I stand before you today (that’s right, I got up) to put forth a case for the most underutilised bit of gaming technology this side of Sky Active. After 18 months of dedicated service from T-mobile I have swapped out my G1 for a brand spanking new iPhone 3Gs with Orange, and currently face the dilemma of how to meet the monthly charges.

It it well documented that the iPhone 3Gs’s graphical capacity exceeds that of the DS, and since it encompasses the same – nay, better – touchscreen technology as well as a tilt sensor I find it perplexing that the platform is sidelined by gaming media in favour of the latest PSP Syphon Filter port.

Nothing on Ifrit

Recently Squeenix saw fit to release Chaos Rings – an RPG for the iPhone that perfectly encapsulates the platform’s pick-up-and-go ethic. A substantial story that plays out like a crazy anime Battle Royale is frequently interspersed with intuitive and gloriously realised gameplay, harking back to the 3D-characters-on-a-2D-plain-save-for-the-battles Final Fantasies of old. Although the iPhone and any smartphone for the foreseeable future will be a slave to it’s battery life (the 3Gs clocks in at about 2 and a half hours when used intensively for gaming) it’s a welcome substitute or even replacement for the other competitors in the handheld market, at least until Cloud-based gaming steamrolls the whole affair flat.

Another tasty morsel I’ve been spending a lot of time with is Gameloft’s Resi-esque mash-up Zombie Infection. Following the trials and tribulations of a special forces agent throughout a pandemic-swept South America (again), Zombie Infection uses the touchscreen interface to effectively conjour the fluidity of any third person shooter. With 12 sweet-looking levels, clocking in at 200MB and sporting a £2.99 pricetag, although not as meaty as the Syphon Filter port that may or may not exist, it’s a fine example of the iPhone’s limitations, or rather lack of them.

Exotic zombies, without the controversy

The platform plays host to a wealth of gems that – thanks to the badly organised app store – are only made apparent through a chance remark, or video suggestion on Youtube. For 59 pence I found Pandorum – a survival-horror movie tie-in that owes a debt to Dead Space, and makes for a delightful albeit juddery romp as a result.

That’s not forgetting all the classic ports you can enjoy. Plants Vs. Zombies is just as complete an experience in the palm of your hand, and Dragon’s Lair would be but an abstraction to me were it not for that  iTunes spending spree.

So next time your contract runs out, consider an iPhone. Sure, your HTC may have Flash, but does it have Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2?

Currently Playing:
Alpha Protocol – 360

• Ducking and Weaving

So, apparently we’ve been playing videogames wrong our entire lives, meaning we now have to buy more accessories for our consoles and move the coffee table any time we want to play Dance Central (a game I am tempted to try purely to support my beloved Harmonix). I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t largely made my mind up about these technologies, because one of my character flaws is being quite quick to form first impressions. However, I also have the remarkable ability to form second opinions which are polar opposites of my first ones. I started to warm to Move when Namco announced they were going to be releasing Time Crisis:Razing Storm with Move. It was then announced that they’d bundle Time Crisis 4 and Deadstorm Pirates in with it. As long as they don’t get greedy and pull an Activision on the release RRP, Sony may have sold at least 1 Playstation Move controller (and possibly a pointless gun attachment, something I’m willing to forgive Sony for producing, but not Nintendo). Heavy Rain: Move Edition as a software patch on the existing game further compounds my interest, as an improvement on the already fascinating use of a PS3 controller can be at least met with curiosity, and at most met with a warm, loving embrace (an embrace that you can hopefully screw up the button pressing for to waggle your character’s body about like a yoyo like some kind of deranged puppet master).

On the opposing side of the HD Console Controller Revolution, Kinect’s versions of Wii Fit, Wii Sports and Nintendogs doesn’t hold my interest in anywhere near the same way. The technology behind it certain seems like it could have some amazing applications (or at the very least, it might finally persuade my brother to buy an Xbox 360 of his own so he can play fitness). Until the software catalogue perks up though, my £130 is going to go on buying a rageproof 360 controller. If Kinect plans to make the player the controller, and losing at games makes me take it out on the controller, then frustrating Kinect Experiences will probably constitute self harm.

• NintenDO

A somewhat hypocritical bullet point, given the Nintendo-bashing nature of the last paragraph and my previous posts, but Nintendo’s E3 press conference blew me away as much as they could blow me away without announcing a Mischief Makers remake. We almost forgot that Kirby and Pit weren’t just smash brothers characters, but Nintendo wrote out a love letter to their hardcore fanbase with their software lineup (Perhaps a literal love letter if the swathe of attractive ladies with 3DS’s is anything to go by). Finances permitting, I now plan to buy another Wii and NOT sell it when I don’t use it for a little while, making me the biggest hypocrite in history (apart from Lord Prescott).

• if (year = 2010){playstation++;}

Xbox 360 fanboys rejoice at Sony getting off their high horse and starting to charge people a subscription for something (even if online play is still free). I caved in and got a 90 day subscription, and think I’ve already got my money’s worth in 2 content updates. £11.99 taught me 3 things. 1- PSN Minis can be good, 2- I hate Wipeout games, and 3 – Playstation Plus works. Xbox Live has provided better value for money for its gold customers with earlier demo access and deals on its digital catalogue, so why shouldn’t Sony do the same? I may not bother buying anything on PSN full price ever again, now that I know a few months down the line I can get a hefty discount. Now all we need is for the Xbox 360 to provide BBC iPlayer as a free service available to all, and we may as well flip a coin to decide which console to recommend to our friends.

• Older and Wiser

Working a part time job doesn’t afford one the opportunity to buy every £40 release that tickles one’s interest. Waiting anything from a couple of weeks to a couple of years can probably halve or quarter your gaming expenditure. This I realised when I walked into CeX and bought “The Club” on Xbox 360 for £3. Having paid full whack for it at release I was understandably annoyed, but I couldn’t pass up the chance to add it to my collection again (which I now operate a “Currently Playing or love too much to trade” policy on). The GOTY contenders of 2007-2009, and even the retail failures of 2010 can be picked up for half of what a dedicated fan would pay for it on release (begging the question, why buy games at release at all). Dark Void, Mirror’s Edge, Bayonetta, Bioshock 2, Dark Void, Infamous, Alan Wake, Splinter Cell Conviction, Burnout Paradise, Assassin’s Creed 2, Mass Effect 2, Skate 3, Borderlands, Fallout 3, Final Fantasy 13, Gears of War 2. All these games I have seen for at most half of their original £40 starting price, and anyone who looks at this list and says there is nothing good to play this summer should download Invisiblehand for Firefox or Chrome, and get buying. Joe was recently not pleased to hear his beloved Alone in the Dark was being flogged for £1.99 by GAME, and the list of games that make me release a small internal gasp when I see the price after a few months is far longer than what i have listed above.

• Oh, and PC gaming too.

For all Gabe Newell’s proclaimations about how the PS3 will be the platform of choice for Portal 2 players (He’s obviously never tried playing an FPS on a PS3), Steam still continues to be the big platform of choice for Portal 1, along with the vast cohort of other games, many of which are too small to see a boxed release. During the infamous Steam Summer Sale (with banner advertising so charming I just wanted to buy everything), I added 9 games to my collection, depriving me of hard drive space. Reducing games just enough to push would be purchasers into spending money has damaged our wallets, and fattened those of developers who use the service, and nobody seems to be unhappy with the arrangement. The 93% piracy rate for Machinarium (and subsequent Pirate Amnesty) notwithstanding, Steam is the last bastion of hope for the ailing PC platform (Civilisation V and Starcraft 2 also notwithstanding). I hope to continue lining Gabe Newell’s pockets in future.

• Oh, and Blur is better than Split/Second, and people who tell you otherwise are fake’n'gay.

Where now for the shiny disk?

 For four quid I picked up Company of Heroes, a genre I would never usually approach as I lack the cognitive skill to multitask. What? I get a sense of satisfaction watching my troops constructing bases. Look at them, hammering away at the foundations…ooh, on goes the steel sheets and the tarp! It’s the miracle of creation, I tell you.

I’m discovering the joy of having no alternative game to play, as well as the satisfaction of owning physical media – another DVD case on the shelf, another manual explaining the intracacies tucked inside.

I’ve become a bit of a nihalist too when it comes to disks: how long will they operate before the scratches render them useless? With digital distribution services like Steam and the prospect of OnLive, do shiny wheels of plastic have a future or a value? Perhaps not, but there’s never been a better time to exploit this. For £1.50 I can grab a copy of Prey, a throughly underrated shooter that performs feats that would make the latest Call of Duty weep.

I’m no Jesus, and when an internet connection next comes to hand I doubt I’ll restrain myself from slipping into the old ways. But in this moment of clarity – while the morphine of torrents runs dry – it’s humbling to remember that a DVD will never let you down. Unless you scratch it a load.

Anyway, not much has happened on the gaming front. I bought and nearly completed Metroid Prime for my GameCube (I’m just about to get the last Chozo Artefact) until I discovered that I’d missed scanning one creature that I’d mistaken for being the same as another, and that it only appears during one boss fight near the start of the game. That broke my momentum and, while I still intend to finish it, I haven’t played since. I know collecting all the scans isn’t necessary for finishing the game, but having stuff thats easily missable that can’t be found later really annoys me.

I also (finally) finished Half Life 2: Episode 2. I’d started that game twice before but both times coincided with me deciding to reinstall Windows on my PC. When Steam starts hosting save files little problems like that will just go away. I enjoyed it a lot except for the big strider battle at the end. There’s nothing better to highlight how much fun you were having with a game than suddenly putting a long, hard, rage-inducing section at the end. It probably doesn’t help that I was trying to get the achievement for not letting any of the buildings get destroyed. According to the commentry Valve put a lot of lot of effort into the exploding buildings and wanted to make sure the player got the best view of them, so they are never blown up until you’re looking in the right direction. The problem is that when this is combined with the building protecting achievement it just feels like the striders are sitting there waiting for you to turn up so that they can destroy the buildings right in front of you and laugh.

I got a few more trophies and characters in Super Smash Bros. Mêlée, I finished Tomb Raider Aniversary (man was that long and boring! I really enjoyed Legend, but Aniversary was just tedious), I won the MAGS competition with Erk: Adventures in Stone Age Real Estate (the game I did a bit of a development diary for on here) and I started Mass Effect again (not having got very far through it the first time). So yeah, not a lot of gaming for the last third of a year.

What is new though – and here comes the blatent advertising – is my website. I bought the domain ages ago but I finally got around to learning the basics of HTML and CSS and I’ve been doing bits on it for several weeks. Anyway, I now officially declare it open and worth visiting, so if you want to take a look hop over to http://www.onedollarproductions.co.uk. It even has a couple of downloadable games…

Waking up is hell, as I didn’t set an alarm (first lie in I’ve been able to have in a long while), so I feel like standing upright is as difficult as standing on a tightrope. When I come around, I pop the 360 on, and try out the Halo Wars Demo I downloaded last night. It’s alright, quite story heavy, it seems. Speaking of which, I never completed Halo 3. Not even on Easy. I should get back to that some day. I go downstairs for what is now Lunchtime for some noms, and attempt to do something academically productive.

I fail spectacularly when I pop Skate 2 into the disc tray. I go on youtube to look at some glitches I can use to beat some challenges that are horrendously broken and subsequently difficult to complete by conventional means. An hour later, I’ve got a Deck, Truck, Wheel, Shoe AND Clothing sponsors. Awesome. Now what? Own the Spot? Nah, I’d rather go downstairs and watch Shaun of the Dead on ITV2 (which is a better film than I remember it being).

On a Skate 2 related note, I thought to myself  “I should play Kane and Lynch MP sometime, as it’s good” (I found a copy for £6 in HMV while buying Skate 2). I also try and convince myself I should have a few plays on The Club, which I bought again for £10 (in a similar fit of capitalism, but at Currys). I decide against it, but still wonder how my game collection is looking these days.

A detailed inspection of my game collection so reveals that I’ve only truly completed PGR4, Gears 2, Mass Effect, Oblivion and GTAIV (of all the games I currently own). Never mind Farcry 2, Race Driver GRID, Viva Pinata Trouble in Paradise. I still haven’t done the endless setlist on Rock Band 2, either. I wish I had the time and the willpower to buy another copy of Eternal Sonata, and play Encore Mode, but I just don’t. Quite a backlog I’ve got.

Also got my PSP as welll. With Initial D. Which I love. And I have a DS. With Tetris. Which I love. And (unfortunately) I have an iPod with (fortuantely) Peggle on it. I’ve recieved offers of borrowing Prince of Persia and Guitar Hero World Tour on top of ALL these games I have. I’m dangerously close to reinstalling RCT2, and in addition I’ve reacquired The Sims 2 and several expansion packs, which crazy eats time.

Given that I’ve written 500+ words already about how many gaming pies I’ve got my fingers in, why the hell am I feeling the need to buy Burnout Paradise: Ultimate Box? Criterion is practically begging me to play it (they’ve added a restart race function!), and I really want to, but I feel guilty that I haven’t given all these other games the time they deserve. Taking a more critical stance, I now wonder whether or not all of these games do deserve attention. Shooting space fools in Halo 3 is just as good as shooting space fools in Gears 2, which is just as fun as shooting earth fools in Left 4 Dead, which isn’t quite as fun as shooting earth fools in Fallout 3. Why should I feel guilty about not saving earth from the Covenant when I can save Sera from the Locust! Why can’t I go around twatting zombies around the face, without much regard for the wellbeing of anyone other than Bill, Louis or Zoey, without feeling like I should be hunting down the Jackal?

Semi structured rant aside, I’d like to think I create a point of conversation or comment for you guys to ignore. If it wasn’t for the fact that I don’t sell games any more, I’d have cex’d half of these titles as I don’t play them. Why should I give a damn about the immintent release of Resident Evil (4.)5 when I can shoot as many africans as I want in Farcry 2. Why command my troops to ram some Covenant Fools when I can damn well do it myself in a first person perspective on a disc I’ve owned for the best part of a year. I suppose the main question I intend to fire back at you guys is this. I suppose the question I ask (if any) is this: “Where’s the innovation?”. I sure don’t see much of it in my game collection. I guess a second question to ask is “Does this matter?.

Pictured above are games I haven’t completed (apart from Gears 2, which I like having there). I love gaming, but I think I’m hugging it too tight (and it’s dying slowly as I’m hugging its neck really hard, and it can’t breathe).

Sorry it’s been a while; I haven’t been devoted nearly enough time to videogames lately due to lots of other commitments, however I found time to cut a swathe through Dead Space, Mirror’s Edge, Gears of War 2 and most recently Call of Duty: World at War (which I tackled on a PC: Mashing the keyboard in a futile attempt to locate the ‘melee’ key, anyone?).

Although they were all decent, I’m giving my ‘Game of the Year’ to Mirrors Edge because it took me about 5 hours to complete (well, that and I enjoyed nearly every second of it).

I’m saving all the big RPGs for the imminent christmas period, namely Fallout 3, Fable 2 and Farcry 2. Then somewhere along the line there’s Left 4 Dead, Prince of Persia, Resistance 2, LBP-

Okay, I don’t have time for this. Dead Space was ten hours long and that took me going on two weeks to finish. I’ll be surprised if Farcry 2 even gets a look in. I’m considering pawning some games, seriously. I reckon I big up Mirror’s Edge so much because it was mercifully short and punchy.

The first step is admitting: Maybe it’s the workload talking but my enthusiasm for games is waning at the moment. I feel a bit overwhelmed, to be honest. I’ve become a jack of all trades, but a master of none. In an effort to appreciate all that the season has to offer I’ve foregone that dedication that a good game deserves. When I was a young lad I had to make do with ‘Super Mario All Stars’ for months before the next game came along, and I don’t recall complaining. I’ve contributed many hours and expelatives to Gears of War’s singleplayer, and countless more to the multiplayer component. I blitzed through the sequel’s campaign in six hours and got bored of multiplayer instantly.

Don’t worry, this isn’t the end for me; I’d hate this post to be misconstrued as the swan song of a gamer who “grew up”. However, I think a chill pill is in order. I need to either set the less appealing games aside, or resign myself to not reaching a game’s conclusion.

I return to Sheffield next week, and eagerly anticipate forcing David through some of last month’s best industry output, so that I can once again evicerate the inhabitants of the Ishimura, force my way through the bowels of Jacinto on the back of a Brumak, or take that leap of Faith.

After all, Vidya is for life, not just for christmas.

Currently playing:
Flower, Sun, and Rain (DS)
Silent Hill: Homecoming (PC)

Be the games season as it is (I.e. Heaven), there have been a multitude of new games, demos for new games, and trailers for new games coming out. Having sampled many of these through a variety of methods, I intend to briefly sum up why every single one is awesome, and how I need some crazy get rich quick scheme to afford them all (I think Christmas will be my get rich quick scheme for now). The brilliant games in question are (In no particular order):

• Left 4 Dead
• Fallout 3
• Farcry 2
• Gears of War 2
• Mirror’s Edge
  
• Pain: Abusement Park (Is he kidding? Yes, but it’s still awesome anyway)

All of these games have been fighting for my student loan to be spent on them, of which Gears of War 2 and Mirror’s Edge have fully succeeded, but only because of financial constraints. If I could buy every one these I would, as these games are all familiar yet foreign, conventional yet daring, and most importantly, crafted, not made. From what I can tell from the hype, and the admittedly short plays I have had of each of these games, they are games based upon the videogame conventions that have seen their predecessors sell the amount of copies they do, but still manage to push the envelope where I didn’t think it possible before.

So without further ado, my brief summaries of each game (I’ll follow the order I did before just so my brain can cope):

Left 4 Dead (Played one demo playthrough on single player on Xbox 360)
Only word I can use to describe it = Brilliant. Everything I’ve heard and seen up to today at 1:00am has been completely justified by simply one playthrough of a small portion of this game. As a current facebook status will atest to, I class Left 4 Dead as less of a “Survival Horror FPS”, more of an “Abject Terror FPS”. Seeing somebody playing a beta, and getting killed by a swarm of infected makes you go “oh, sweet!”. Playing it for yourself makes you say “oh, fuck!” (Rinse/Repeat). The inevitable second playthough may provide me with many more of those moments given that the AI director attempts to ruin your shit from slightly different angles with every playthrough. I’ll probably pick up the shotgun next time. I’ll probably play as Francis next time. I’ll probably get incapacitated at a different point of the game. But unlike other games, I won’t know when it’s going to come! This, I feel, adds TRUE replayability to an already brilliant game, which can only be a good thing

Fallout 3 (Played 2×1 hour stints of a flatmate’s Xbox 360 version)
Firstly, *Insert “Oblivion with guns” adage here*. There, now that’s out of the way. Now I can go on to tell you about how it doesn’t matter that it’s like Oblivion with guns, because the guns are awesome. Saying something is “with guns” normally amounts to “with guns (and therefore makes the game too easy)*, which I personally did not find to be the case. Walking round Hamilton’s Hideout with the world’s most useless flashlight to alert me to the presence of any radroaches around, the limited ammo I had for my BB gun wasn’t going to help me in the slightest, nor was it going to help me when I fast travelled and generated next to a supermutant with a chaingun. Oblivion itself was a brilliant freeroaming RPG, and building on that by crafting a world so bleak, yet so full of colourful charachters (Anybody who has met the lady in Arefu who greets you at the door with “are you here to deliver the catalogue?” will know this to be true), and whacking guns on the top is only a good thing. Same game mechanics, different world, and for an RPG such as this, the world is the key [/ramble]

*breathe*

Farcry 2 (Played 2×1 hour stints of the same flatmate’s Xbox 360 version (Recurring theme? Thanks Dean!)
I’m going to gloss over this game a little bit, because most of the 2 hours I spent was the tutorial, as well as driving/running between various gun battles in the game world (both of which are executed brilliantly, only interrupting your gameplay to show you your charachter has malaria now and again). The real reason I’ve wanted to buy this, is because of the freedom it gives you. Freedom to get in your crappy car and chase diamonds, or do some missions. The only time it doesn’t give you freedom is when you’ve got to either shoot up a load of dudes, and then blow something up, or NOT shoot up a load of dudes, and then blow something up. Then it ventures into “The Sims” territory, something which I think is a really interesting thing to mix with an FPS (Quite fortunate it combines with such a competent shooter as Farcry 2). The story exists, but given you can play as one of a handful of mercenaries, and after the tutorial, you’re told to go and Kill the Jackal, it seems somehow more open ended than most of your modern day (J)RPGs. I’m not going to get bogged down trying to argue that Farcry 2 is a true FPSRPG, but it’s certainly gotten close. (And I said I was going to gloss over Farcry 2, ha!)

Gears of War 2 (Endless hours of Online Multiplayer, 2/5 of the Single Player Campaign)
Ok, I might have gotten a bit caught up in my grant narrative of ALL these games in my intro spiel. Gears of War is not a game that is familiar yet foreign, it is a game that is just familiar. Nothing foreign here (except for the Americans on Xbox Live). The only thing that makes this game an essential purchase (at least for fans of the first game) is that it does everything Gears of War 1 did, but on steroids. As I’ve been saying to countless people, it’s actually scary seeing Gears of War 2 attempting story, as I’ve seen deeper story in the first 2 chapters of GOW2 than I did in the whole of GOW1. The single player campaign adds a wealth of new charachters (Anya isn’t just “that bitch what gives you commands in your ear” anymore! She’s a real person! A real, reasonably proportioned person! It’s a miracle!), and although Marcus is still the rough, tough macho hero with little time for anything except locust slaughtering, he’s backed up by Dom who now has/had a wife, Dizzy who reluctantly got enlisted so his family would be safe, and Ben Carmine, who knows bugger all, and you have to train him (while conviniently training the player, too). Not to forget the Cole Train, who was probably the most developed charachter in GOW1, who retains his (arguably racist but) street charm for the second outing. Anyway, I need to go to bed soon, so I’ll wrap up this so I can sum up mirror’s edge in 0.5 words. I’ll do this by adding that the already stellar Online Multiplayer mode has only been made better with the addition of a lovely noncompetitive, non-story mode (Horde), inventive reworkings of classic gameplay formulas (Submission and Guardian spring to mind), as well as a party and matchmaking system which has graced every other shooter since Halo 2/3, making Gears of War an essential game for anybody with a decent grasp of the controls and £5 a month to spare on Xbox Live Gold.

Finally,
Mirror’s Edge (Played demo infinity times on 360 AND PS3)
I’ll either write another 1,300 words on this game alone, or I’ll write a lot less, the latter of which sounds appealing, as if I were to get started on the inviting gameworld, interesting story concept and (what I found to be, personally) mindblowing control system, I’d be writing all night, which neither of us want. No other game has actually made me physically squeal at finding out what the “jump” button is. The duck and rotate buttons being all shoulder based, too, while the Right Trigger maintaining it’s conventional “makes stuff die” usage makes the control system easy to access, which is just as well, because as a “platformer”, you could argue that it’s brutally unforgiving (although the reload time is rather fortunately only momentary). I personally got on with this game very well, and most times, I’ve pressed different combinations of buttons to make Faith jump off/jump over/jump onto/slide under/roll upon landing on everything in the world, and everything was just as satisfying as it was the last time I did it. Tomb Raider’s days as a linear platformer, i believe, are numbered. Because not only is Faith reasonably proportioned (therefore not making her a target of radical feminist hatred), she doesn’t always just want to shoot everybody, and won’t die because you can’t see where you’re supposed to be jumping.

That concludes my semi structured ramble through the 5 games I’ve had the pleasure of meeting during the last few weeks. If you thought this was a long post, you just wait until I play through these games in full and I’m either hideously dissapointed or even more riotously impressed. These 1571 words are nothing.

Then there’s all the little finishing touches that take much longer than you think, such as creating an installer (I use Inno Setup – a fantastic program) and writing documentation. I’ve even got one of those annoying licenses that nobody ever reads.

Overall I’m pretty pleased. I’ve spent days and days worth of solid work on the game, and I’m happy with how its turned out. No doubt with time I’ll discover some annoyances, but then that’s just another learning point for next time, right?

Anyway, enough advertising. Go play the game, comment on it, rate it, play the rest of the MAGS offerings for this month (which I’ve yet to do) then vote for your favourite!

Links:
Erk: Adventures in Stone Age Real Estate completed game thread
Erk: Adventures in Stone Age Real Estate games database entry
October 2008 MAGS competition thread

Erk: Adventures in Stone Age Real Estate
Story: |||||||||| 100%
Background Art: |||||||||| 100%
Character Art: |||||||||| 100%
GUI and Item Art: |||||||||| 100%
Scripting: |||||||||| 100%

The parallel that paintball provided for me today was that of the experience of playing against a set of cheating motherf*ckers (No other word can really express it). My Teammates and I (as the group we were with was not large enough to be able to play against ourselves) had the misfortune of playing against a bunch of people who pretended they were new, so they had the marshall’s sympathy in grey areas, which they expolited, and while the Marshall’s weren’t there, they wiped the paint off when they were hit (according to two of my teammates). This netted them a “Victory” over the day.

To relate this to gaming (I’m getting there, honest), the Sunday I spent running around the woods 15 miles out of Birmingham reminded me of the times I’ve spent on the Roundhouse map of the Call of Duty World at War beta. In this map, there is a pile of bricks which apparentlys is made of wafers, and allows people to crawl through them/between them/under them, resulting on people being able to stand underneath the map, shooting at your feet, and killing you, without even giving you a chance to fight back. This netted many teams a “Victory” in many matches.

I’m using speechmarks to underline “Victory” because I’d like to very shortly and very sharply infer that a Victory implies that you played fairly. Dirty play sucks the fun out of a game for the losing half, because they’re losing unfairly.

When paintballing, I got shot in the foot, because the cover that I moved into hapenned to have somebody going Rambo style on the other side, which was fair enough. I assessed the situation, and was incorrect, and got shot. Fair play. I put my hand on my head and walked to the dead zone. But when  a 49 year old enemy man is stood right behind 5 of your last line of defence, taking the piss by just standing there casually waiting for somebody to notice, and when said 5 people turn round to shoot him, it sounds unlikely that he’d be able to kill 4/5 of the players before getting shot himself. I thought that. But apparently he thought it was OK to continue shooting people after he’d had about 5 paintballs from different people burst on him. Then he came off, and with everybody at the Dead zone, he was bragging to his team about it, as if he was some sort of Ninja. Thankfully I had a full facemask to hide what you can imagine was me mouthing “FFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU-”

This post has mainly me bitching about the opposing team on paintball, and has only had a brief mention of any games so far, but the wipers we were playing against at paintball is such a good parallel to people on most of Xbox Live/PSN/Most PC games. If gamers are given the option to play fairly, or use cheap tactics to achieve the same end, despite the actual gain being so small (usually amounting to 10xp per kill/whatever), they are the cheapest bastards in the known Universe. In the safe area, I even heard our opposing paintball team talking about how they played Call of Duty 4 and Gears of War (That’s probably where they get their cheating mentality from).

I’m going to get on my ridiculously hyperbolic soap-box and say “I’m the only person who values fair play any more” (Even though Joe and David play fair as far as I can tell). As far as I’m aware, PSN doesn’t have much/any way of punishing cheaters, seeing as PSN accounts are free, and if one is banned, another can be acquired relatively easily. Steam game servers have anti cheating mechanisms built in, but equate to no more than just kicking people from games, but people get kicked/drop from games all the time anyway for other reasons, so it’s not the harshest of punishments. If Steam do infact take cheating seriously, and use IP Bans/other punishments, then great, I will admit incorrectness without flinching. But it is the case of Xbox Live which annoys me the most. As the main platform I use for online gaming, it’s annoying to see people cheating, and the only thing that I can do against it is go on their gamertag and make them an avoided player. However, they’re going to continue to cheat, without so much as a blemish on their gamertag, except maybe moving down to a 4* rating if they’re a prolific offender, but apart from that, people are free to be cheap, exploit glitches, and still have their many cheap wins tied to them appear as fairly earnt.

I could just be being a whiney little bitch, but I would like somebody to look me in the eye, and seriously try to suggest that playing against cheaters is fun, worthwhile, and not stress inducing.

Anyway, apologies if this post has seemed like an (at most) semi structured rant about how paintball was a bit annoying. Normal service will resume upon the release and purchase of Gears of War 2/Mirror’s Edge. Sorry for any inconvinience caused to your journey (Sorry, spent too much time in Train Stations last year)

Erk the Caveman: Adventures in Stone Age Real Estate
Story: |||||||||| 100%
Background Art: |||||||||. 90%
Character Art: |||||||… 70%
GUI and Item Art: |||||||||| 100%
Scripting: ||||||||.. 80%