Return to Rapture, via Liberty City

If there's one upside to being unemployed, I've been able to revisit some of the games that I never actually finished back when I was working. Since I can't afford to waste money on Bioshock 2, I have been playing Bioshock instead.

I don't think I "get" Bioshock. I spend too much time looking at the Art Deco furnishings and wondering why they'd be present on a city under the sea apparently built after the second world war. There should be more horrible nylon drapes in burnt orange and various shades of mucus. In a game where I use magical genetic engineering to shoot wasps at people, I stand around in corridors looking at leaks and thinking "At this depth, a pencil-sized leak would fill at around a ton of water per second, filling this infeasibly vast corridor inside of eh, a minute and a half."

Frankly, the sole draw of the game is the ability to hit objectivists upside th' haid with a big adjustable wrench and light them on fire without the concomitant aggro from the police who insist on enforcing the law regardless of the horrible philosophy of the victim. Even then, the combat's rather poor, especially as the game progresses and you need to empty hundreds of rounds into the victim in order to kill them (presumably by crushing them under the sheer weight of bullets), all the while giving it the simultaneous "Lightning bolt! Lightning bolt! Lightning bolt!" to stop them from setting you on fire.

Personally, I would be happier with some sort of beat-em-up; Philosophers of the 20th century vs Capcom, for example. Chomsky versus Ryu, who will win? Better still, Ayn Rand versus Simone De Beauvoir catfight!

I've also restarted GTA 4, which I gave up on due to work pressures and the insistent ringing of my in-game mobile phone as my idiot cousin asked me to take him to a strip club every five minutes. Since then, I've discovered that the in-game phone has a "silent" mode (why yes, I did just spend the past ten years developing mobile phone software, why do you ask?) and have decided to give it another bash.

There's no denying that GTA 4 is a masterpiece of videogaming.  It presents a rich, realistic world for the user to play in, but to me it lacks some of the charm of earlier GTAs, especially San Andreas, along with a loss of fun. I miss being able to tool around in a jetpack or eating so much I become the fattest gangster on the block.  GTA 4 has a depressing sense of gritty realism and even the massively improved physics engine robs you of the sheer joy of handbraking it around every single corner at a hundred miles per hour. Saint's Row 2 for all its bugginess and immaturity was more fun.  

Especially if you picked the English accent for your gangster and made 'em look like a fat Vinnie Jones.

Note to potential employers: This week, I have also been learning about SOAP and REST with regards to web services and am thinking of doing something RESTful to Twitter, but all work and no play blah blah blah.

Yes, I'm acutely aware that at the moment I'm technically in a state of no work, but that's the problem with Aphorisms; they're only approximately correct.

Red Faction: Guerrilla

I've been playing a bit of Red Faction: Guerrilla and while I think it's fun, there's some missed opportunities in there too.

The one that really bothers me is the AI of civilians. It's too good for what it is.

That's a bit of an odd statement, but to see what I mean, you have to go out of your way to watch the little folks go about their daily routine; people browse the (nearly empty) shelves of (nearly empty) shops, they lounge around, propping up the bar in pubs, they carry space two-by-fours around on their shoulders when you smash up their houses with deadly sledgehammer action. It all works towards a sense that they've things to do outside of being collateral damage for your high-explosive exploits.

The trouble is you have no reason to see any of it. Since you spend most of your time tearing around the wilderness in excitingly impractical space-taxis and Mars-buses, or running around military bases, you rarely see the effort the developers have put into the idle behavior of civilians. You've no need to explore the insides of buildings aside from picking up hidden Quantum Bomb caches that aren't really worth the effort. Most of the work put into civilian AI, especially indoors, seems to have been... not wasted, as that implies they shouldn't have bothered with it, but under-utilised, as the basic flow of the game almost never puts you in the thick of it.

That aside, I like the game. If only the sound guys could have got a bit further away from petrol engine sounds when doing the effects for some of the cars. I hope that if we ever do get to the point of terraforming alien worlds, we can do a little bit better than internal combustion to run our rides.

Anyways, 8/10, good effort.