The following is a rambling log of thoughts, experiences and opinions that might, if you squint a bit, loosely be termed a review.

Bioshock should need little introduction, so I shall limit the formalities to saying that it is at heart an FPS with a limited weapon / Jedi-like ability upgrade system that allows for some degree of customisation to your player as the game progresses. The setting itself grabbed the most headlines, however, with a once prosperous undersea city run as the logical extension of relentless, government interference free capitalism that has seen it go from a position of strength to almost falling apart. You must stumble around trying to piece together what’s happened and.. well, we’ll take that as it comes, shall we?

Day 1

I believe I’d played Bioshock for a grand total of two hours, after having it sit on a shelf for a year or so. THe mechanics of the game seemed initially repellant to me, and I wasn’t hurting for other games to play. Still, time to take another look at it.

I seem to remember the biggest brouhaha being made over the graphics in Bioshock. If we’re going to be all technical about it, the graphics aren’t actually all that brilliant, even for the time, at least on the basis of the first couple of levels. The texturing is somewhere between adequate and dull, and the character models aren’t all that complex or interesting.

What people meant was that the style of the graphics was worth making a brouhaha about, which also ties into the audio design, the scattered diaries of people going progressively more insane and the always compelling trick of dumping you somewhere dilapidated that was once idyllic, without knowing why it’s fallen so far and so hard.

I’m actually enjoying this a lot more than on my first dalliance, perhaps because I’m more open to taking in the ambience of the piece rather than just thinking about the game mechanics, which at the moment are little advanced over any of the ten-a-penny FPS’s littering the 360 landscape.

Lets see if this view holds up to a more extended play.

Day 2

We take a relaxing run through the fisheries.

While I’m trying to forget that I already know the twist in this little narrative’s tale, that aside I’m enjoying the gradual uncovering of the the conflict between Rapture creator Andrew Ryan and his rival, the underground crime boss cum hero of the people Frank Fontaine, with Ryan’s increasing obsession and paranoia seeming to be the catalyst behind the collapse.

Doesn’t really explain why there would be so many diaries scattered around the place so randomly, though. Perhaps a naughty dog did it.

It occurs to me that the decision whether to harvest or rescue the Little Sisters in this game is a pretty perfect distillation of all of the thus far fairly feeble attempts to introduce morality into a video game narrative. BioWare are the prime proponents of this, and while games like Jade Empire and Mass Effect are some of my favourites, their moral choices were so needlessly poles apart that they may as well have all been replaced with Bioshock’s version – do I murder a small child for personal gain, or not?

Day 3

So, after today’s efforts, I think I’m round about halfway through the game. Some of the cracks are starting to appear. I’m being sent on a worrying amount of fetch quests to progress. Kill seven members of a cult for the McGuffin they’re carrying? Find seven bottles of distilled water? What is this, a MMORPG?

I suppose it’s really no different from Doom’s whole “find the red key to get the yellow key to get the blue key to get to the exit” schtick, but that wasn’t attempting to build a cohesive framework around its shooty shooty bang bangs.

Regardless, I have a soft spot for the mentalisms of Sander Cohen in Fort Frolic, even if the whole level basically reduces to electrobolting Spider Splicers and clubbing them with a wrench.

Well, pretty much all of the game so far has reduced to that, to be honest. I think I’ve not even used half of the other weapons so far. Why alter a winning strategy?

Oh, and to satisfy my ob-com tendencies, I decided to get that “Luck Winner” ‘Achievement’ on the slot machines, which consists of standing in front of a machine and hitting ‘A’. For about half an hour.

Thrilling! And nothing garners a real sense of achievement like a totally random event that has no base in skill whatsoever! Go, design team!

Day 4

While it’s not become what I’d call a chore to finish, I’m just heading into the last level with pretty much all of the lustre taken from the piece. The past few levels have been a succession of irritating tricks that I suppose were supposed to make me, or my character, or whatever fusion of the two, feel powerless. Like a puppet, perhaps, given the revelations of the final third that I shall gloss over in the admittedly massively unlikely event that anyone who wants to play this game hasn’t done so by now.

Regardless, there’s really very few more annoying tricks to be played in a game like this than arbitrarily losing control of my character to allow something narratively convenient to occur without me tapping away on the ‘Bludgeon with wrench’ button to ruin the precious structure of the game, and that’s exactly what happens here. This has the exact opposite effect of what was intended. This does not draw me into a narrative. It attaches a high explosive to the fourth wall, blows that sunuvabitch up and reminds you that you are wasting a perfectly sunny evening, with the World Cup on as well, swinging a virtual wrench into the approximately eleventy millionth ‘mad doctor’ enemy character model.

And as if that’s not irritating enough, it follows up this with an equally arbitrary ‘lose all of your powers for a bit’ section, as your control of your plasmid upgrades goes haywire. This might be less of a problem if the weapons in the game weren’t so disappointingly dull. Even with what would seem to be a varied selections of different ammo types for each weapon, essentially giving each weapon a secondary and tertiary fire mode, this just gives minor bonuses against certain types of foe. It’s just the same old shotgun, pistol, grenade launcher, etc that I seem to have been using since the dawn of FPS’s.

The only difference here being that they might as well not exist, because even against what I assume to be the toughest enemies in the game you might as well just batter them quickly into submission with a wrench that freezes things, somehow.

Excitingly, the next level looks like it will feature an escort quest! If it also includes a power-up that reverses your controls, we’ll have a complete set of every shitty trick ever pulled in a video game!

Day 5

Well, it’s all over bar the finger-pointing. The last level falls mach in line with the rest of the game, albeit in a silly helmet, and while I’ll give the last boss some credit for being different it certainly wasn’t particularly challenging. It also continues the last few level’s theme of playing with or removing elements of the game mechanics present throughout the rest of the game, in this case the Vita-chamber respan points.

This, you’d think, might give the encounter a bit of an edge, but assuming you’ve bought enough Medikits, shotgun and grenade ammo from the suspiciously closely grouped vending machines before the lift to the encounter there’s really no problem with the last fight. And you’re certainly not going to be short on any of those items in the first instance, what with all that wrench-based action going on.

So, it’s been mildly diverting for a few days, and I certainly didn’t want to throw the game out of the window at any point, so I suppose I got my money’s worth from the game, which if I recall correctly was about ten quid. I shall leave the game to percolate through my braintank for a few days before wrapping this up.

Finger Pointing

More than any other game I’ve played, Bioshock asks for a degree of collusion with the game designers’ ideas on how it should be played, and the enjoyability of the game is directly proportional to the degree to which you go along with it. I hadn’t bothered to turn off the ‘tutorial’ hints that pop up occasionally, and so quite often a message would pop up saying that I was low on health packs, but wealthy, so I should go buy some at a vending machine. But why, the cynical mind would enquire, should I bother when the penalty for running out of health is to respawn at the last respawn-o-vitachamber I passed, with the same weapons loadout and indeed every other attribute as when I died? Well, there’s the small matter of running back to the scene of the action, but none of the levels are so large as to present any real problems on that level, and with the amount of backtracking required in some of them may also present a handy shortcut.

In this game you have, to any reasonable standard, immortality by default, without a cheat code. Unless you’re really looking to max out the achievement points from the game, there’s no incentive at all to play the game ‘properly’. Why sneak up on splicer and snipe them with the crossbow, why bother tediously photographing and researching splicers, why bother finding all of the weapon upgrade stations, when the route one approach of running up to an enemy and hitting it with a wrench remains as resoundingly effective at the end of the game as it does at the start?

For the most part, the answer to most of these questions is that it’s more fun that way, and if you’re playing the game to have fun rather than simply complete it, you should perhaps play it that way. Unfortunately, at least as far as I’m concerned, it’s not much more fun to play it the way it’s been designed to be played, and it involves an awful lot of faffing around, so I choose to remain in Wrenchville, Respawn County.

The back of the box promises a game experience like no other, which is a prime example of marketing hyperbole, given that this is a game experience very much like a dumbed down subset of System Shock 2 with a 1940′s graphical edge. Narratively it uses exactly the same tricks, but Bioshock’s simplified approach to the genetic enhancements common to both games removes a lot of the choices that made SS2 more compelling. This wouldn’t be a problem if the combat mechanics otherwise felt smooth and fluid, with interesting weapons, but Bioshock feels dated on this score, more like a contemporary of Timesplitters 2 than Modern Warfare.

Right then, the storyline. There’s a school of thought that narrative has no place in a predominantly interactive medium such as gaming. I see the point, especially for games that have never and should never be battered into that structure. No-one is hurting for lack of a story arc in the Need for Speed series. Most developers’ idea of developing a story is to grind everything to a halt, show a pre-rendered movie then continue blasting away, which is at best a mere distraction.

Valve do this well in the Half-Life series, by subsuming the narrative throughout the game in a way that if all you want to do is run and gun, you don’t even have to pick up on it. Well, for the most part, as there’s the odd unskippable cut scene moment, but a lot of the game’s flavour comes from scrawls on message boards and overheard NPC conversations and the like. Crucially, the most interesting events in the game were happening around you.

In Bioshock, like Dead Space and the System Shock games, the most interesting things in their scenarios long before you first hit the ‘start game’ option. Not necessarily a problem, but at times it feels as though everything down to the level design has been construed more with the intent of supplying a visualisation of the previous societal collapse than it does with providing a enjoyable playing experience. I would dearly love for this game to have spent as much attention on its gameplay as its setting, as then this would be a truly remarkable experience.

As it stands, it’s an interesting, visually markedly different setting attached to a pretty dull, challenge-free, often repetitive game with limited variations in enemy design and weaponry. Narratively and visually it’s interesting, but mechanically it’s at best workmanlike and that’s assuming you play the game rather than abuse the inherently flawed game design choices.

10/10? Game of the Year candidate? Not a bit of it.

In retrospect, this was a silly idea.

Anyway this particular tale of woe is chronicled below to help any fellow lost souls who tread this path in future.

Backing up your iPhone is always a good idea. Unless of course you have installed AppSniper, a useful price monitoring tool for the iPhone that just plain refuses to play nice with iTunes. For the longest time, it caused all syncs to take an inordinate amount of time, but this was eventually fixed. Seemingly the same does not hold true for the backup procedure, which with AppSniper installed was taking hours. With it removed, minutes. While still a useful app to have, I think it has now proven itself too awkward to fit in with any sensible workflow. Props to RevStu‘s WoSblog for the reminder on that one.

Given that the inordinately useful Infiniboard, as seen on this YouTube link does not yet work under iOS4, and that the new folders are a pretty half baked concept for a replacement, it seemed like a decent idea to remove all but the very core apps from my iPhone until this rectifies itself. On the plus side, this removal of the hundred plus games on the damn thing, weighing in at about 12GB, should reduce the time taken to restore the device.

Why half baked? Well, often I want to play a game. But I’ve no idea which game. With everything in one big flickable page it was easy to zip through until something caught my eye. With things stuffed away in folders, discoverability dives to zero. Perhaps the mini-icons inside the folders are more legible on the IPhone4′s Super Turbo Retinal Hyper Fighting Edition display, but it’s next to indecipherable on a 3GS.

Anyway, with this app bloodbath complete and re-backed up, the games could begin. As is the way of all (Mac based, at least) jailbreaking, we get a hold of the official ipsw firmware package, point PwnageTool at it and let it spit out a customised ipsw archive to play with. I’m assuming that you’ve read the warnings regarding any previous unwanted baseband updates, especially if you’ve had a recent official firmware on there lately.

Now to simply stick the iPhone in restore mode by turning it off, holding (and keep holding) down the home button and powering back on until the restore prompt appears. Plug into the computer, and when iTunes prompts you to restore, hold down the option key, click the restore button and point it at your newly made custom firmware.

While this has worked perfectly well on all previous attempts a jailbreak-o-upgrades, this time it was a bit flaky. First off iTunes spat out one of its ever-so-helpful ‘unknown error’ dialogues, so thinking this might be tied to an increasingly dodgy USB interface on the MacBook I unplugged all devices from USB bar the phone, rebooted and tried again. This seemed to do the trick, until reaching the state of near-completion as seen in the screenshot above.

Beyond this point it simply would not move, regardless of how many rubber chickens I waved near it in attempts to appease whatever malevolent gods bestowed iTunes on us in the first instance.

Not to panic. Well, I did panic, but thanks to the Googles I realise I am not the only person to have this issue. Massive, massive thanks to a ‘nicksherb’ on this MacRumors forum thread, as his advice was the exact thing to get over this sticky wicket. For Mac users, we delete the folders “/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/DeviceLink.framework” and “/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/MobileDevice.framework”, reboot and reinstall iTunes 9.

Repeating the restore procedure this tine went without a hitch. Superb.

Of course, it’s deleted all of my music again, so it’s going to take the rest of the day to re-encode and copy them over again. I’ll let that slide as the restore is a factory reset style  solution, and the price paid for the flexibility of jailbreaking. Still, it’s not doing my carbon footprint or electricity bill any good.

iTunes. iDiotic.

Sometimes I hate iTunes.

Like today, for instance. I have all my music stored losslessly on an external, network drive, so that any device in the flat can access it, and I can get at it from anywhere with an internet connection. It’s quite slick.

But being a network, occasionally it can flake out a bit, so iTunes might temporarily be unable to find the drive, or something like that. It happens. No big deal.

Unless you attempt to sync your iPhone/iPod/iThing while it’s having one of these snafus, at which point it will arbitrarily wipe everything from the phone because it can’t find its networked twin. So sure is the program that this digital apocalypse is what I’d wanted that it doesn’t even trouble you with the option of, say, not deleting the entire device.

Which anti-genius came up with this idiocy as a default behaviour? Actually, it is best that I don’t know, for then I would have to kill them.

Do excuse me. I need to go and watch a progress bar progress very slowly as it re-encodes and copies three and a half thousand songs.

Thanks, Apple! You bunch of fudds!

There are some inherent challenges in limiting yourself to a mere 140 characters when trying to make a point, which some believe to be part of the fun. It can, however, come back and bite you on the ass.

I followed noted photographer and broadcaster Scott Bourne on the ol’ Twitters, at least until checking out his behaviour after posting this little bon mot:

“I’m consulting with a wedding #photog studio selling against a studio doing $500 weddings. Our new ad – “We fix $500 wedding photography.”"

Fine. Except he was taken to task by a number of people over the Twitter wires for playing a little fast and loose with the details. The underlying assumption to all of this is that the more money paid for a service or product, the better it is. Life, of course, is rarely that simple.

Value is a product of both cost and quality, and there’s no way to know whether or not the five hundred buck shots are significantly better than the (one would assume, otherwise we wouldn’t need the responsive ad campaign) significantly more expensive wedding photography he’s hawking. There’s no way of evaluating this from the frame of a 140 character tweet, so it comes across as reductionist and unpleasantly snobbish.

If you need any more convincing that cost != value, the Oppo/Lexicon Blu Ray fiasco described at Audioholics makes an enlightening case study.

Others found more to question. Folks starting wedding photography businesses, offering comparatively low rates to get a portfolio together, hoping to gain a foothold in a competitive market read it as a direct insult to their professionalism, and it’s easy to see their point of view. Many took him to task or sought clarifications.

Scott Bourne’s response? He called them trolls and blocked them.

I don’t doubt he’s a busy man and just wants to avoid multiple 140 character slagging matches. However, a better way to do this would have been to not throw the stones in the first place, as between that and refusing to answer any criticism at all he comes across as a massive ball of wrongheaded egotism. Which isn’t much of a brand to build for yourself.

I’m not, contrary to what you might expect having gone to the bother of writing about it, really all that bothered by his statements and it wasn’t the primary reason I hit the big Unfollow button. It was, however, the reason I reviewed his recent contributions and found them largely to be plugging his own website articles which I’ll read anyway, so essentially he’s an inefficient manually powered duplicate of his RSS feed. Hence he is consigned to Twitter digiblivion.

I’ll still listen to the podcasts, though. I’m not mental.

After a terrifyingly long, 70+ hour struggle with Oblivion: The Elder Scrolls IV on the Xbox 360, I find myself crowned Champion of Tolkiensville, after completing the main questline and reaching the conclusions of the Mages Guild, Thieves Guild, Fighters Guild and Dark Brotherhood storylines.

I have, in short, torn the arse out of it.

Despite this, the game does not show up as “complete” on the 360 dashboard, even though all off the 1000 possible Meaninglessnumberpoints have been extracted from it. Why?

Because, gentle reader, an expansion pack that I do not own exists, adding an extra 250 completely unobtainable gamerpoints to the tally.

This is nothing less than a tax on the obsessive-compulsive, especially given that the expansion pack download costs considerably more than the main game itself, these days.

Of course, I’m going to get a hold of it anyway because I enjoyed the game. It just the principle of the thing that annoys me.

The petty, petty principle.

Halo 3
Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas
Rockstar’s Table Tennis
Shadowrun
Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory
Hour of Victory
LEGO Indiana Jones
Kung Fu Panda
Vampire Rain
Oblivion
Lost Odyssey
Skate
Ninja Gaiden II
Beautiful Katamari
Amped 3
Bioshock
LOTR: Battle for Middle Earth II
Blue Dragon
Condemned 2
The Club
Dead or Alive 4
Eternal Sonata
FIFA 07
Flatout: Ultimate Carnage
FEAR Files
Grand Theft Auto 4
Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter
Project Sylpheed
Phantasy Star Universe
Project Gotham Racing 4
Pro Evolution Soccer 6
SEGA Rally
Saint’s Row
Stranglehold
Test Drive Unlimited
Viva Pinyata
Forza Motorsport 2

Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
Boom Blox
Nights
Super Mario Galaxy
Wii Play
Trauma Center: Second Opinion
Metroid Prime 3: Corruption
Heatseeker

Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance
Beyond Good and Evil
Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter
Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX 2
Devil May Cry
Escape From Monkey Island
Final Fantasy x
Genji
The Getaway
God of War
Gran Turismo 3
Herdy Gerdy
Ico
Kessen II
Killer 7
Kingdom Hearts
Manhunt
The Mark of the Kri
Maximo
Maximo: Army of Zin
Medal of Honor: Rising Sun
Metal Arms: Glitch in the System
Metal Gear Solid 2
Metal Gear Solid 3
Mr Moskeeto
Nightshade
Onimusha
Onimusha 2
Shadow of Memories
Silent Hill 2
Silent Hill 3
Silent Hill 4
The Suffering
Syberia
Tenchu: Wrath of Heaven
Tony Hawk’s Underground 2
Underworld: The Eternal War
WRC Extreme 2
Zone of the Enders

Zero Divide
Wu-Tang: Taste the Pain
Wing Commander III
Wing Commander IV
Final Fantasy IX
Final Fantasy VII
Final Fantasy VI
Final Fantasy V
Final Fantasy IV
Fear Effect

One of the nicer things about it is the presence of a small slider on the top of the phone which turns the ringer on and off, which is a far more civilised way of putting your phone on silent than rooting around in menus. The silent mode on phones out to be used more often by people, especially if your ringtone is La Cucaracha.

Another demand I make of my phones is to wake me up in the morning, as I’m too cheap to buy an alarm clock. The Treo manages this adequately, with a rousing midi rendition of Reveille, although why it can only be set in five minute increments rather than any arbitrary time baffles me.

Except, that is, if you’ve inadvertently left the slider on silent, in which case you are left politely unstirred by a rousing rendition of absolute silence.

I’m not saying that this is the single most retarded design choice in the world, just that it’s in the top five or so.

This review has been ‘repurposed’ from my other site, theOneliner.com

Something of an odd choice for Japanese game design deities Treasure, this. Departing from their recent run of Triple A shooters to do a sequel to the top notch Sega Saturn Guardian Heroes, an RPG tinted side scrolling beat ‘em up characterised by huge, er, characters, fairly spectacular spellcasting effects and the kind of graphical zooming trickery that set jaws dropping amongst those who hadn’t yet subscribed to the prevailing wind of 3D killing off 2D gaming. Above all, it was a tremendous amount of fun as we’ve come to expect from that particular codehouse. Jaws dropped again when the news came that Nintendo’s humble pocket system would play host to this welcome yet unanticipated sequel. Surely it could never do the original justice?

Sadly, no, it can’t. But it has a damn good go at it, and in the process pushes the hardware beyond the limits anyone had thought possible. The game starts with your death, which would seem unfortunate but allows the legendary Undead Hero to inhabit your body, the design of which owes more to Gunstar Heroes than Guardian Heroes. This big dead fella you may remember as your large sword swingin’ golden armoured CPU controlled helper in Guardian Heroes, and while the newest incarnation relies more on fisticuffs than swordplay you’re by no means defenceless.

In terms of moves available to you it’s hardly Street Fighter Alpha 3 but it’s certainly streets ahead of Final Fight One, probably it’s closest contemporary on the handheld. Standard ground punches chain into combos so it’s easy to start baddie bashing, although you’ll need to start mixing up attacks to survive the onslaught. Overhead attacks send enemies flying around the screen and a ground pounding attack that would seem more suited to the Hulk knocks down those around you. Aerial attacks prove effective also, and if that’s not enough you could always start laying the smackdown with one of your spell types, which differ slightly depending on your character choice. Homing attacks and lasers? What is this, R-Type?

All of which would probably get you off the first level but not much further unless you learn how to block and counter. The shoulder button when held creating a barrier from most attacks. A swift tap just as a blow is about to land not only stops any damage but knocks your attacker into a stun, or if it’s a projectile it’s returned to sender with extreme prejudice. This is so vital towards the game’s later stages it’s the only way to play it, which does make a short game harder (a good thing) it limits the amount of fun you can have with it (a bad thing). Defeating your attackers earns you crystals, which can be used to level up your characters attack, defence or magic stats as you see fit.

Oh yeah, the plot. There’s not as much pontificating as I remember clicking through on Guardian Heroes, but the Advance incarnation still has more development than you’d expect or probably want from the genre. A thousand years have passed since the last game, and the Heavens have decided it’s time to have another final battle, with mankind on the extermination agenda. You take on a huge but not too varied army of miscreants the heavens have thrown your way headed by Zur who inexplicably looks like a goofish Shakespearean extra but who’s also raised Guardian Heroes‘ fiendish magician Kanon from the dead. You’ll have to deal with the sword swinging footsoldiers, giant ogres, huge robots and mirrors. Don’t ask. In a canny reference to the original / recycling of assets you’ll have to have versions of the heroes of the first game, now unwilling soldiers of the Heavens, who are trying to raise the ultimate warrior.

Lovely, but somewhat superfluous. I suppose it has a better ring to it than ‘Walk right. Kill everything that gets in your way’, but it’s all faintly ridiculous and ultimately breaks up the action. At a short but challenging six levels, there’s a slight suggestion it’s only there to bulk up the playtime. In terms of additional lifespan you can unlock near enough every sprite in the game to play as, either through repeated playthroughs donating the crystals ordinarily used for levelling up your character to a research fella or by having a blast of the survival and time attack modes, themselves unlocked after completing the game on varying difficulty levels.

It’s not enough. There’s no real incentive to unlock all of these characters, no benefits apart from a sense of completion for the dedicated or anal amongst us. It shows attention to detail that essentially every character in the game is properly playable if you put the effort into it, but you’ll still be playing the same game through every time. Unlike it’s elder brother there’s no branching stages, no alternative paths through the game which made Guardian Heroes a viable prospect to replay through a few times. Understandable format constraints make such a scheme impossible on the GBA, but after you’ve spent four or five hours playing this through a couple of times there’s no added incentive to come back to it again.

Which would be a problem if this were a fun game to play, after all Final Fight One offers approximately nada in terms of extras but it’s still a great game to dig out for a half hour rampage now and again. The mechanics of Advance Guardian Heroes make it a more complex game, but also detract from the fun to be had from it. Quickly, and almost immediately on higher difficulty levels it become apparent that the only way to progress is to wait for an opponent to attack, stun him with a block/counter and then unleash a quick flurry of attacks. Repeat until bored. This quickly saps the fun from the game, reducing it to a mechanical exercise in timing.

Fine if you like that sort of thing, but I’m sure it’s not that significant a portion of the population. Technically it’s a very impressive game, pushing the sprite handling and scaling capacities of the GBA past what limits were imagined for it, although it goes a little to far. Slowdown rears it’s ugly head a few times when the spells are sent flying amongst dense crowds, and while it’s rare that it presents a hindrance to gameplay it does tarnish the presentation a little.

The main thing that’s bothering me about this game is that it really doesn’t feel like Treasure made it, despite the obvious reuse of their IP. The touches of personality that raised things like Guardian & Gunstar Heroes and Bangai-o above the normal genre standards was what made them legendary, and there’s only a precious few moments in this latest outing that come close to that. The rest seems somewhat…perfunctory, I suppose. It’s by no means a bad game in any sort of technical sense, just a rather joyless one that’s too mechanical and too short lived to be recommended to all but hardened beat-em-up fans.

Installing the shiny new MacOS X Leopard on to the less shiny old iBook that I have kicking about as, egregiously enough, a spare laptop (oh! Such wanton excess! Swiftly, to the vomitorium!) would seem to go without a merest hint of a hitch. After slapping the disk in the drive, setting the thing running then forgetting about it for a while, it’s drops one off to the updated Desktop including its really stupid looking new reflect-o-dock and mildly retarded transparent menu bar. Also, whoever came up with the idea of Stacks assuming the icon of the last file to be dropped into the folder needs to be brutally cudgled until they have been suitably chastised.

These, however are mostly eye candy related issues. Of more pressing concern was connecting up to the Network Attached Storage box containing a 750GB drive largely full of music files. Mmmmm. Music. Off we go, connect to server, enter the NAS’s address (192.168.0.2, IP fans!). Act slightly puzzled by a new login option that seems insistent on logging in with a name/password, which doesn’t exist as an option on my NAS, or as a guest. Well, guest seems like the better option. Click!

Boom.

If you answered b) The system crashes like a total feckin’ Colin, congratulations! You win the respect of your peers, should you have any.Days of alternately changing every vaguely related setting possible and hitting it with a hammer have yielded the vast improvement of it now simply not connecting, rather than seizing up so badly it has to be powered down. Awesome.It’s always a brave move for a company to change their business model. While it might be a laudable example of chutzpah, changing from “it just works” to “it doesn’t work” might not be the crowd pleaser Apple were apparently expecting.

Edit: 12th Feb 2008: The 10.5.2 update seems to have fixed pretty much all of the above. Huzzah! Only took four months!

Anyway, the time came to drag my PC into the modern age, largely because I want to play Bioshock. One minor spending spree later and I have a deliciously dinky Shuttle case, 2GB of turbo-nutter RAM, one not-quite-turbo-nutter-but-with-capacity-to-plug-one-in-later Core2 Duo and a nVidia 7600 based graphics card. Nifty. The hard drive, a 500GB beast, for this was repurposed from the existing machine.

Now, here’s the thrust of the piece. When you plug a drive into a Windows XP machine, as the old machine was, and go through the ritual of formatting and assigning drive letters (which itself is an asinine process, but that’s another rant for another day), the default option is to turn it into a ‘dynamic disk’. I wager most people when faced with the options of ‘dynamic disk’ and ‘basic disk’ will have no clue whatsoever as to what the difference is. Certainly I did not. On doing some subsequent reading before writing this, it’s certainly the better technical option. Excellent. No problems, then.

Well, apart from the fact that you cannot install Windows Vista on a dynamic disk, for reasons that seem to be clearly mentioned precisely nowhere. I assume XP is similarly afflicted. No problems though, as the disk was already emptied of everything it ought to be a simple-ish matter of the Vista installer program re-partitioning and reformating the drive into something it can work with.

Except it can’t do that. It just sits and stares back at you with cold, disinterested eyes. It’s not going to install, it’s not going to reformat, it’s not going to budge. You can try to stare it down, but you’ll lose. What an excellent way to introduce yourself, Mr. Vista! Truly, “the Wow starts Now”. Or rather doesn’t. Start. Now. Or at all, without help.

How to progress past this sticky wicket? Delving into my archive of arcane resources I majick up a disk containing Ubuntu 7.04, which happily boots a functional OS straight from a DVD and can run the GNOME partition manager software. This can be used to delete the dynamic disk and leave it in a raw state that Vista can work with. Excellent, now the otherwise blissfully smooth install can continue. Should you find yourself in this situation, the gParted live cd will be a less hefty download that can achieve the same ends.

While I’ve barely used it, initial impressions are that Vista does seem overall a more pleasant OS experience than XP, but I’m not seeing anything to justify the £370 list price of a shiny new copy of Vista Ultimate or any of its myriad derivatives. It’s a little more cohesive, but still nothing like as unified as the MacOS X it’s imitating. It’s a little better, but seemingly not by much more than a nicer skin and a sidebar. It’s not that there’s very little ‘Wow’, it’s that there’s very little new that’s the issue here.

The real thing that gets my goat here isn’t the money it costs, or the seeming lack of advancement over the aged Windows XP. It’s that for something that’s claiming to be the best and most intuitive Windows ever to issue forth from Redmond I had to boot into Linux to install the fecking thing. If this is something that open source, zero cost to the punter operating systems can do, and have been able to do for years, is it too much to expect the same capability from the company that’s by far the biggest dog in the yard?

Ice, ice, baby, Vanilla Ice, ice baby.

Um, sorry. While Vanilla Ice is certainly a problem, it’s probably not the one at hand. However, if for some strange reason you’re trying to play an MP3 from this horrible man, it may well be. These sentences come to you courtesy of the Seamless Linking Corporation, all rights reserved.

The problem is described thus – on slapping your MP3 files in the appropriate directory for the Sony Audioplayer app to find them, it bafflingly only plays about two seconds of them before skipping on to the next. This is teeth grindingly frustrating, especially when the solution is something not hugely intuitive, albeit something that admittedly should already have been done as best practise.

Essentially, make sure you’ve downloaded the latest Sony drivers to allow the Clie to support the Memory Stick Pro, not just the standard, out-of-the-box support for common or garden Memory Stick. Yeah, yeah, obviously you should have put this on already but note this – without the driver the Clie happily recognises and uses the MSPro, and most apps save to and run from MSPro without the driver. Also, as the driver isn’t stored in the permanent flash memory, after a hard reset it doesn’t get automatically restored along with the rest of the system.

Which as it turns out was my problem, as I knew I’d installed it so didn’t bother checking, making for weeks of frustrating irrelevant setting tweaking. Conveniently, I’d forgotten about having to do a hard reset that had removed it in the interim. One three second install later and the problem evaporates.

So concludes this episode of “Fringe Interest”, we hope you have found it both entertaining and informative.

Theoretically, this is an excellent plan hampered only by EA’s coding being so, shall we say, sub-optimal that the thing just wouldn’t work. Installs to hard disk fine, then just falls over on having the temerity to attempt to play it. Patched to the latest revision. No worky. Do the usual messing around with the never-yet-useful compatibility options of WinXP. No worky. Download and install 60-odd meg of the latest graphics drivers, a ludicrous size itself worthy of another rant. Still no worky. Consult Google. No answers, but lots of whining about it’s status as ‘fuxxored’.

I have, naturally, solved this problem. I have solved this problem and can now happily make mincemeat of red commie scuzzbuckets to my little heart’s content. How have I solved this? Why, by heading off to the ever useful Megagames website and downloading the No-CD patch, which in this case is perhaps better described by calling it an ‘Actually Make Game Work’ patch. So despite having paid good money to the corporate monolith for a legit copy of the game, the reward that gave me was a few hours of needless head-scratching that I wouldn’t have had to endure had I just downloaded the damn thing of a newsgroup in the first place. Grrr.

It’d be unfortunate were this an isolated incident, but hardly noteworthy. Of course, it isn’t, as between plain poor coding and increasingly ludicrous DRM and anti-copy measures all of which are defeated by serious pirates within days, anything you buy has a better than evens chance of falling over at some point. Some of the ruder schemes will even see a game refuse to install if you’re running perfectly legitimate CD image mounting software like Daemon Tools or Nero Drive Image, for no readily discernible reason I can come up with. Again, if you’d taken the dark path and downloaded it this is handily stripped out for you. Sure, the publisher doesn’t their pound of flesh but at least you can play the damn thing.

Piracy is often sited as the force that will destroy software development, typically by, er, software developers and their Federation Against Software Theft PR branch. If so it’s taking a damn long time to do it, as any number of playgrounds with any number of C90 tapes stuffed with ZX Spectrum games will attest to.

Piracy had better not be stamped out. It’s the only way most of us can actually play the damn things even after buying them.

I suppose they could just be coded to work in the first place.

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Bwahahahahahaha! I crack myself up, sometimes.

Wait! Give it a chance. They’re not all as bad as the Star Wars books, y’know.

Ender’s Game sets itself on an Earth of the not inconceivably distant future, with a crowded, population controlled world preparing itself for a seemingly inevitable future war with an insectoid alien menace, an advance force of whom that they’ve just barely managed to fend off. Deciding that nature needs a little help in producing a suitable leader for the Earth forces, a little genetic fiddling of the Wiggan family sees a generation of exceptionally gifted children. Valentine has a little too much empathy in her to make an effective, ruthless military leader, and Peter is a few shades too close to psychotic. In accordance with the Goldilocks theorem, the third attempt, Ender, is hoped to be just right. The consequences if he’s not are grim.

Surviving six years of a childhood alternately tormented by his elder brother and protected by Valentine, Ender is taken away to an orbital battle school by a military leadership determined to push Ender to his limits, even if that does mean alienating everyone else from Ender, already marked as an outsider by being younger than any other recruit, and cutting him loose to survive or fail on his own wits and intuition.

Of course, you don’t get pegged as humanities’ last best hope of victory without having some aptitude for the role. Navigating a course of unwanted rivalries to be put in charge of his own squadron of children for the zero gravity wargames that the school and the book’s title revolve around, the consequences of pushing Ender to his limits and beyond prove to be compelling reading.

Ender’s Game is often held up as one of the best sci-fi novels of recent years, and there’s few bones to pick with such statements. Indeed, enough people seem to be voting with their wallets for the series to support three direct sequels telling the rest of Ender’s story and another three concerned with the kids from battle school and Peter Wiggan’s ascent to hegemony of Earth. Ender’s Game isn’t just a hugely enjoyable novel in and of itself, it’s the introduction to a series that deals with consequence and identity in ways that haven’t been seen since Phillip K. Dick.

Now, I’d be recommending you read Ender’s Game were it the only time Card had put quill to slate, or however it’s done these days. Instead of this, I’m recommending you read Ender’s Game because its direct sequel Speaker for the Dead is as good a book as I’ve ever read, but would be best enjoyed by absorbing this novel first.

Of all the classic games in this current retrogaming fad lauded for their playability in lieu of the graphical fripperies that many more clock cycles are devoted to in this age of technological wonders, one example stands head and shoulders above all others. One game that scrambles Chuckie Egg. That flies higher than Jet Set Willy. That sends Sabrewulf Head Over Heels. That really needs no more cut-rate puns to enhance its reputation. That game, of course, is Advanced Lawnmower Simulator.

Tapping into the Great British obsession with all garden based activities, this barnstormer was released to an unsuspecting world in April 1990 to the astonished silence of all, particularly publishers Codemasters who had their own prolific line of ‘Advanced’ prefixed games but crucially not in the lucrative lawnmowing sector. Providing the most comprehensive grass cutting simulator that has yet to grace the world, you take the role of young, idealistic uphill gardener Fingers McGovern as you try to take your company to the top of the gardening world. Starting off with only the standard issue ‘Patio Sprintette’ mower you have to build up your reputation and equally importantly your bank balance as you progress up the ziggurat.

Upgrading your lawn tending technology as you go, you’ll have to face stiff competition from your rivals and the never ending forces of nature in your quests to keep lawns the country over neatly cropped. Will you be able to join the halcyon ranks of the gardening elite such as Percy Thrower and Alan Titchmarsh or will your burned out career end up on the compost heap? Perhaps a more important question, will you be able to tear yourself away from one of the best games ever created?

You almost certainly will, given that the game revolves solely around holding down the ‘m’ key for a while. Advanced Lawnmower Simulator was a practical joke perpetrated on unsuspecting readers of the popular and deeply funny Your Sinclair magazine, receiving a glowing write up in the April 1990 issue from Duncan MacDonald, one of the most popular Speccy writers of the time, now an author having recently released the novel S.C.U.M.. Confirmation of the gag came in the next issue, with Advanced Lawnmower Simulator appearing on the covertape with a writing credit of none other than MacDonald.

As the screenshots show, even for a Speccy the mechanics and graphics were …minimal. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the game itself was its line of insults on completion of a lawn, as your poor pixel avatar slowly proceeds block by block and line by line up a poorly realised lawn. The game rewards your tolerance with statements along the lines of ‘Call that a mow-job?’ and ‘That’s a bit of an erratic cut. Hellen Keller could have done better’. Still, mow well and you could earn yourself a nice corned beef sandwich.

Hardly a glowing recommendation for a game, or even a passable concept in the first place, but it spawned a wealth of YS reader produced knock-offs all of which being the same game with a few colour codes changed. Striking a chord with the ever quirky British sense of humour, Advanced Lawnmower Simulator lived on not only in the timeframe of its initial release but in a baffling array of ports for platforms as disparate as the VIC-20 and the Gameboy.

Among the admittedly slim ranks of great gaming April Fool wind-ups (the only other enduring ones I can think of off the top of my vacant little head being EGM‘s Photoshopped Street Fighter 2 screenshot claiming the inclusion of the legendary Shen Long, their ‘Lara Croft nude’ codes and the idea that Duke Nukem Forever will ever be released), Advance Lawnmower Simulator stands above all else in terms of invention and endurance.

If this has taken your fancy and you’re up for a spot of hot mowing action, there’s a very decent online Flash version for your delectation and Duncan MacDonald’s original review is archived for posterity and the shrine of all things YS The YS Rock’n'Roll Years.