I must admit, my recent foray into MMORPG-land with EVE Online did have one plus point. It reminded what a great game Frontier: Elite II was, and I fired it up under the Amiga emulator WinUAE for another quick blast.

Several hours later I was still there, genuinely more engrossed in the tedium of space flight than at any point during my EVE experience. It wasn’t so much the game itself that kept me entertained - thirteen years after release, it’s looking a little tired and its many irksome bugs wear thin rather quickly - but the game world.

In 1993, a game world typically wasn’t expressed entirely through the medium of the game as it would be now. For a game with the scope of Frontier, it’s hard to see how that would even be achieved. No, it was expressed through something that used to be commonplace inside boxed games: extra goodies.

The Frontier manual was a thing of beauty, a 100-page brusier detailing every possibility in the game, from mining through to piracy. You didn’t even have to play the game to be able to taste the possibilities, the wanton open-endedness of it all. Mining in Frontier may have sucked in reality, but it certainly didn’t when you read its chapter in the manual.

Having a decent manual certainly wasn’t unique to Frontier, especially back in 1993. Even some modern games - the GTA series springs to mind - uphold the tradition with detailed, lovingly crafted manuals, chock-full of detail from the game world. No, what was almost unique about Frontier’s offerings were the other two booklets.

There was the Gazeteer, featuring profiles of many of the star systems and planets featured in the game, and Stories of Life on the Frontier, a compendium of short stories based in the Elite universe.

It was partly these additions that brought the blocky, largely empty universe of Frontier to life. Even the other day, as I cruised from my pulsating blue circle of a Hyperspace Arrival Cloud Remnant to the rudimentary 3D geometry of an orbital station, I could recall the nuggets of detail I’d read about the game world, and some of the childish sense of wonder - I’m flying through a colonised star system! - came back.

How many games can you say that about, eh?

Just for kicks, compare and contrast this approach with the situation today, where the mechanics of the game world are - generally - delivered 100% in-game. Have a look on Wikipedia for the storyline behind Half-Life 2. It’s clear that an immense amount of thought has gone into it, but how much of that background detail makes it into the final game? How much of that is the player aware of?

I’m not sure whether it’s preferable to make the player experience the game world first-hand, rather than reading about it in a manual. The fact that it’s even remotely possible nowdays is certainly encouraging, but is it the best way? I’m not sure - but I know which approach fired my imagination more.

I know, I know, GameFAQs exists for background. Strategy guides do too. But nothing quite beats the freebies you used to get with those big boxed games.

94% of all comments are spam.

Hardly a surprising statistic when you look at the amount of trouble this meagre site has had with the spamming hordes. I wouldn’t care to guess what the ratio of spam-to-ham is like here, but I bet it’s nowhere near as good as 6% real meat.

Fortunately, the spammers that hit this site regularly are a particularly stupid bunch, and even a small sample of their automated antics was enough to build a bulletproof spam filter back in January. Recently, though, they’ve started being a bit more subtle:

These enigmatic gems pushed me over the edge and I implemented Akismet, an online service for preventing comment spam. Their home page is where I got my 94% figure.

The idea’s simple enough: when someone sees fit to hurl their erudite observations at your feet, your blog queries Akismet’s web service with the contents, and receives the thumbs-up or thumbs-down from them in reply.

So far it seems to work, with one minor drawback: all my own comments are flagged as spam. Less than ideal, but hopefully that’ll stop with time.

Victory over the bastards again - for another six months at least.

Ah, simpler times. That’s me in my Asp Explorer, approaching Boston Base in Barnard’s Star. The game was Frontier, easily one of my favourite games, and probably the single game I’ve invested most time in.

For some reason I find difficult to pin down, I’ve always found those games - we’ll simplistically call them ‘open-ended space trading games’ - fascinating. From Frontier to Hardwar to X - Beyond the Frontier, whether the game is represented by rough polygons or the latest in graphics technology, these games somehow fire the imagination. You can almost imagine you’re there and that these starships, pirates and orbital stations are populated by real people.

And so when Stan - vile temptress that he is - asked me to join him on a 14-day free trial of EVE Online, how could I resist?

Empty Spaces

EVE Online is a MMORPG - the largest game universe in the world, apparently. It’s set entirely in space, where every player pilots his or her ship across the vast game universe, making a quick buck while avoiding pirates and the law. It should be fun.

But it isn’t.

The first thing that strikes you about EVE is how empty it all seems. Of course, you encounter other ships as you fly about - they’re all around you, in fact - but it’s still dead and lifeless. Hardwar, still one of the best single-player examples of the genre, is teeming with life by comparison.

After a short time playing EVE, you start to see why it feels so dead. EVE isn’t so much a game to be played as a game to be left minimised while you, say, implement categories on your web site. You are perfectly able to let your ship ply the vast open spaces on autopilot. It begs the question, why are you - and these other people - here? Wouldn’t the game work just as well without you?

Nobody Home

It’s a sad conclusion to draw, but the answer is ‘almost’. For the first few days of playing EVE, I have to admit I was addicted. It wasn’t the actual game that made me stay, though; it was the potential the game had.

When I was pilfering cargo crates abandoned in space, the game warned me that the owner would be free to exact his grisly revenge. Well, bring it on. When I entered a dangerous system, the game warned me that it was an unsavoury place. I might get attacked here, too.

But did either of these things happen? Did they bollocks.

Hey You

In the mid-90s, when I was fascinated by Frontier and later Hardwar, the multiplayer potential of these games was clear to me even then. What if these other ships were being flown by real people from all over the world?

Unfortunately, EVE utterly fails to capitalise on the fact that this is now a reality. Your humorous ship name appears on no-one’s radar; instead they get your player name. Even the ability to role-play, by a mechanism as simplistic as sending out communications to nearby vessels, does not exist. Such additions could, quite easily, elevate EVE to much greater heights with very little effort.

Imagine being able to look around your cockpit. Imagine being able to use your ship as a taxi, or simply invite other pilots round to check out your fluffy dice. Wouldn’t that make the game that much more engrossing? Wouldn’t it make the ship feel like it was yours?

Don’t Leave Now

Sadly EVE does none of this. Most of the pioneering space stuff is still left to your imagination, and what’s left of the game - flying from A to B - manages to be so hopelessly unengaging you might as well not be playing. Of course, EVE has the usual set of abstract ’skills’, ‘equipment’ and ‘money’ that you have to clock up hours upon hours of game time to obtain, but is that fun? Could I even see the game becoming fun once I’d earned my millions? Not really.

You’ll notice that I’ve ignored the bread and butter of most online RPGs, the guilds. Here they’re called ‘corps’, and they’re rubbish. I don’t know this first hand, but I can extrapolate from my meagre experience. Stan and I tried to go mining in dangerous systems together, and it was hard. Not the mining itself, but sticking together. Flying in formation was impossible; even remaining remotely near one another degenerated into constant checking-up via the in-game chat.

Playing on your lonesome is boring, playing with others is boring and hard. All in all: lame.

Goodbye Cruel World

I’ve left the most damning condemnation of EVE until last. Stan and I decided to go out in a blaze of glory, at the end of our free trial period, and have a fight.

Even that was boring.

And if fighting is boring - surely the culmination of years of buying the most powerful guns, constructing the most pimped-out ship and fitting the strongest shields - what chance does the rest of the game have?

Having said that, 25,000 people can’t be wrong. Are Stan and I? Check out his review of EVE and then decide.

I’ll leave you with the final indignity - my death at the hands of Stan. The one and only public airing of my ship’s given name makes it all worthwhile.

Remember that episode of The Brittas Empire where Rimmer Mr Brittas arrives at the gates of Heaven, apparently without any good deeds to his name. “You’ve got a list of good intentions,” says Peter, “but they don’t count for anything I’m afraid.”

My list of good intentions will include my ambitious plan to reengineer HuzboWeb for the Web 2.0 generation, complete with properly object-oriented PHP 4 (rather than the “mess” currently employed), AJAX, a tag cloud, and all that fancy stuff. Unfortunately I got to the planning stage and thought “bugger that”, and another abandoned project was chalked up to laziness.

But look! There are improvements! Exciting developments, even, taking the site up to some kind of Web 1.5 level, possibly. Each post now has a category, indicated by the icon in the top-right corner. Click the icon and you’ll see only the stories in that category.

All right, so certain other sites have had this feature all along - some cynical bastards might even suspect that the only reason this site didn’t have it originally was to avoid the appearance of blatantly ripping others off - but hey, I’m excited.

I’ve put about as much thought into this as the government put into their plans for homebuyers’ packs - or their plans for anything really - so don’t be surprised if it breaks. If it does, please leave a comment so I can get it sorted.

I hate wasteful companies. You know the sort: the kind of people who send out the tiniest, most indestructible item known to man in the biggest and thickest cardboard box they can find, swathed in reams of bubble-wrap and funny foam crisp-like things. Or the kind of firm who insist on sending you their catalogue, week in week out, even though you’ve only ever bought the one thing that got you on their mailing list in the first place.

It’s annoying. There’s nothing you can do about it. The company doesn’t charge you for packaging - not directly, at least - and the most you can do with the acres of packing material is save it all in the hope that one day you’ll sell a huge, fragile item on Ebay and be able to recycle it.

A case in point is Novatech. They may be very swift and, in my experience, helpful mail-order company, but man they love their packaging.

This week they sent me these two relatively small and difficult-to-destroy items:

The wireless access point was snug in a cardboard box not much bigger than the device itself. It wasn’t going to move around or get crushed in there. A spindle of blank DVDs is virtually indestructible. But that didn’t stop them packaging these items in a box this size:

I mean, what? That’s the biggest box ever. Those foam things are now filling a shopping bag to the brim, in the bin. There’s nothing else I can do with them, aside from collecting them forever or scouring the country for some kind of ‘foam things’ recycling centre.

Amazon tends to package things well, with the minimum of waste. Even Ebuyer, though they love their packaging, generally use plastic bags filled with air as padding, which don’t take up a lot of space in the bin once you burst them.

So all companies, learn from Amazon’s example. I’m fed up of having a bin full of cardboard, funny foam things and plastic bags. Imagine that multiplied across the entire country - it’s a lot of crap nobody wants.

P.S. Fulham railway station or Fulham Broadway station? I can’t decide!

I mentioned that I recently bought a Nintendo DS. At around the same time, I ordered a wireless access point from Ebuyer so I could play Mario Kart DS over the Interweb.

It didn’t need to be anything special. The DS only supports the older WEP encryption standard, and - being a paranoid bastard who thinks the TV is watching me - I wouldn’t use wireless networking for anything important no matter how secure it was supposed to be. So all things considered, this heap should have suited my needs perfectly, allowing me to connect my DS while blocking everything else out.

Ebuyer sent me a DVD writer instead. Bad start to my quest, wasn’t it? I sent it back to Ebuyer, who promptly told me that they don’t actually sell what I’d ordered, refunded only part of what I’d paid, and stopped talking.

So now I’m up to ordering this thing from Novatech’s special “so cheap it must be a mistake” range. We’ll see what I get this time. I am expecting a purple elephant.

I’ve complained about Plusnet a few times in the past. They’ve variously allowed bits of my site to be deleted due to dodgy default security settings, deleted my whole site themselves, deleted my site again, changed some important configuration settings without bothering to tell anyone and contributed to trapping huz.org.uk in domain-name pergatory for nearly three weeks. On Saturday and Sunday I couldn’t connect for about 24 hours, which thankfully halted my EVE obsession but also meant I couldn’t send a very important email. I was on the verge of running out to buy a modem and shake magazines in the hope that an AOL trial CD would fall out. Before you ask, no, the “important email” wasn’t an Evemail.

Aside from that, I still insist that Plusnet are pretty good.

This time they’ve decided to up the ante with an unstoppable act of wanton destruction. Unbeknownst to me, since I couldn’t even CONNECT, the following ominous message appeared on the Service Status page on Sunday morning:
“Our network engineers are currently investigating an issue where customers are not seeing any email displayed in their mailboxes.”

Do you know why customers were not seeing any mail displayed in their mailboxes, readers?

It’s all GONE.

Yes, this evening I’ve had a quick trawl through the updates on the Service Status page. Cluelessness gradually turned to suspicious caginess which, by this evening became “oh shit guys, hope you’re sitting down: 700GB of email gone :o :(”. The story goes that some hapless employee accidentally typed a mythical “delete everything” command while mistakenly logged in to the wrong servers. The mirrored backup system did its work and dutifully replicated the change, so the backups are toast as well.

Oh dear Plusnet, oh dear. They’re sending the data to a data recovery firm, who should - since the disks were yanked out of the system, probably in a blind panic, immediately after everything was bummed - be able to recover everything.

700GB of data to be recovered, though? More like the biggest bill you’ve ever seen.

Remember the good old days when email spam was straightforward? You’d crack open your email account to be met with a deluge of subject lines promising HOT HOT SEX and WILD, WILD, WILD TRACTION ACTION - and that was just the ad for Microsoft Monster Truck Madness - and perhaps the odd message, buried within it, from your mate who’d just discovered the Internet. Life was simpler then.

Nowadays, spammers go to all sorts of lengths to make their subject lines look innocuous, and one of their favourites is including a common name in the hope that it’s yours. You know the sort of thing: “Hi, Dave!” or “Check this out, John Smith!”. That’s some good spamming, and fairly likely to be semi-successful.

Then we have the cretins who bombard huz.org.uk’s role accounts:

Pantograph… Snaffle?

Good work, guys.

Nintendo’s ethos of putting the fun back into games - well, did it ever really leave on their consoles? - works wonders on the Nintendo DS. Features which might at first seem like gimmicks, like the touch-screen and to a lesser extent the built-in microphone, add depth and immersion to the gaming experience in a way I hope the Wii’s ‘revolutionary’ (ho ho) new control interface will.

I have only one complaint so far, Nintendo. In the good old days, attempting to be naughty with text input would more often than not result in a hasty smackdown from the game in question. Why, then, was I allowed to teach Animal Crossing’s sweet, innocent Bree the following rudery?

Honestly. That takes some explaining when people try out my town.

Something funny happened to me on the Interweb today. Funny strange, not funny ha ha. To understand what it was, you’ll need a cursory understanding of P2P - but let’s face it, you’re here reading this site, so it’s more than likely that you do.

After a largely unsuccessful evening scouring the Internet for fast torrents - of Linux ISOs, cake recipes and other non-illegal things, natch - I thought I’d struck gold. I’d happened across one that sped off at ridiculous speeds immediately, just the sort of torrent I’d been hoping to meet all my life.

But wait! It turned out that my torrent had some horrible skeletons in the closet. I was about to click µTorrent’s “peers” tab to peek inside, and cover myself in human remains.

This is what fell out all over me:

You’ll notice that the IPs listed are all very similar - in the 38.100.xxx.xxx range, mostly, with three outliers which are also very similar. The vital statistics of each peer are different, but the client is the same in each case.

What’s that all about? Is someone, as Ryan suggests, trying to “law me up”? Or feed me with a horrifically corrupted file which I will spit out in disgust, eventually leading to lifelong Bittorrent bulimia? Or something else?

Answers on a postcard, please.