Wednesday 23 May 2012

Sore wrists, swollen thumbs.

Yep, I'm back for a ramble, deal with it.

I don't have any wonderful insights about the computer gaming industry.  Let's throw that one out there.  I have only a little more insight about the writing industry, and given my situation, you can tell that ain't a whole lot.  As far as insights go you might as well go and ask a tree stump, it isn't my forte.

What I do have is a long history with computer games.  I remember Christmas, 1987, opening the box my ZX Spectrum +2 came in and being delighted*.  I didn't even mind the squeaky squarky five minutes of loading for a game that I was shit at or, even worse, decided not to work at all, because I had a computer.  Over the next four or five years I built up a library of tapes, most of which lay unused while I obsessed over the games I enjoyed and were within my abilities to play **.

Games like 'Robocop', 'Chaos' and 'Target: Renegade' took up a great deal of my time.  Time I could have been using to go out playing with other kids or masturbating was dedicated to making shitty collections of half-dozens of pixels scoot around the screen to beat or shoot each other.  It was a golden, very pale time.

The bug was there and over the years I've had brief affairs with Nes, Gameboy (original and Advance), Saturn, Playstation, Playstation 2, Dreamcast, Gamecube and even PC.  All dependent on money and my interest.  Each in their own way fascinated and ate my time for the period they were in my life.  At least three of those were instead of having a girlfriend.  Fuckin' hell, I'm a cliche!

My wife and I now own a Playstation 3. Recently I've gone into one of my periods of not playing games.  After finishing up the last ending for 'Fallout: New Vegas' and playing the millionth team death match on 'Modern Warfare 3' I was starting to feel a little fatigued.

It happens.  Although I've felt it more with modern games.  Particularly ones like the recent two 'Fallout' games, where RPG elements are crammed in.  These elements are almost guaranteed to get me playing, but I always feel like they're flawed, the main one being promising to allow the creation of characters your way and making it clear characters need to be tailored in a particular way if you want to complete the game, "Sure you can create a super tech-savvy character, just don't come crying to me if large, angry mutants spend most of the game eating her head off."  These RPG elements also mean you have to play for a minimum amount of time in order to get your character good enough to complete the game.  And, while this is a whole lot of fun for a while it can become tiresome (the 'Fallout' games are good at staving this off, mind you).

I would love to write plot lines for computers games, as it seems, sometimes, though creators want amazing narratives, they (seem to, I have no evidence this happens) kind of leave the actual writing to their stoner mate. There are exceptions: the above-mentioned 'Fallout' games, 'LA Noire' (although it did come undone a bit at the end) and 'Portal 2' to name but three.  It was amazing to me, playing the first 'Resident Evil' with its dodgy dialogue and frustrating controls, that a game could have that structure.  This was after I hadn't played games in five or six years.  And now we're at the stage where they're pulling in David Goyer to write the next 'Black Ops' game.  Pretty cool.

And I want in on that, man.

Although, just like lots of other kids who grew up in the eighties and nineties, I'd love to create my own game.  A bit more of a problematic situation since I have no idea how to code or any of the dozens of other things required to develop a half-decent game.  One can always hope, though.

* So many people have nostalgia hard-ons about those bastard little rubber-keyboard fuckers.  Screw that shit.  The +2 had a real keyboard, it looked slick, man.

** Fuck those retro-gaming snobs who think the mark of a game was how impossible it was.  Fuck 'Manic Miner', it was retarded.  And you can shove text adventures up your arse, too.  I got enough frustration from games I liked playing, never mind trying to work out the right fucking command to type that didn't get me, "Pick up cup is not recognised".  Gaaaah!



Will

Friday 11 May 2012

Will someone shut those crickets up?

It's been a bit of a quiet week really.  The most interesting thing I've done is go and vote.  That's what you call living wild, right?  Right?

Seriously, I don't know.  I was bumped on the head as a kid and I think my wild centre was knocked out of whack.

One of these days I'm going to fulfil the aim I didn't tell anyone about and use this blog to occasionally educate my three readers.  It's an admirable aim.  Certainly far better than navel-gazing or doing the circular let's-talk-about writing thing that'll come up.

This week I'd had it in my head to talk about the sad situation of the FHM sexiest woman of the year list and how dull the number one was.  Then I realised it would only lead to a depressing discussion of how the media is turning entertainment into a mediocrity contest.  And who wants to read that trotted out again?  Not me.  If I wanted to really depress you I'd dig up the sales figures for 'Fifty Shades of Grey' – although I might have dragged some controversy my way from the people who like the badly written fan-fic of badly written fiction*.

Yes, I know the truth, and unusually, I've exposed myself to a tiny bit of it, taking one for whatever team you care to name.  The writing manages to make Dan Brown seem witty and poetic.  And that takes some going, I can tell you.  I can't imagine reading a whole book of such awkward prose.  Take a look here and get something of an insight into its terribleness, or you can go look at Amazon if you don't mind the books popping up as part of your recommendations (can you stand the stigma?).  There were excerpts that I now can't find, bugger.  You get the gist.

And I've gone and digressed.  I went and talked about bad erotica.  Are you happy now?

I'm going back out onto the porch, stare up at the sky and whittle me some words.

* Which actually sounds like the start of something.  Fan-fic replicating like facing mirrors so long that it breaks through into the real world and WE CAN'T FUCKING ESCAPE IT!  AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!  Hold me, I'm scared.


Will