all of these games was that they’re about as accessible as reading Anglo-Saxon sagas in old English. Putting aside even the graphical limitations, a baroque sequence of keys were required for any tasks, often with capital letters causing different actions. For example, press “r” will read an item, while “R” would instead rest. While perfectly playable, it requires a degree of effort that alienates all too many.

At the turn of the millennium, one Tom Baker took Zangband and gave it a menu interface and some slightly less obscure graphics: ZangbandTk. It was rediscovered in my corner of the net early in 2004, lead to a rapidly multiplying craze, my staying up until six in the morning on a few occasions and this article in a desperate attempt to explain it all to an uncaring world.

Travis came next. And Travis was a contender. Taking things simple, he was a human warrior. I realised that this was going to be harder than I expected, so wanted to have the least to worry about as possible. Being a straight human and a single-class character, he went up levels quickly, and being a fighter he was capable of taking most things on directly. He found his rhythm – getting enough items from the dungeon, teleporting to the surface with a recall scroll and then back down to continue. He’d even illicitly discovered the joys of “farming” monsters: creatures like mice, once disturbed, started to replicate at an incredible rate. However, by making sure the area of the dungeon they were in was a sealed with closed doors, a cunning warrior could stand in a narrow corridor and take them on one at a time as they came. As long as he hadn’t missed a leak, he could happily bounce up levels until the experience gained from each became insignificant. By the time he was 350’ down, he was level 12 and getting somewhat confident. And then… water.

I’d never seen water before. The simple blue shapes promised a whole new world – and said that I was getting there. I was making progress. Happily Travis splashed his way into the shallows. From the waters emerged a barracuda, which speed beside him and in a couple of combat rounds tore him to pieces.

It’s important to note that this is only one root of the family tree leading down from Rogue. There’s an entirely different pathway you’d follow which leads from Hack to the occasionally-mentioned often-mocked-by-idiots Nethack. While superficially similar games, there’s profound differences between the pair. Aficionados will hotly argue which is the greater – it’s the lo-fi RPG-nut version of the Quake 3/Unreal Tournament argument, basically. If you were to generalise, so seeking to offend both fans as efficiently as possible, Nethack tends to lean on esoteric puzzles while ZAngband concentrates on fun-for-all-the-family monster hacking. In recent years, the Nethack development team has updated less than the Zangband one, which may give it the edge.

Direct comparisons, however, are misleading. Things are fuzzier than “Zangband over here and Nethack over there – three falls and no submissions”. Both are open-source games, meaning that anyone can download files, have a nose and work on their own variants. For example, take that Angband to Zangband progression mentioned earlier. That was just one of the projects continuing from Angband. And once Zangband was out there, people were taking its code and making variants of that. A quick scan of the net reveals variants which add everything from Cyberpunk to Anime to Steampunk to… well, anything.

It’s here which the Rogue-like games gain their strength. Since the code-base is open, people have been developing, fiddling and adding sections to the games for years. With no need to worry about graphics, they just add functionality – new things to see and new things to do. They’re games about variety and surprise, meaning that every time you start with a new character class it can be a completely different game. Trying to survive as a Halfling rogue whose high stealth rating means stumble across most monsters asleep is a completely different to a Half-orc Warrior who is knee-deep in monsters the second he enters a level. And both are worlds away from playing as a vampire or a Chaos Warrior or a High Mage or a…

The variety is necessary because given the slightest provocation ZangbandTk will kill you dead, dead, dead.

And you’ll have to start all over again.

Stumpy, Dwarf Paladin, was caught by a mob of Crypt Fiends, who proceeded to summon the greatest array of Undead monsters the world had ever seen. I thought a simple small-distance Phase Door would get him away. In fact, it just teleported him further in. He was surrounded, poisoned and ate alive. He had time enough for a recall spell to jerk him out, assuming I’d had set it off when a smart person would have instead of meanly trying to save it. Stupid. Dead.

Cassius Clay, the Golem Ranger had retreated to a staircase to read an unknown scroll, in case it turned out to be one of Monster Summoning or similar. If the results were too frightening, he’d simply head up to escape, I thought. However, it summoned the Death Sword which, while immobile, delivers dozens of incredibly fast attacks against anyone stupid enough to stand beside it. Like Cassius Clay. Stupid. Dead.

Jude Lawful, Half-Titan Paladin, perished on the blade of Orfax, Son Of Boldor. Stupid. Dead.

Harbull the level 12 Hobbit Rogue, met a horned beast called Zog. It’s fast and fearsome and Harbull is looking increasingly worse for wear. I try my random-magic Wand of Wonder. Sadly, it hastes the Zog, increasing the rate of Harbull’s demise. Things are looking bad and, wary, I use a phase door spell and teleport Harbull to safety. I’m panicked, and – Zog out of sight – hold down the key to run away as fast as I can. Got to get away! As quickly as I can and… Zog tears around the corner and rends Harbull limb from limb. Zangband is turn based. Holding down a key makes no difference to the speed you move. I had panicked. Stupid. Dead.

Alecina Fear, Barbarian Chaos-Warrior, wise from Stumpy’s fate, activated her Recall scroll the second the Crypt Fiends appeared. However, being a smarter fighter all round than Stumpy, she’d virtually annihilated their forces, Rotting Corpses and all, by the time she’d been brought back to the surface. She relaxed. She was safe. I was safe. We were safe. I started walking towards a shop, to sell whatever loot and… dead. She’d been poisoned by a Rotting Corpse and I hadn’t noticed. I hadn’t been paying attention. Very stupid. Dead.

Saffy XIII was… I’m sorry. I can’t. Not yet.

Unless you cheat, once a character perishes, they’re gone forever. Of course, cheating is easy enough to do. The open-source nature of the game prevents the developers making anything that forces you to play by its rules. There’s even cheat-options you can turn on in the menu, for example, to make the game easier for you. And harder too, of course, for those truly brave (i.e. truly dead) few.

But, among ZangbandTk players, you tend to look down on such people. The risk is the entire point. The dungeons are randomly generated, so there’s no narrative to lose. When you start again, you’ll be playing something entirely new. And the variety is enough to make you want to play it again.

But mostly, the risk of life makes the game has worth. Any successes are your successes. Any failures are your failures. This isn’t a game in the modern sense which holds you hand and meekly leads you from cut-scene to cut-scene, trying to bolster your confidence, the equivalent of a doting parent telling their kid that finger-painting of a dog is the best thing they’ve ever seen, ever, and aren’t they a clever little mummy’s boy.

If you’re rubbish, ZanbandTk will kill you. It’s merciless… but it’s also brutally fair. The fact you – you! Clever old you! – were killed seems unbelievable. How could you have been tricked into failure by a game which appears to be so simple? So you play again. And you die again.

And it’s your fault.

It was getting ridiculous. I’d wasted days on this game, and I needed a place to make a break. While it was clear I’d never complete ZangbandTk by dethroning Oberon and slaying the Chaos Serpent, five-thousand feet below the surface, if I could create a level 20 character – the point my circle had decided was worthy of the title “hero” – I could move away from it and get on with life. With this in mind, Saffy XIII was born.

An Amberite Ranger. Her bloodline gave her ridiculously high stats and the ability to regenerate wounds. Her training mixed fighting prowess with considerable nature magic. And I had a graveyard full of dead warrior’s experience inside me, all calling out for revenge.

She rent the dungeon asunder. She hunted down and slaughtered the once trouble-some Robin Hood. Dragon-blood coated her blade. The Crypt Fiends were crushed under foot. Then, 250 experience points short of the target of level 20, she opens a door.

Into the gap steps a gazer. A bloody gazer. A weak, puny, pathetic thing. Normally splits with a single arrow. However, it gets an attack first. It paralyses Saffy. Bad – but not too bad. She normally recovers pretty fast. However, after a few immobile turns, it becomes clear that she’s not going to recover. While the gazer is mostly missing, it’s hitting enough to keep the effect going. This would be disastrous but for the fact that its actual attack is so pitifully weak that Saffy’s natural regeneration closes her wounds faster than it can inflict them. She just can’t move. There’s other monsters behind the gazer, but they can’t get to Saffy because of the floating eye is blocking the doorway. It’s a stalemate. I hold down the forward keys, hoping that the odds eventually turn up a chance where Saffy resists long enough to get a single blow on the beast.

It never does.

Saffy XIII stands in the doorway for days of in-game time until she finally starves to death.

I’m speechless. I just opened a door. I didn’t even have time to perform a single action.

This wasn’t fair. This wasn’t my fault. I give up.

Fuck you, ZangbandTk, I’m off to play Far Cry.

Okay, that was a lie. It’s not always fair. In a game with as much variety and interlocking rules created by different people in as ZangbandTk, there’s always the possibility that something may actually turn a little unfair at any moment. But it’s a question of degrees – did you know the risk when you were getting into it? For example, being dropped down a trapdoor into a lower level that your character probably can’t survive. Is that unfair? Well, maybe… but what were you doing walking around without a Recall spell or some find staircase variant? Or just being very careful indeed?

The areas where it’s actively unfair are mostly extremely well demarked. For example, the effect of Chaos in the game. If you play a Beastman, you have a chance of gaining another unpredictable mutation every time you increase a level. It’s even worse for those who choose to play a Chaos Warrior, which puts you firmly in the capricious hands of a Chaos God who delivers “gifts” – and those are the most underlined speech marks in human history – upon increasing a rank. Mostly, they’re extremely beneficial. Huge statistic increases, chaos-weapons of ridiculous potency and even being transformed into a superman, complete with heat-ray vision and steel-skin. A sizeable fraction, however, are not. Physical curses, experience losses and summoning hordes of monsters to attack you are common. Changing your race is another gift that can kill you as good as outright, when your Titan warrior turns into a pathetic Mindflayer with the attendant lack of physical prowess.

Even when they’re being generous, you can never under-estimate the God’s sense of irony. Take the tale of the Chaos Warrior who was gifted a permanent aura of sunlight. For almost everyone, a useful boon when exploring the depths. Everyone except, for example, vampires.

But while random and unfair, this is random and unfair you’ve specifically asked for. You’ve traded character security for random power, and pretty much forfeit your right to complain. Successful Chaos Warriors have to start playing the odds, being careful to watch their experience scores to make sure they cross boundaries when in relatively safe areas instead of in an unsure fight that can be turned into death by an intervention.

A week later, I’d changed my mind. Yes, it was brutally hard… but it wasn’t unfair.

I knew things that paralyzation existed – on the character sheet there was a list of things you could be immune to, and it was clearly there. The problem was that I was overconfident in thinking I wouldn’t need any resistance yet. There’s shops aplenty and I hadn’t gone looking for items to protect me. It was my fault. It was a particularly brutal my-fault, but it was still my error.

With this in mind, I created human Warrior-Mage Lauren Laverne. She died upon reaching level 11, when 50ft below the surface, heading back to town, I decided to try an unknown potion to clear a slot in her inventory. It turned out to make Lauren vomit, reducing her food level to zero. And I’d eaten all my supplies already. I rushed her upwards, quaffing healing potions to try and avoid her health failing from starvation. It wasn’t enough. Lauren expired crawling up to the gates of town, all the ripe smells of the inn tormenting her.

But it was fine. It was all my fault.

And that’s how I stopped worrying and learned to love ZangbandTk.

I’ve given up trying to persuade the rest of Gamer to see the joy in Nethack over the years, simply shrugging my shoulders at this year’s Top 100 meeting when someone asked why you just don’t play Doom on map-mode instead. The argument is simple – the more time people spend working on the graphical allure, the less time they have to work on content. If to create a new form of dragon involves a modeller working for six months to create the 100,000 polygon form, you’re clearly not going to have a great many of them. But if it’s a tiny sprite – or even just a letter - and the raw functionality of the code, you can have dozens, hundreds, thousands.

Some have made the argument that having such simple graphics allow you to imprint your imagination on the scene. I’m not sure I concur - I don’t find myself imagining the scene much, but more rather concentrating on the stripped down mechanics of it all. There are no distractions – just you and the game, alone against the dungeon.

ZangbandTk, while not as primitive as Nethack graphically, is a fair halfway house. Its menus mean that anyone should be able to play. While, due to its developer stopping work in 2001, misses the developments of the latest “pure” Zangband releases, it’s still as rich a gaming environment as you’ll encounter. The hardest of the hardcore may want to turn their attention to other variants – try Tales of Middle Earth, for example. But – whisper it – I don’t think many of us are that hard.

Antony: The one who made it. He was a Klackon warrior, a race of unintelligent speedy ant-people acid-spitting who can’t be confused. That’s one vulnerability off the list. His Halberd “Heavy-Metal” ((3d5) (+12,+13) [+9] (+3), weapon stat addicts) added fear-resistance to that, among a host of other minor ones. At the first opportunity, I sold another magic vampiric sword to raise the six-thousand gold required to purchase the ring of free-motion, preventing paralysis. That left blindness, though his variety of rods of teleport, allowed him to dodge anything out if he suffered loss of sight.

And he did. He reached level 27. He descended to 1250’ in into the dungeon, only returning to the surface when a meeting with Alberich the Nibelung King ended with the dark-dwarf-lord summoning a small army of replicating creatures which over-ran the locale.

Back on the surface, I marched him to the Thieves Guild and, on a whim, took a quest. Danger Level 25. Why not? Antony had proved his worth and I was confident in his abilities to at least survive anything.

The dungeon was perfectly still. For a second I thought I should have picked up his monster-detecting kit to work out what he had to do, but – well – too late now. He opened a door, and was bombarded with magic spells. Crawling to cover, I attempted to work out what was going on. Door Mimics, it seemed. Which summon monsters, I discovered, as an Umber hulk bashed through the wall before me. Hurt, Antony drinks a potion of restore Life Levels which he inopportunely discovers isn’t actually a healing potion at all. Why didn’t I actually test that again? His Pattern blade flashes, despatching the beast, but the array of sentient doors continue their bombardment. Time to run for the door… except a horde of Light Dogs materialise around him. No escape for Antony.

“Oh no, not again.” the game’s message log informs me. I think back to Valarina. I laugh.

Antony the Klackon had died stupidly. This grated.

I would have my revenge.

EDIT: Jim notes that I probably should provide a link to Zangbank TK here. I do so., courtsey of the ever-lovely Underdogs.

2004-12-13T16:54:00.000Z

I was chatting to AB the night when the Slashdotting happened on MSN, about the usual selection of nonsense. And it always *is* nonsense. He came up with something which amused me, and has been sitting in the back of my head for the two days since then when I've been pretending to be a good boyfriend over in Bristol.

It's about critical analysis.

Perhaps somewhat predictably, being self-taught in almost everything I've ever done, I tend to value the creation of your own tools for analysis more than appropriation of pre-existing tools. Being given a set of equipment for doing the job means you actually *understand* them far less than a set you've constructed for yourself. So even if the tools you've made aren't actually as perfect as ones bigger heads have done, you can put them to better use.

I've got a load. So, watching rubbishy Cheerleader-teen-comedy Bring It On last night - blame Curran for his recommendation - I found myself describing it as Major-key storytelling. Now, some devotee of Robert McKee's "Story" would describe it as a particularly crass Archplot, but the comparison to the big, open, strident and obvious chords makes more sense. Its what a film like that feels like, so the comparison works better.

Since we were chatting about the NGJ, I lobbed him the copy of my Cradle article. After reading which, he swiftly coined one for a certain technique I've based far too much of my journalistic career on. And since it's an amusing one, I've decided to steal it.

He's describes reading it before striking an unexpected personal revelation about me, which appears to come from nowhere but swiftly makes perfect sense - and adds a certain credulence to the rest of the article by its very presence. After all, if he didn't believe what he was writing, why would he drag in a clearly personal and painful memory? I'm not saying what the moment was - you can wait for the article for that - but it comes from the same place that made me elaborate at great length about my various Exs in my early-period gamer reviews. Exhibitionism, yes, but exhibitionism for an artistic purpose.

(AB also used it extensively in his brilliant - even better than Bow Nigger - Possessing Barbie)

AB describes it as the following "'Cos it goes: Kieron talking, kieron talking, Kieron, FUCK ME KIERON IN HIS UNDERPANTS".

So there you go: The Underpants Moment. Go abuse it as you will.

Appendix:

cheesetoasties: I don't uinderstand the underpants moment.
ProfHades0K: Okay
ProfHades0K: I like this game
ProfHades0K: And the games graphics are good
ProfHades0K: and the sound is good
ProfHades0K: and my mum died alone
ProfHades0K: And this game reminds me of that
ProfHades0K: And the levels are good
cheesetoasties: I get you.

2004-12-10T23:59:00.000Z

And now the front page of Slashdot.

Fingers crossed for State and AB's server.

And, heading into the Kitchen to make a cup of tea, I realise that the most referenced piece of writing in my career is just the world's most glorified referal post.

You know what? I'm fine with that.

2004-12-09T19:11:00.000Z

NGJ Manifesto emerges again as it gets Metafiltered.

They hardly need the hits, but it's good to be polite.

2004-12-09T17:37:00.000Z

I return and as a vague attempt to warn up my writerly-head, I blog about my week away from the beloved Internet.

(Bar a couple of methadone moments courtesy of Ste "Get off the internet now, Kieron" Curran and Dave "You've been gagged when you were away" Bushe)

The major reason for my leaving you was toddling off to All Tomorrow's Parties. It was my first time there, as I'd previously avoided it due to an over-active case of inverse-snobbery (It being the festival for people to good to go to normal festivals, ergo, lowly and to be looked down upon) and Belle-and-Sebastian phobia (Since they curated the first one).

I changed my mind, as I had one of my rare realising-I-am-full-of-shit moments that I don't like to dwell too much upon.

I get there and realise, very swiftly, everything everyone has ever said about ATP is true.

For non-music people, it's set, in a stroke of real genius, at a Pontin's holiday camp. So rather than crouching in a tent and wading in your fellow festival go-ers faeces, you have a small challet you share with others, set in a compound and with the ironic dissoance between relatively obscure music and 1960s style British Working Class Holiday Camps.

If Glastonbury is the Indie-Somme, ATP can be cruelly referred to as Indie Auschwitz. Or, probably more accurately in these modern days, Indie Guantanemo Bay. Especially when half the acts are close to the sort of things that, as shown in the Men Who Stare At Goats, are what the US Army would blast at prisoners.

Another easy way to describe it: A fair chunk of the bands are the sort of bands who I always assumed what my Co-workers thought I listen too. You know: two notes in ten minutes, five minutes each played at sufficient volume to sterilise the audience. Not that Wolfeyes was anything but brilliant.

So: memorable moments.

Well, I've always had a theory that parties - specifically house parties - concentrate time. A good night out can have a similar sort of effect, but it's an intense, highly interactive group which leads to the emergence of LOTSOFSTUFFHAPPENING. Parties are good like that.

This was, essentially, a three day party.

Not that I'm sure how typical our experience was. On Saturday night, our neighbours came around at some point when the clock was crawling towards 7 a.m to ask us to turn down the PS2 Singstar Karyoke as we were the only chalet in the building. Not everyone was really living it as much as we were. But - hey - we're the only people who counted.

(We blanked the request, which was for the best. The people who came around were, I realised later, the same people who only a couple of hours earlier had started a fight with Triforce Internerd Sidekick Rob in the pub near closing time since he slagging off George Elliot's Silas Marner to them. Because one of them had "Silas" written on his T-shirt. Some people can't take critical re-examining of classic novels.)

And scanning through Ste's photos of the event, I find myself recalling things I'd completely forgotten, like applying a giant Tattoo of a Phoenix sicking up a dismayed Mermaid to Rob's chest in the toilet, much to the seeming bemusement of the surrounded post-rock massive.

So a mass of experiences. Jokes were manufactured at an industrial rate through the seething power of the Ste/Byron/McCarthy axis only referred to as "The Triforce", though Chalet-comrades Jude, Chris and James and myself did have our own cottage industry. There's too many to list, which makes it lucky that the Triforce were keeping a book which, hour by hour, they noted down the eb and flow of the events. It's a little like the Odesey, but with a lot more Odd and will eventually find its way online.

By the time it got to 7 .a.m. on Monday morning and there was a spellbinding Greatest Running Joke hits performance at some bewildered chalet guests, minds were disolving into soup. In terms of personal moments, James, Chris and I refusing to stop singing Just Like a Pill at a similar period, even when the Singstar backing tape had stopped, was heartwarming and dumb in about equal measures. As opposed to a few minutes earlier, when I had dramatically warned everyone to be ready for clouds of smoke since the oven had been left on from Jude's cooking food when she wandered off to the Beach, opening the door and being unable to locate anything, so deciding she was so Drunk she hadn't remembered to put stuff in. Oven turned off. Then when Jude comes back, she opens the oven and pulls out the chips. I'd somehow missed it. Marvelous.

The minor annoyances that caught me at times disappear in my recollection, acting as artful noir shadows to the emotional topography of the weekend. So, to invoke another of the sacred running jokes, It Was A Lovely Time. Also, AWESOME.

I still have, for the record, no idea why I casually - if intently - informed Rob and delightful missus Ruth that I was a - I quote - "very sexual person".

Er... Haven't mentioned the Bands yet. Stand outs: Wolfeyes. Mercury Rev. Little Wing. Miss Kittin (FIGHT - RUNNING - GAG). Peaches. Trail of the Dead. Silver Mount Zion. Pelican. McCarthy singing Ace of Spades before pulling open his coat to reveal he had somehow sneaked a whole round past pub security at 4am or so, then diving back into it and... oh, I think we're back to us rather the bands again. Man, we suck.

Before moving on from ATP, a couple of photos. Firstly, some bastards who tried to start a fight on the Beach with us.

And a man who used to be one of the most respected journalists in the industry.

Monday was the end of ATP, but not the end of my adventures, deciding to spend another couple of days in the Smoke so I could interview The Dresden Dolls for Plan B. This went about as well as an interview with me can ever go: I consider the actual face-to-face chat pretty much the worst of my skills as a journo. Could have gone infinitely worse, since half an hour before I was a giggling schoolgirl mess while eating Breakfast with Jane and trying to work out what I wanted to ask. Trying to get in the mood to find questions featuring words like "Semiotics" rather than "Pooooo" proved troublesome, but a swift glass of wine and I was ready to do my best Simon Reynolds impression. Self-laceration aside, they seemed to enjoy it and even complimented the questions afterwards. Which could always be a band playing a journalist, but seemed genuine, especially when backed-up with the camera man grabbing me to say likewise on the way out.

Maybe I am too hard on myself. At least I'm aware that you really should have something a little better to ask than "Why are you called "The Dresden Dolls" or "Why do you wear Make-up" when you go meet a band. Or if you *do* want to ask those questions, at least hide them behind a little intellectual fog (The Semiotics question related directly to the image, natch).

Caught the gig in the evening with co-tyrant Alex De Campi, which was a spectacular, glorious success with moments that absolutely transfixed me as if they'd hammered a bloody great nail through my chest. As much as I loved the ATP bands, its heights even topped the way "I never dreamed I'd hurt you/I never dreamed I'd lose you/
In my dreams, I'm always strong" cut me open during Mercury Rev's encore of "The Dark Is Rising".

After I finish a rubbish PC-game review, I'm going onto writing my featurette, which I'm looking forward too immensely.

Final moment I want to keep for posterity. Having got back to Bristol, Jane and I stop for a drink before I have to sod off back to Bath. Heading piss-wards just before ending, I literally feel my games-journalist brain switch back on at full force as I - for no discernable reason - start to create a concrete argument for Game Entryism to be thrown into a piece on KOTOR2. Not that I've been actually *asked* to write something on KOTOR2 yet even.

Feeling your brain TWIST in such an obvious way is rare and glorious. It took a week's worth of sleep deprivation to create it, so I salute it too.

Rare and glorious. Now there's an apposite phrase to close on.

To work. I have a rubbish RPG to mutilate.

2004-12-06T21:46:00.000Z

"Please, God, don't make her ask me to dance.

Demand I give her a ruby ring or diamond necklace, sure. It's worth thousands of gold pieces, and my scurvy crew (trad.) will be cursing their captain's name as their pirates-retirement fund gets diverted onto the heaving bosom of a Governor's daughter, but that's much preferable than the alternative. I'm here for the buckling of innocent swash, not the integration into polite society through courtly dancing.

Pseuds could argue this was a terrible attempt to immerse you in the Pirate mindset fearful of the feminine world of domesticity, cleanliness and poncing around to something whose lyrics don't involve the precise number of men capable of fitting on some old chest, but when you're dreading the appearance of a rudimentary Rhythm Action, it doesn't quite cut the mustard.

In short, Pirates is a most curious beast."

I crash at Ste Curran's place in London post-ATP, and decide to blog this. Tales of adventures another time. I'm still slightly physically queasy from that point at around 6:25am last night (Golden rule: A day doesn't end until you sleep) where The Triforce did a greatest running jokes hit-mix.