Vidogame Noir in the End of Days.

So, this Friday I wandered round to Game and bought a Game. L.A. Noir. I didn't listen very closely to the sneak previews so I thought I was going to be a hard-boiled gumshoe who shoots people in the face. Well, I was wrong. I'm an annoying cop who shoots people in the face. The game is slightly weird- the big cases that I work usually result in suspects being taken alive and Due Process being served. However, as I drive from location to location, I pass random "street crimes" and almost without exception these result in hilarious bloodbaths whether I want them to or not. The Street Crimes don't mesh well with the main plot- In a main mission, I get commended for heroism for facing off against a couple of mooks with .38 pistols. In a street crime mission, I shoot up an entire gang of bank-robbers armed with semi-automatic rifles and tommy guns and no-one ever mentions it!

Speaking of things getting shot up, I'm glad I wear a hat in the game, because apparently it is magnetic and attracts bullets away from my face. Every time there's a gun-battle someone WILL shoot my hat off at least once. Yes, I can get my hat shot multiple times because like Indiana Jones, my character will risk life and limb in pursuit of sartorial elegance. Hat shot off? Well, let's stop shooting back at the three gangsters packing submachine guns and go hunting for my damn fedora, even if it means stepping out from cover and into the hot lead hailstorm. Who would do that? I wouldn't do it even in a videogame, but the game itself thinks I should, so I do so even though I'm hauling at the controller going "NOOO! DAMMIT! WHO WEARS HATS ANNNYYWAAAAAYYY???"

The developers have put a lot of effort into making the facial animation as lifelike as possible so that when I'm questioning people, I can pick up on facial cues to work out how much the lying bastard is lying to me. It works rather well for male characters, but for females, it has the side effect of making them all look like hideous wizened trolls, even when they're supposed to be fifteen years old or movie stars or something.

I could do without so much CSI:1946 poking around dead naked female murder victims who may or may not have been killed by the Black Dahlia killer, or by copycats thereof. It's creepy and will probably make the game the year's best seller in Japan.

When not mauling corpses, the clue-hunting sequences are interesting but have one minor problem- when you are near a clue, the jiggler thing in the controlller jiggles to let you know something interesting is nearby. This is fine except that the initial release of the PS3 (which I am playing the game on, not XBox360 for various reasons) came with controllers that don't have jiggly things in them. I got my PS3 on release and have been too skinflint to get the new jiggletrollers so hunting for clues is rather tricky. In the last case, I only found 11 out of 12 clues and got shouted at by the crazy Liam Neeson-a-like who runs Homicide and spouts pseudo-religious wrath-of-god nonsense in lieu of being an interesting, well-developed character.

Speaking of crazy pseudo-religious types, I note with some amusement but not much surprise that as far as I can tell, the May 21st Rapture did not occur and the world has not yet ended. Hardly surprising; ignoring the bit of the bibble that says something along the lines of none can know the hour of his coming because the lord cares not for your dental appointment, if I were an an omnipotent deity, I would have much more interesting things to do than choose 200,000 of the planet's most insufferable wossnames to come live with me at Chez God so they can all stand around being smug at the suffering of all the billions who didn't make the cut. Indeed, assuming that a God would want to choose 200,000 actually decent people, there's going to be a lot of empty heavenly housing-stock. A bit like post-crunch Ireland, but without so much of an impact on the Eurozone and the Queen hasn't made a visit. Yet.

Everything Tweets

Recently, I had to replace my vintage 2006-era iPod as the battery life was down to about three seconds. Someone who owned a soldering iron (like what I do) would probably have replaced the battery, but I used the excuse to move to a new iPod touch.

After buying a new shiny-shiny, what's the first thing you do? Well, the first thing you do is coat it in silicone rubber and add a screen protector that makes any improvements in display technologies a moot point because now there's a plastic film glued to your fancy retina display, but I digress.

Having bought the thing to play tunes, I find that it does rather more; such as let you tweet. For that matter, a Kindle will let you tweet too, as will an Xbox360 and many other random gadgets. Next up is underwear that will twitter to the world about what a horrible person you are if you try to wear them for longer than a day.

If anyone actually develops that as a thing, I will punch them. I'm all for improved personal hygiene (I work in a non-air-conditioned office with an average temperature of 26 degrees Celsius; this sort of thing matters!) but there is such a thing as too much information.

Everything's Vibrations!

I've been reading "classic science fiction" from the olden days when science fiction came in magazines named things like "BOGGLING STORIES!" or "TALES OF WONDERMENT".

Apparently, back in the 1930's any hack with a tripewriter could make a living churning out some right tosh, so long as there were enough thermionic valves, relays, rockets and incredibly dense young women in highly impractical space-suits.

Apparently-apparently, by the space-year 2147 the state-of-the-art in air travel will be giant aeroplanes that seat three thousand people, travel at over THREE HUNDRED miles every hour and use really really big propellers because apparently we will have forgotten about jets for some reason. Also, they will be used to transport large sums of cash (we must have forgotten about electronic funds transfers too), perhaps as much as half a million dollars at a time!

Sky Pirates will use maaagical knock-out gas that not only seeps through air-tight metal aeroplane hulls, but cures cancer as a side effect (no one finds this particularly impressive because they're idiots), then dock their maaagical invisible aeroplanes to the airliners (magnetically, of course, because magnets are magi-er, science!) and sneak aboard before nicking the cash and leaving stock certificates in the Sky Pirate corporation as payment because they're not thieves or anything.

The heroes who set off to defeat the sky pirate are sickeningly tall (the short one of the pair is "only a couple of inches over six feet tall"), sickeningly handsome, sickeningly wealthy, sickeningly clever and basically generally sickening.

They're so very clever that it takes them about an afternoon to invent a maaagical energy source that works off "the heat vibration of molecules" and a similar magical form of propulsion that also works off "directed molecular action".

They're so clever, they realise that the villain's invisibility screen is one of their own inventions that they had written up for "preposterous inventions quarterly" and had completely forgotten about until juuuuuust now, because heaven forbid that anyone else in the world ever invent anything ever!

Anyway, they defeat the villain and stop him curing random airline passenger's cancers. They send him to a loony bin because obviously he's an amazing genius just like them, only a kleptomaniac or something, and by the next story he's all sane and ready to help them fly to Venus in their molecular-action spaceship where they meet big-breasted blue women with extra thumbs and fight a mile-wide aeroplane powered by A HUNDRED PROPELLERS!!!

I can feel myself getting stupider reading these books. Any day now, I'll try to power my phone with atoms, or vibrate my molecules into invisibility or something.

Back then everything was explained by vibrations... Sorry, capital-v Vibrations! Anti-gravity machine? Etheric vibrations. Perpetual motion device? Molecular vibrations. Disintegration beam? More molecular vibrations, possibly transmitted by etheric vibrations. Spooks, spectres and poltergeists? Psychic Vibrations. Crazy television that lets you see things at a distance despite there not being a camera there? Etheric vibrations, part 2: electric boogaloo. Invisibility? Intangibility? Molecular vibrations *again*. Time travel? Vibrations in the FOURTH DIMENSION!!!

Nowadays, no-one really cares about vibrations as an explanation for stuff. The only things I can think of that still use it are Superstrings (all subatomic particles are different kinds of very small vibrating science-string, maybe), Crystal Healing (if they don't go the Chakra or It's-all-Quantum flim-flam routes), the Beach Boys and Ann Summers.

I'm ba-aaaack!

Hello again!

After a long absence, I've been reminded that I have a blog. In my defence, I've been very busy what with work and getting hit in the head and stuff. Also, my laptop was pinched (along with my XBox360, my phone and my dead mother's jewelery). I had the patio door open late one night to let the dogs out and two sods with a machete and a gun walked in, beat me up and took my stuff. Boo.

Here is a pic of me afterwards. Despite being taken on a cheapo netbook webcam (because someone had nicked my phone with a proper camera) and despite me being covered in dried blood, it is still the best recent picture I have of me. I don't photograph well (because I am ugly)

Working man's blues

Well, I've been back at work for two whole days and things aren't any easier yet. The bank account is bare and I won't get paid until the middle of next month. The code I'm working on is complex and there's noone there who understands it in detail as it was all written by a contractor who is long gone and nobody else there really understands Symbian code. I know I'll be able to get on top of it, but I'm not sure how long it'll take to truly master things and I want to try to show some progress as soon as possible, understandably. I fixed my first bug today, though! Shame it was in something that nobody else had noticed was broken, but it's still a fix!

Nice weather we've been having, too. A particularly ghastly billboard poster of Tom Cruise blew away in the amazingly stong winds yesterday, which is exactly the sort of weather-related mishap I can get behind.

Dietary Requirements

Today I went shopping for shirts. Thanks to a discretionary payment of thirty quid from the nice people at my Flexible New Deal provider, I am now the proud owner of a pair of office-style shirts; one in light blue and one in eye-watering maroon for added sassiness.

I shall, however, be going on a diet. Sitting around on my backside for twenty months hasn't helped my shapely physique any, so I'm going to make a proper effort to eat better and get some exercise done. There, I've told the Internet so now I have to live up to my words or I'll be letting the Internet down and Tim Berners-Lee will send round his goons to beat me up.

My trouble is that I wouldn't know a balanced diet if it fell on me. Wah wah not enough time to cook properly wah and so forth, but it's all excuses. What isn't an excuse is the cost of food on a limited budget, what with supermarket prices for decent (i.e. fresh food that isn't ninety-five percent filler products) grub having gone up something like fifty percent. Fortunately that shouldn't be an issue with the whole job thing, so in the future I'll be able to afford named meat and perhaps even vegetables of some description, as opposed to dehydrated hydrogenised vegetable pieces with enhanced colour, and now with actual flavour! ("vegetable" is a registered trademark of the Monsanto corporation, all rights reserved)

Superstitious Dread

Now I have a job offer, I'm in mortal fear of waking up and finding it was aaaaallll a dreeeaaam.  Despite my non-superstitious general cast of mind, I find myself unconsciously trying to Karmically balance myself out so that the pendulum of fate doesn't swing back into "bad luck" with a vengeance.

How do I do that? By watching Michael McKintyre's Comedy Roadshow. By forcing the terrible misfortune of Michael McKintyre on myself, I ought to have something really nice happen to me as recompense.


I bloody 'ate Michael McKintyre. How he has a TV show, I do not know.