Google Maps may be an excellent service, providing easily the best and most flexible online maps of the UK, but after extended use by someone who doesn’t like to drive - say, me - it begins to reveal a dark heart, the end result of its upbringing in a land where the car is king.
Yes, Google Maps is evidently designed for (and by) fat pies who refuse to step out of their SUVs until they’re inches away from their destination - Americans. Quite possibly Americans like the young couple who once told me in hushed tones, on a train but without a hint of irony, that public transport in California “isn’t for people like us“.
Despite the fact that Google Maps diligently records all known nasty one-way systems, and routes its directions accordingly - with no way of telling it to stop it because you’re on foot - it somehow omits that most basic of locations, the humble train station. No, you can’t find train stations on Google Maps, either by looking or by specifically searching. Instead, for unfamiliar towns and cities, you either have to trust that most major train stations can generally be found on “Station Road” or perhaps “Station Approach”, or look up their location somewhere else and make a mental note.
This is rendered even more bizarre by the fact that Google Maps actually include railway lines, albeit represented in the same way as the rather less uncrossable tram lines, leaving the location of the stations themselves as the only mystery.
All this, of course, means little more than the opportunity to put my limited artistic skills to good use when I have to print a map, or send one to someone else. Trying to remember where stations are when sending directions to friends probably helps keep my brain active, too! In the end, in a twisted kind of way, Google Maps are doing me a favour. Probably.
Forget playing modern PC adventure games, they’re uniformly rubbish. Fact.
This is where it’s at.
More on this exciting development, such as a step-by-step guide on how you can join me in the slightly scary world of running homebrew software on your DS, may follow.
Until then, I’m off to finally play Beneath a Steel Sky the way its creators never intended - on the bog.
We’ve established that I own too many games. What better excuse to play them than to review them for this site?
Of course, when some of my games are as high-calibre as those in The Adventure Collection - three games for a fiver, folks, there’s nothing suspicious about that! - I don’t want to commit myself to playing them all the way through.
With that in mind, I present the first in a potentially regular column: the half-OOUR review. The concept is simple: a game has half a f**king OOUR either to impress me, or make me think it was MORE FOOL ME for tainting my computer with such gash. The time it takes to install doesn’t count.
Without further ado, the first candidate: Journey to the Centre of the Earth, one of the games in the fine Adventure Collection.
I didn’t have high hopes.
12:35 am
Installation went well enough. Actually, what am I on? Of course it did. This is sounding like a JA+ review already, scrambling for compliments like a pig scouring marshland for truffles. But still, it’s true: there was even an installation splash screen that didn’t burn my eyes.
Of course, as soon as the game began, I found myself making allowances for it. Good cutscene, I thought, for an adventure game. In reality it’s amateurish in the extreme and looks about as visually stunning as a Blue Peter competition entry. One unconvincing rockfall and a crashed helicopter later, and our sexy female protagonist (I’m sure that’s the look they were going for, anyway) is stranded in the middle of nowhere.
What does the game smack me with first? Terrible pathfinding? Naturally. A character who has to turn laboriously on the spot before she sets off in a new direction? Of course! Tiny hotspots? Yep.
The interface is unresponsive, to the point that it only does something when you try something you’re allowed to do. Objects you can interact with - but not necessarily pick up without manipulating them first, for reasons the game does not offer - are highlighted with an icon. There are no descriptions or even text labels, so if you can’t make out what an object is or why you can’t pick it up immediately from the illustration alone, you’re out of luck. Oh man.
What’s outside the helicopter? A vast expanse. What happens if I click on the footprints icon that appears over this tiny, tiny piece of land?
Oh, I see. It’s slipping. Thanks for that. As you can see, no expense has been spent on the visuals, nor on the protagonist’s dialogue.
At this point, I’d picked up everything possible from the downed helicopter. I’d found a crevice in a rock, only to be dropped what felt like a heavy hint, “there might be a way out over there”. I located the tiny hotspot for ‘over there’ and found a panoramic view over the sea, at which point my spunky heroine proclaimed that she “should tell the office about the accident”. Well, yeah.
12:45 am
Ok, enough blind stumbling around. I decided I must have missed something about the interface. It couldn’t really be this bad, could it?
Sadly, it could and it is. There really is no way to tell what an object is other than by sight. There is no feedback when something doesn’t work, only when it does.
Thanks to a walkthrough in the manual, I found I had missed some objects in the helicopter cockpit - a medical box that I initially couldn’t pick up (the game couldn’t tell me it was screwed to the wall, natch), and some wires I had to cut loose.
12:50 am
At this point I decided to screw wandering around the same three screens of the crash site, searching for new ways to pit myself against the interface in battle, and went back to the walkthrough from the manual. It transpired that “telling the office” equates to “sending an email from your laptop”. Sending an email from a laptop while stranded in a remote spot in Iceland, of course, makes perfect sense, but only when you have a panoramic view over the sea!
Email sent. I was no further forward.
12:53 am
Walkthrough again.
You see her there, brazenly saying “over there”? She means here. There’s a way out here, where she’s standing. Getting rid of the rock I didn’t even know was a problem - no feedback, y’see - had me on my way.
1:00 am
Only five minutes left, thank God. It was set to be a telling five minutes, though.
Play any number of ‘fan games’, amateur efforts generally created as a labour of love by one person, and you’ll find one common thread running through most of them: pointless player missions. You know the sort of thing: find the shaven llama and take it to The Insidious Overweight Moon God before Mars is in the eighth house. Usually there’s no plausible reason for these missions, because the amateur adventure maker can’t be bothered with a plot or a cohesive storyline or any of that nonsense, but you have to do them to progress through the game.
Guess what? Journey to the Centre of the Earth has one of those.
Mmm, so I have to find a crystal and polish it? Like you polish your ‘wand’? Sounds intriguing, do tell me more.
Naturally it isn’t intriguing at all, it’s boring and rubbish. I found the crystal, and the game wouldn’t let me pick it up. How do I pick it up?, I wondered. Do I use everything in my inventory with it? Go out and find more inventory and then try that? Tinker with this fusebox - with no feedback - in a vain attempt to repair it?
Or did I just Alt-F4 the hell outta there?
Admittedly, by this stage the game was beginning to show at least a smattering of potential. If I was interested enough in adventure games not to mind the bad gameplay (see signature), I might have persisted for, ooh, five minutes. But as it turned out, my time was up.
1:05 am
Half an OOUR? Seemed more like three. Just out of interest, I decided to take a look at how JA+ reviewed it. I’ll give you a clue: it scores more highly than Monkey Island 2.
Next up in the series, the demo of Al Emmo: The Lost Dutchman’s Mine. I might have to steel myself first, though.
I used to have a serious problem: I couldn’t stop buying games I didn’t have time to play.
Actually, who am I kidding? The problem hasn’t gone away, it’s just loosened its grip slightly. There are still games on my shelf I’ve barely unwrapped.
Prince of Persia. Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon. Deus Ex. Eternal Darkness.
Just last week I spotted an irresistable deal on play.com: three adventure games for £5! Granted, I’d never heard of them, and even the reviews on Just Adventure were prepared to admit they were sub-par - meaning they were each a pathetic waste of space, and playing them would compare unfavourably with repeatedly impaling your head on a fork - but still, that’s three games for £5. How could I resist that?
And of course they’ve joined the ever-expanding ranks of games I’ve never touched. I did manage to make inroads into the pile a few years ago, by forbidding myself from buying any new games until I’d given each of the existing ones a fair chance. Obviously, with my self-dislipline, that lasted about five minutes - but it gave me the chance to play some decent games, seemingly for free.
Ah, so that’s why governments stockpile some of their natural resources.
So yesterday there was a classic Internet furore as AOL publicly released a pile of search data from users of their search engine. Anonymised, mind you, but that’s not quite the right word. When I think of something being ‘anonymised’, I think of dodgy electronic voices. Interviewees in impenetrable silhouette. Details changed to protect the innocent. The whole shebang.
What AOL mean here is that they didn’t attach the name and address of each user directly. Very good of them - but they still gave each user a unique ID number.
And tagged each of their search queries with a date and time.
What this means is that anyone can quite easily track the search history of user #3, and - if they happen to have insider access to any of the sites user #3 found through the AOL search, say a government site or one owned by any of the big media companies - crosscheck AOL’s data with their own web server logs to lift the veil of anonimity. Oh dear.
You don’t even have to be that big a site to score a victim. So congratulations, Case Study User X - you stumbled upon a site for which I have the logs.
Huz? Stalker more like. Thanks Ryan.
The guy - and, judging by his search history, I’m assuming it’s a bloke - is from Texas. He came to the site but didn’t stay. The bastard.
Probably because it doesn’t contain many pictures of actresses. He likes searching for info on actresses, you see. And paparazzi pictures of them. And sometimes, he can’t help but wonder where they live.
Nothing too bad there, I suppose. Harmless enough. At the beginning of his search oddysey with AOL, he was looking for ‘free puppies’. By the end, his search had moved on to the subject of puppy food. Is this a touching tale of dreams fulfilled?
Probably. Unfortunately, not many dreams are likely to be fulfilled by people having their search history posted for the world to see. My stalking victim was relatively innocuous, searching mainly on mundane topics that any one of thousands of people could have. The fact that he was looking for careers with a specific company, evidently owned a particular model of printer and had a poor credit rating - but wanted a loan - might help to pin him down more precisely, but not without a lot of educated guesswork.
It’s highly likely that for dozens, if not hundreds, of people represented in the 2.1GB of raw search data, the effects of someone who knew them trawling through the data would be much more damaging. Even a quick perusal of the first 65,000 records revealed some woman - evidently a woman - with an unhealthy interest in post-natal depression and ‘infanticide’, and a few less savoury examples.
The sad thing is that without the inclusion of unique user IDs - and the associated loss of privacy for those concerned - the data becomes much less interesting for research purposes. It simply becomes a collection of words, without context. As it stands, the AOL data is intruiging; it represents something akin to a stream of consciousness as ordinary people interact with the Internet, revealing more about themselves to the ether than they might reveal to their friends.
It’s a bit of a scary thought how much of ourselves is likely to exist in Google’s vaults, really.
Remember kids: Big Brother might not be watching you right now, but he’s probably saving everything you do until later. And if you’re not careful, he’ll release it all in an ill-advised and incredibly naive philanthropic gesture.
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!
