I suppose it's about time I discussed this. I'm sure a lot of you will have heard me make reference to a device known as "the Falcon" recently. I have this device on loan from the university as part of my fourth year project.

The Falcon is supposedly (we'll get to that) a Next-Generation Games Controller. It's a haptics device, some that attempts to bring touch sensation into games. Despite all the literature hailing it as a revolution in gaming, it's been around for a good two years now and nobody seems to care.

You can read all the press here, but don't trust them: http://www.novint.com

My project is to create a virtual route planner for visually impaired users; basically, we want to generate a 3D environment matching a route in the real world that the user can explore using the Falcon as a virtual white stick. Which is pretty cool, because as a games controlled the Falcon is useless.

I've got the Falcon for my project because it's been sitting around and never used. They prefer another haptic device, the Phantom, which seems to have been around a lot longer. The Falcon is interesting for a number of reasons -- it's only $189, making it affordable against a Phantom's $1000+, and it can actually generate more force than the cheapest Phantom. Something like 8.89 newtons of force rather than 3, if I remember from the lecture notes.

It can do this at the cost of the available workspace. The Falcon is basically a nodule on the end of three awkwardly arranged robot arms, meaning that instead of getting a regular square or hemispherical workspace or something else easily comprehensible, you get a very annoying polygon. When you're feeling your way around some of the demo programs, you quite often find it resisting you because the arms just won't go any further in the direction you want them to.

One of our current concerns is navigation. While the Falcon acts as the white stick, how do you move the Falcon's workspace around the 3D world? My initial thought was the arrow keys, but if you can't see the screen to orientate yourself -- well, that's no help. Another idea is making the white stick also carry you forward as you push the Falcon's boundaries, which is perhaps better because you'd feel the ground moving under you. But that might also be really awkward, if you're trying to feel an object in front of you and suddenly you're barrelling off around it.

Anyway, to try and narrow down the problem, I decided to investigate how the Falcon was applied to some real computer games. Hurr hurr.

Reason 1 why the Falcon has never taken off: of all the games that support it, I only own one. Quake 4.

It supports a number of first-person shooters, mostly Half-Life 2-based ones. However, the bulk of its support is an array of casual games that you've never heard of. It does not support any Unreal Engine games, which seems like a glaring omission to me. No strategies, no RPGs (not that I can imagine the control setup for those).

Naturally, since I have only recently finished Quake II, I felt drawn back to Quake 4 anyway -- and what better way to experience the game than with force feedback?

Reason 2 why the Falcon has never taken off: it's fucking useless as a games controller.

Yep. It could just be that the Q4 support is rubbish. But taking that as gospel, this is how the Falcon operates in an FPS.

It's implemented as a 2D pointing device -- up and down, left and right to point, leaving the depth for force-feedback. The main issue, however, is that the world of a first-person shooter is infinite, whereas the workspace of the Falcon is extremely finite. When you have a mouse, you can lift it up and shunt it back to the centre of your mat; stuff your ergonomic or intuitive balls, it works and it feels natural. The Falcon cannot do this, so you're often left with the natural centre of the workspace being in completely the wrong place. Turning corners is a bitch, but since the Falcon does handle horizontal rotation, supplementing it with the arrow keys would relegate it to purely vertical duties. Not a solution, after the cash you've forked out for this intricate device.

Rotation beyond the workspace occurs when you push to the edge; it resists you, and slowly pulls the view round. Push harder, it resists harder, and you spin round like a maniac. Maybe I have the sensitivity up too high, but I need that for when I'm pointing properly in the thing's normal workspace.

Particularly nasty were the vehicle sequences. These are a low point in Quake 4 at the best of times, but with the Falcon...

If you think you can't aim as a normal soldier, the vehicle sequences are insane. I ended up just holding it in place for the truck-mounted gunning parts, because it is absolutely dreadful. The big problem is when you want to point at enemies that have run in close -- pointing the gun right down is mostly impossible, because the workspace doesn't extend that far down. The game at this point is meant to limit you, but combining that with the limits of the Falcon makes a bit of a mess. Especially when you can't get it to the bottom of the workspace to try and shunt the natural centre back to the centre of the workspace.

The hovertank was even worse. The Falcon didn't know if it was controlling the turret or jolting you around over the terrain underneath you. Again, the limited up and down of the tank guns made aiming a disaster. Thank goodness I have it on easy mode.

The verdict: I like force-feedback.

I always loved rumble packs, and always will. What the Falcon does to Quake 4 that really works is force-feedback. You're not feeling the walls, but you are feeling the judder of your machine-gun, the huge jolt of the shotgun. Reloading was also a nice touch -- the machine gun clicks a whole clip in, but the shotgun snicks for eight individual shells as they go into the gun. It's cool.

Will I buy a Falcon when my project is over?

No. As I said, it's fucking useless as an FPS controller. Not to mention it's pretty capricious -- it will spontaneously switch itself off, and the manual doesn't actually explain what the blue, green or red lights actually mean. I've sort of worked out that blue is all good, green is wiggle me about until I turn blue, and red is something went wrong but I can't tell you what. But it would have been nice if the manual, you know, explained that?

I may not be able to aim with the mouse any more, but the Falcon (like the analgoue stick before it (cue massive raaaaaaaage)) is not the answer to all the world's game-interaction problems. It's just too awkward.

For a blind person wanting to explore a virtual world, however, the Falcon seems like a good, solid, affordable solution to the problem.

But then again, we'll only know for sure once my project is finished. Hurrrrrr.

It's funny how one of the big beefs people have (okay, myself included) with so-called "next-gen" games is that they are brown. But really, this is nothing new. Games were brown in the past, too.

Quake II, oh Quake II and your two mission packs, you are so much shorter than I remember you being. But you are so brown, oh so brown. With the odd splash of grey, when you're feeling a bit racy.

Maybe Quake II was revolutionary at the time, but having just replayed it, I'm still no more convinced than I remember being all those years ago (not that many years... 2006).

The game was made in 1997, though, and considering the run of problems I've had with this computer and games of a similar age (read: Little Big Adventure II), Quake II did run like a dream. It filled out to use all 5.1 speakers appropriately, there were no graphical problems (though it did have to run at 1280x960 instead of 1280x1024, but this made no difference as far as I was aware). The only hiccup was one of mouse sensitivity (am I just paranoid about my aim now?); it seemed awfully heavy, even on the highest setting. I managed to fix it by enabling a graphics option, "Sync every frame". I have no idea what that did except fix my mouse handling. Lucky it existed, though, or I'd have stormed off in disgust.

Unfortunately, I should really have waited for the dead of winter (or at least night) to play the game; as it is very very brown, very dark brown (and they don't give you a flashlight... Gogo Unreal and basically every FPS since), even the slightest morning glare turns everything into visual mush.

It's hard to tell if I actually enjoyed myself or just went through the motions. As I remember from the first time, levels are often confusing and there's a lot of backtracking -- however, unlike an RPG where there are landmarks and names and even maps, you can take a slight wrong turning and lose the flow of respawned enemies. Luckily I'm relatively well-versed in such matters now, so I generally felt it when I was going the wrong way.

My big beef this time is ammunition. Things like the grenade launcher, I hardly used because there are too many tight corners -- you walk round, there's an enemy, blam, you explode your own face off. Same for the missile launcher -- so ammunition really racked up for them. On the other hand, there is the chaingun, which eats ammuntion like water and is quite handy -- but you can only carry 300 bullets, which allows you to attack for a very short period of time. You basically cannot use it unless you're at that limit, for fear of running out mid-fight.

All told, the weapons are pretty boring. The shotgun and the super-shotgun are, well, shotguns. The machine-gun and chaingun are, well, machine-guns. The grenades/grenade-launcher and rocket launcher are, well, explosives. The Hyperblaster, where some imagination kicks in, is just a machine-gun again. The railgun is a sniper rifle that's missing its scope, and its slow reload makes it pretty awkward to use (especially when most enemies don't one-shot-one-kill with it).

And then the BFG10K is just insane. It shoots a bolt that shoots bolts and then explodes... Right. All off power cells. Okay, supsension of disbelief, but it's not even that useful. The most imba weapon is definitely the Hyperblaster.

The ammunition woes continue into the mission packs. Ground Zero has the delightful ETF, which is basically the Stinger from Unreal (both were 1998, so it's hard to say who stole what from whom and I can't be bothered doing any research) -- but it only carries 200 flechettes and isn't actually that effective in a fight, so you end up emptying them all too quickly or just not caring. Also, it's just another fast-firing machine-gun.

The little tesla-mines were pretty cool, but I still never used them. Laying traps just doesn't seem right in a fast-paced FPS. The last thing worthy of note is the plasma burner. Oh, I always love a good plasma beam gun. But it's another ammo-muncher, so I didn't get to bring it out as often as I'd have liked.

So, to sum up:

Imagine a sprawling industrial complex, connected by endlessly winding corridors. Now imagine it in shades of brown.

Congratulations, you've played Quake II.

I completed Mass Effect yesterday, and with the power of Pinnacle Station managed to reach a curb-stomping level 57.

It's hard to say where a game's "end sequence" really begins. I think the only definition I can apply is "when you realise that shit just got real." It's when you've just uncovered the bad guy's last secret and you're now on the all-out assault on his base. An assault from which you cannot return, naturally.

I love dramatic finales, so I'm going to consider some for this blog. Spoilers for Mass Effect, Unreal II, Deus Ex and Sonic 3 & Knuckles may ensue, so don't say I didn't warn you.

I'll begin with Mass Effect, since that's the most fresh in my mind. The end sequence here could count as one of two places -- you could say it's as early as the Council locking down the Normandy, but that's unsatisfying because you still have the freedom to tromp around the universe as you please once you escape the Citadel. But it does lock down the "main quest"; rather than your four planet options that you can visit as you please, there is only one mission before you.

I'd prefer to say as soon as you click "Land" on the Ilos pop-up, because once you hit that there's no going back. Not to mention it's introduced with the whole find-another-landing-zone intensity, where the lip-synching starts to break down (everyone is shouting, but they don't look like they're shouting).

But the dramatic intensity is broken because, before you get to the serious business, you have to wander around the Prothean ruins for ten minutes or so. I think the true end sequence begins as you finally get into the bunker.

It starts slow, of course it does. You're driving down a huge corridor with massive plant roots and mysterious stasis pods sticking out everywhere -- you look left and right down big gaps and see even more. Perhaps most telling is the fact that you get the main menu music here, that soft and ambient synth; something you've been introduced to before you've even started playing the game, and here it is again to mark the finale.

If you want to be really crazy, you could, I suppose, call even that not the end sequence. You could push it back to the big reveal with Vigil -- yes, he's not the big bad guy telling you all his own plans, but he does tell you everything. Ties up all the loose ends in readiness for pulling the plug.

There's one more point before you are, beyond all doubt, taking part in the finale. Once you reach the Conduit, and the what's-going-on-outside-the-Citadel cinematics start chopping in. Sovereign is tearing shit up and the Council poop themselves, and you have thirty seconds to get blasted across the universe.

I love the storming-the-Citadel (gosh, I like massively dashed compound words today) stuff. It's the quintessential gauntlet that must be run before you can win -- you've got the best weapons and mods in the game, your team are all buffed up, and you've got hordes of the strongest enemies to beat down on your way up a giant tower. As if that wasn't enough Mass Effect lays it on thick with some serious set-pieces: Sovereign tearing shit up above you (taking advantage of Unreal Engine 3's massive draw distances to have appropriately large-scale claws), the Geth troop ship you need to unlock the rockets to kill, debris flying everywhere... All that drama, big stuff you really appreciate having 5.1 speakers and a quad-core for.

The actual end-boss fight is a bit of a dud after all that. Saren commits suicide, because really, nobody is daft enough not to max-out charm or intimidate. Then robo-Saren is  a combination of all the most annoying features from the most annoying enemies throughout the game -- at least as a Soldier I can withstand that shit.

Unreal II has a similar idea, though as a linear game it's much easier to say when the end sequence begins -- it's when the Atlantis gets shot down, when Aida downloads the burst transmission. I actually couldn't believe they killed everyone when I first played that game. I kept thinking "no, they got out alive, they must have got out alive, they can't have killed--". Sheesh.

The difference is that Unreal II doesn't have an end boss; for it, like Deus Ex, the entire last level is the boss. The gauntlet only includes a few enormous and delightful Tosc to fire singularities at you, and instead opts for playing with the gravity. You've got to make awkward jumps while dodging one-shot death (not to mention delivering it yourself without falling into your own projectiles). Occasionally frustrating (it's never nice to die when you're all hyped-up on a finale run), but still a thunderous end-sequence. And after all those hazards, the ending is a real tear-jerker -- basically your only consolation is that you lived. At least with Mass Effect you saved the universe. Okay, you saved the universe from the Tosc, but everyone you loved still died.

Deus Ex's finale begins when you go to Area 51. Even though shit got real when you talked to Page on the communicator down in the Ocean Lab, you knowing his location and all that, the missile base mission is only a little aside. When you hit Area 51, the music goes up a dramatic notch -- let's face it, you're exploring the still-burning ruins of a military base that just got fuckin' nuked. How much more dramatic can you get?

Then you find the final chapter of "Jacob's Shadow" in the comm building, a book that basically follows you through the entire game. I don't know why, but that last chapter always gets me going. It's like shit just got real.

The thing that always gets me about the innards of Area 51 is the infolinking. Morgan Everett, Tracer Tong and Helios all start fighting over you, and every objective that takes you closer to an ending makes Page get more and more desperate. It's an open-ended puzzle level, where combat becomes basically useless as the UCs pump out replacement enemies until you can lock them down. I always do every little thing I can before committing to an ending, provoking the maximum response from the puppeteers. I imagine it would be pretty annoying being any of them, all tuned in and seeing me trolling each in turn, the very fate of the world resting on my decisions.

Helios: I will be destroyed if the reactors become unstable, and without me there will be chaos.

Of course I couldn't let this go by without mentioning Sonic 3 & Knuckles. Shit gets real in the Hidden Palace Zone -- yes, we knew what Robotnik's plan was all along, but Knuckles didn't, so when Robuttnik blasts his way in that counts as the bad-guy-reveals-all speech and Knux counts as... us, the (until that point) ignorant player. Yes, yes, complain all you want, there are still three (four) levels to go.

But what levels! Sky Sanctuary starts with possibly the best piece of Sonic game cinematography ever -- the Death Egg pulling out of the clouds, spewing Egg-Robos everywhere, water pouring off it, that ear-piercing synth lead. Sky Sanctuary has always been close to my heart, since it combines two of my favourite settings -- ancient ruins and floating islands.

Not to mention you've got to fight Metal Sonic all the way up, pulling back to the whole running-the-gauntlet thing. The strange thing about this gauntlet is that it ends and then you've got two whole stages left to go. Then there's the true end sequence, Doomsday Zone. It's a different kind of gauntlet, always haunted by the shadow of not-collecting-enough-rings-and-falling-to-your-death, an intense car-chase as you crash face-first through an asteroid field.

That feeling of running the gauntlet is what I tried to go for in This Wreckage. Shit gets real as you finally meet your antagonist and he explains everything (naturally). Then as the cave collapses around you (timer and dust being implemented in Version Gamma), you've got to tear through hordes of constructs, mercenary Giants and Daemons and forgotten creatures of the underground. The chase element is Fallen Stones V, who leads you on through the complex and back to the surface as you. Then you do make it to the surface, where we get a very small lull to collect ourselves before the giant free-for-all in the temple compound. Complete with bad-guy chat, á la Deus Ex.

I love finales. Playing a game all the way through is great, but there's nothing like an intense end sequence to really put the icing on the cake. It's the time when you get to throw caution to the wind and pull out the big guns, the huge set-pieces. Because the finale is your reward for everything else. This is what you were made for.

Ye-e-e-es.

... Gets its own page on wikipedia, it's that hard core.

Every time I play Deus Ex, I want to mod it. Just like every time I play Unreal II: the Awakening, I want to blog about it. Just like every time I say something, Kilbirnie says the opposite and Jack fuckin' hates that shit.

I've tried to mod Deus Ex before, with varying degrees of success. I did most of my work a considerable number of years ago, back when command prompts were still scary. But now, I've jumped back in with minimal fuss and it is absolutely delightful.

This, then, is the story of my love affair with UnrealEd.

I first met UnrealEd when my family bought me Unreal Tournament for christmas; the unlocking of the floodgates concerning first-person shooters (before then, the usual "too violent" excuse flew around, limiting me to the likes of Age of Empires II and Need for Speed III). Needless to say, enthused as I was by AoE2's delightful editor, I blew my load when I learned that UT had its own editor.

Except that, when you're a young thing with nary a care in the world, the dull aqua-blue interface of UnrealEd 2 is fucking scary. It took me... Five? Six? Attempts to overcome my fear of that deadly grey grid, with a really super-basic tutorial.

I never did anything proper for UT. Tried a couple maps here and there, never finished them etc etc etc. But I did acquire all the basic skills required to operate UnrealEd, and despite not having touched it for a number of years now, they all came flooding back when I installed the Deus Ex SDK (had to install the "UnrealEd fix 4" to coax it into firing up for Vista, but that's neither here nor there).

Of course, with UT you can just build a map and go -- there are no peripherals to cater for, no outside influences. Of course you can add extras, but... You know what I mean. I spent plenty of time playing about with UnrealEd 2, being generally a bit rubbish but capable of assembling things. I've worked with UnrealEd 3 in the same manner, and to the same extent; and I have very very briefly dabbled in UnrealEd 4.

It's a lovely editor. Scary when you're new to it, but lovely. I'm well versed in 3D modelling these days, and I absolutely love the slab-sided architecture present in Unreal Engine 1 games. And the additive-subtractive way of working -- it's delightful. You know, space is infinitely solid and you have to carve it out (with squares and straight edges of all kinds), then add it back in, and carve it out again. It's closer to sculpting than modelling, I suppose, but it is rather refreshing and devillishly easy to slip into.

I've actually rather surprised myself. I've been adding banisters, door frames, all the little things that you don't add when you're young and don't understand that it's the little things that give your level life. Since I love the Paris level (where you can raid houses and it's all very open-plan), I'm working on a smaller-scale version of that. Okay, the big "building" that everything occurs in is pretty illogically shaped (not to mention Club La Porte de l'Enfer is on the top floor, above Jaime Reyes' apartment (complete with medbot), above Tres Chic the generic shop), but it's got trim and windowsills and lamps and even a few bins and rubbish bags in appropriate corners.

Basically, it's full of stuff I just never would have thought of back in the day. I don't even remember the slick ease with which I've done all this -- adding and subracting and intersecting and adding semisolids and zone portals...

Anyway, Deus Ex is an action-adventure-RPG -- it is nothing without conversations. Needless to say, ConEdit is not integrated into UnrealEd (I have a very sneaky suspicion that the original UnrealEd was written in Visual Basic).

I remember struggling with this quite a lot in the beginning. Basically, you've got to -- horror of horrors -- compile your code externally. This compilation then drags all the conversation files (and other gubbins you need) with it. Then, and only then, do you have a Deux Ex mod.

Juggling all that command prompt usage really riled me up back then, but this time I've been all "wait, why did I find that difficult?" You don't even need to do anything -- navigate to the System directory and run "ucc make". No specifying files or folders, no funny switches, absolutely nothing even remotely frightening. I had my dud first test-conversation ("Whassup bro?" "Nothin', yo." "No ho?" "I need ta go.") in there and working in the same few minutes it took me to refresh my memory of how ConEdit operates.

Of course, with all the delights of UnrealEd, also come the horrors. If you've ever been near an Unreal Engine game (probably only 1, since 2 and 3 are all static meshes rather than BSP consumption), you will have heard (and probably seen) "BSP holes". BSP stands for Binary Space Partition; basically, that's what makes things solid and not solid. Sometimes, for slights real or imagined, UnrealEd will punch great big holes in your level.

While you can just about live with the view of emptiness that you get in the editor, you probably can't live with the graphical insanity that results in-game from those unseemly rents in the fabric of reality.

I got my first one the other day; which is probably quite good going, because I've been working on this level for well over a week now. The thing with BSP holes is that they are nigh-on impossible to get rid of -- because you have no way at all of knowing why there is a hole in your BSP. There are some techniques bandied around, but not one of them can guarantee a result.

Luckily, I managed to fix mine... I noticed that the hole was spreading over one side of the map, the same side as the skybox. So I moved it over to the other end, and lo and behold -- the floor of Aucun Dites, le Motel! disappeared. Bye bye skybox and all its lights, and the BSP returns to perfection. Whew.

But nothing can reduce my love for UnrealEd. A king among level editors.

Since I paid the princely sum of £3.99 for Mass Effect's latest downloadable content pack, Pinnacle Station, I feel the right to lambast it horribly.

Well, I can't lambast it horribly; it was all right. It wasn't £3.99 all right, though -- maybe closer to £1.99. Especially since the previous DLC, Bring Down the Sky, came out free for PC users.

Grumble grumble.

Since I wanted to experience it properly, and not with a level 56 super-character on a replay, I spent basically all afternoon failing to get my new Xavier Shepard to look good. I always go for the bald, slightly bearded look, but for whatever reason I just couldn't get the sliders in the right places. If only you could export appearances from existing saved games...

Anyway, proper hours later (let alone the advertised 2-3 hours of gameplay the DLC was supposed to offer; Jack and I worked out that this is just a little bit less value for money than the full game, but not as much less as expected (taking the game as £34.99 and a full run as 20 hours) I finally got underway, and had to speed-run all the early missions until I managed to become a Spectre and get access to the mission.

The mod promises "thirteen unique combat scenarios", and focuses around you getting to the top of the scoreboard for each of twelve scenarios, before finishing you off on the last special one.

False advertising one: there are four combat scenarios. There are three levels. Three times four may be twelve, but it does not make for twelve unique scenarios; it makes for four unique scenarios you have to replay on three different tilesets (difficulty varies a tiny amount, but not enough for that kind of advertising).

Since I started off at about level nine (and with appropriately rubbish weapons), all the scenarios except one of the survivals were impossible, so I went off and speed-ran Liara's Dig site up to level twenty. This allowed me to thrash another couple of missions, so I speed-ran Feros. Again, another couple of missions, so I speed-ran Virmire. Finally, enough gumption to get through all of them.

Each scenario is short. We're talking, for a successful run, no more than five minutes apiece. The game time advertised here is purely in you failing the missions a number of times because you're not high enough level to cope (needless to say, I am a whore and kept repeating and repeating before going off to steal more levels). You only get experience points in this mod when you get to the top of a scoreboard for a mission; otherwise, you get nothing.

One plus: they finally re-used all the mission decorations. Pinnacle Station itself is full of bits and pieces from Noveria, from the Normandy, to a sumptuous space backdrop (shadowy planet with rings and debris floating all around through the huge windows). Finally, an indoor environment outside of the Citadel that isn't a chocolate-box module system with the same brown rock through the glass even though this planet is all grey (Unreal Engine 2 could override static mesh textures in the level; I doubt they've removed that functionality for 3)...

It felt somehow low budget. As admirable as it is that they finally bit the bullet and started whoring existing decorations (as is, indeed, the whole point of static meshes), there is very little "new" artwork; and the non-Shepard voice acting (Sergeant Dahga in particular) feels just a little bit... Off (not enough chorus effect for a Turian?). It's like the real team have moved on to Mass Effect 2, and now there's just one guy in the corner of the office sellotaping leftovers together.

Because that's how it feels -- not like a glorious extension to a very fine game, but a mod. A one man mod.

They could have done so much more with it. In order to smooth out the real level requirements, there could have been some kind of virtual experience/equipment system -- so that the number of times failing missions was rewarded with weaponry/skills that could be used only in the simulator, and you'd eventually grind your way through if you felt that way inclined (maybe your real level could affect your starting level in the simulator). So no matter what happened in the real game, I could just work my way up the simulator; maybe winning certain matches would translate into money, real experience or real equipment.

Like the bet with Vidinos. Beat all his scores, and you get to choose a weapon of his -- there's your simulated experience translated into real money by a convenient plot point. I also wish they had done more with the names on the scoreboard that you have to beat; bets, one-on-one grudge matches... You only see four of the competitors (scoreboards are top fifteen, including yourself), and only Vidinos actually says more than two words to you (Bryant doesn't count, he's part of the Vidinos "quest line").

And it really needed a combo-kill system. Come on guys, I made one in under five minutes for Warcraft III; I think they could have managed one for this. Scoring combos could have given you more simulated experience...

When you "win" Pinnacle Station, you get given an apartment on a planet nearby. This is cute, but rather than a whole new uncharted planet with your hut in the middle, it's just the hut. Granted, it has an activateable radio to blast out those elevator tunes, and you can pot-luck weapon purchase using the "personal computer", plus there's infinite medigel and grenade replenishment...

Release the editor, Bioware. I promise I'll only make mods with no dialogue.

Oh look, after several weeks of nothing, it's a witty numbers-based rearrangement title! I wonder what RDZ went to the cinema to see last night?

On the subject of not posting, it is summer time and nothing ever happens (except me slowly poking more and more holes in This Wreckage Gamma), so nothing has aroused enough comment. But university does restart soon, and I still haven't picked my courses or finished the placement report...

Anyway, District 9. Spoilers ensue.

It pretended to be documentary-style for about half an hour, then it turned into a real film and all was right with the world. Only occasional docu-comments interspersed a pretty damn reasonable action film -- a lot more action (and gore) than I expected.

So, the aliens were Turians from Mass Effect (emaciated hips, barrel chests, goat-legs), crossed with a little bit of the Dungeons and Dragons Mind Flayer (face-tentacles), plus a bit of crustacean for good measure. Cue hands-to-face tentacle-waving impressions on the way out.

The film revolves around some Deus Ex Machina fluid that can power space-ships and transform people into aliens. But this is a sci-fi, and every sci-fi needs its Deus Ex Machina substance, so we can let that slip.

Anyway, the alien Christopher Johnson (I shit you not, Chris fucking Johnson) has been scraping around the dirt to gather enough of this magical fluid for twenty years (he couldn't just ask evil mega-corp MNU for a chopper and scrounge on the mothership itself? I'm sure they'd have been happy to let everyone go home at this point, in exchange for some instructions on how to build big guns), and then everyone's getting evicted and those scurvy-ridden agency dogs find and make off with it. Curses.

Of course, our hilariously racist main character squirts it in his face and it's all over for him. Cue some rather disgusting scenes, such as him pulling off some of his own fingernails (which is more disgusting than seeing an entire body explode into giblets, for some reason), as he starts metamorphosing into an alien.

It's pretty textbook from here. Since the alien guns only work for aliens, MNU are ecstatic that they've got a hybrid who can work the guns, so they naturally decide to harvest him. What they (traditional villian mistake number 12) don't do is kill him first; he's on the operating table and breaks free, etc etc etc.

The mega-corp tell his family he's been sleeping with aliens, is contagious, highly dangerous, don't go near him, call the police, etc etc etc. Classic fugitive storyline.

When you look back on it, the storyline (once freed from the documentary stuff) really is pretty damn textbook. But don't get me wrong, I actually enjoy that kind of thing -- this shit is in the textbook for a reason. It was all very nicely done, though perhaps with a little too much in the way of entrails for my taste.

The action steadily increases towards the end, which is always nice. The lightning gun gets more and more use, and finally the hero gets inside the robot suit we saw earlier being paraded before the gangsters (the moment we have all, let's face it, been waiting for). Cue even more shit getting blown up.

So if you're going for a documentary-style apartheid-is-bad-except-with-aliens, then actually, don't. Because it's not. It pretends to be, but it isn't. It's a classic near-future sci-fi action-thriller, the docu-stuff is just there to get Arts Council funding.

Go for the lightning gun, my son. Go for the lightning gun.

There was a time when the term "Expanded Universe" didn't strike fear into the hearts of mortal men; indeed, it was probably a time when nobody had even thought to coin the term, because there wasn't such a gargantuan pool of thinly-veiled fanfics that it became necessary.

Or maybe there were millions of horrible fanfics; I was hardly paying attention in 1997.

On Monday this week, Jack visited and was kind enough to bring his copy of Star Wars: Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II. If that's the order the titles go in; it gets confusing.

Like all old games, installing them is a little bit hairy. True to form, I have a completely empty 4Gb hard drive; but more troubling is the 4033Mhz processor I am apparently in posession of. Follow my logic here -- it's an old game, so it should only know about one core, which on here weighs in at 2.4Ghz. I suppose it did tell me to not move the mouse so I didn't distort the readings, though, so all that not doing anything might have convinced it that I was more powerful than I really was.

The game installed without incident, in about twenty seconds.

Compatibility issues ensued. Lucky the internets had already encountered these problems, and with only massive lag caused by transparent surfaces, it was decided that the game was running adequately. About half-way through the game (after struggling through an entire level with transparent water all over it), I found out that I needed to tick a strange option and suddenly all the lag disappeared. Ho hum.

The thing that makes Jedi Knight Episode VII is its cut-scenes. In the sense that they've got actual actors in them.

Which is quite a boon, considering the character models in game can't be much shy of my target 300 triangles (Milkshape has a Jedi Knight model importer, so I'm fuckin' there as soon as I get into those GOB archives). And it really aggressively cuts their detail down, when they're hardly a meter of in-game distance away from you -- you can watch as Storm Trooper helmets turn from pentagonal prisms to rectangular prisms to trianglular prisms to two crossed planes...

Despite all that, it is true to Star Wars form -- huge vistas await, with giant drops into blackness. From having to escape a crashing ship in under four minutes to throwing yourself around the top of a very tall building (while being strafed by a TIE Bomber)... It might not have the raw polycount or texture resolution (seriously, it's pretty much pixel art -- it's absolutely wonderful), but it really doesn't give a shit.

And you can run around all of this at massive speeds. The young Kyle Katarn (voiced and acted by a different person than in JK2, grumble grumble) is a champion sprinter and jumper, and that's without force enhancement. Not to mention Force Jump is totally imbalanced -- you can jump with such power that you lose a lot of health off low ceilings if you do it wrong, and if you miss a high ledge you'll hear the sickening sound of your legs breaking when you hit the ground.

Sadly, it suffers from the same slightly frustrating puzzles as its sequel. You can indeed run around a room for ages until you spot that switch cunningly disguised as a generic blinking console. The force powers, however, don't come into the puzzle solving like in JK2 -- since you can choose (or not choose) to unlock powers as you earn stars from each mission. The force powers only make life easier for you, they're not essential in any way. I'm not sure if I like this or don't like it. There is a larger selection of powers, but I only used heal, jump, speed and protection (though I get the feeling that if I went to the Dark Side, I'd use Destruction).

Yes, it has two possible endings! You can kill civilians or save them from bad guys. Even though I shot everything that moved (especially in the refueling base level, where those little runty guys have tools that look a lot like guns when they're culled into little more than sprites -- Katarn really needed some glasses), I managed to save enough people to not turn nasty. Really, when you can run as fast as you do, there's no time to ask questions.

And let's face it, the graphics are probably superior to the disastrous fanfic they call Episode I. Yeah, guys, let's make a giant and slightly lumpy green area for our battlefield -- when games from 1997 with a polycount budget that would make even me cry can out-do you, you know that shit is not cash.

I've only just started the expansion pack, which Jack has never witnessed due to compatibility issues (fancy that, Vista running something XP can't). So I'm treading new ground here, ain't that exciting?

Not that exciting, because (so far) Katarn has the wrong voice, the Storm Troopers have the wrong voice, and the cut-scenes are... Pre-rendered... In-game...

Yep. Now, by all means, change your style drastically between sequels. But between a game and its expansion pack? That's poor form. In-game cut-scenes are fine, but when you're used to real people in sumptuous 3D worlds, it kind of jars a bit when you're back to 64x64 un-smoothed textures. And they're not even in-game, they're pre-rendered, so you'd have thought some kind of enhancements could have been wrought (say, swapping the head textures to make the lips move a bit). It's all very well when you're the Unreal Engine 3 and you want to pre-render so you can squeeze even longer draw distances and fancier particle effects, but I somehow don't think bloom and normal mapping were a consideration back then.

So, a fine game and a solid fanfic.

Though the ending was a bit dud; Jerec jumped off the central tower after I knocked him out of regenerating, and this time it was him that hit the ground with that sickening crunch. I was all "wtf lol?" when he didn't stand up and start chopping me to bits.

Regardless, it gave me a horrible fuzzy feeling that I can only associate with wanting to play Quake II again. Eep.

Age of Empires II: the Age of Kings is where my story began, way back in the heady days of 1999 and 2000. I'm talking about our very first computer, the 500Mhz lump that now sits in my cupboard in stasis.

That is where it went horribly, horribly wrong.

Recently, Jack decided to come over for some playing of the video games. After I completely ruined his day at Unreal Tournament (Redeemers at dawn), we moved on to try Red Alert II.

Unfortunately, Red Alert II had not been future-proofed. After refusing to acknowledge the existence of our network cards, we tried going via the internets like we did for Baldur's Gate II last year (luckily after that wireless disaster, Jack's laptop is primed to get onto our network with minimal fuss). Unfortunately, Westwood Online doesn't exist any more -- while Jack was able to play, having previously acquired an account, I was unable to sign up. Rage occurred.

For whatever reason, we looked to Age of Empires II: the Age of Kings and its expansion pack, The Conquerors. Unlike Red Alert II, this took under five minutes to install and actually worked.

There are certain things you notice when you're installing old games on new systems. Baldur's Gate, for example, will warn you that it's going to take up a considerable portion of your two gigabyte (ho ho ho) hard drive. AoE, however, knew about every free bit on my terabyte behemoth. It's all in the detail, kids.

I'm sure you've heard my rant about my sound setup. For whatever reason, old games hate my sound-card; anything from the sound only coming out of the two front speakers to the whole lot going silent after thirty seconds can happen. Pleasantly surprising to find that good old AoE confidently pumps out all 5.1 as if it's the most normal thing in the world.

When I first played Age of Empires, I could hardly believe in having your 17" CRT set to 1024x786, let alone 1280x1024. And yet here I am, nine years later, and I wouldn't trade my 17" flatscreen for the world.

So, there's the reason for this blog's title -- Age of Empires II still works without a single shred of reconfiguration. Once I realised that it was my computer blocking the game that stopped Jack's lappy from finding it, we set to comboing against teams of AIs. Who always pick on him, allowing me to build up a giant army, undisturbed, with which to steamroller (Siege Rams full of eagle warriors, fuck yeah).

I was never a very good strategist. The thing that caught my eye about this game was the scenario editor. Fancy that! You can make your own missions!

Due to this resurgence, I've been pottering about in the scenario editor. And coming from the wonders of Warcraft III's World Editor, it is absolutely dreadful. The trigger setup is a disaster, with a choice of under thirty actions that all have miscellaneous controls it's hard to understand the function of. Set object? Set destination? I want to order him to mine those fish, not walk to them. How to shot orders?

But back then, I couldn't get enough of it -- it was absolutely wonderful. I didn't spend my time playing campaigns or playing against the AI; I spent my time making scenarios.

When The Conquerors added the triggers for setting the hit points, damage and name of a particular unit, I set about gleefully making RPG-ish adventure-ish maps (none of which, sadly, survive to this day) using heroes of my own devising instead of La Hire and the Master of the Templar and Joan the Maid (yep, when my parents got that OMD greatest hits, their song Joan of Arc (Maid of Orleans) forever associated itself with AoE. This was before I could get my head around the fact that they released two songs about Joan of Arc, so I only registered the one that obviously name-checks her ("If Joan of Arc, had a heart...")). They tended to involve really imbalanced Plumed Archer and Eagle Warrior mods.

I suppose it's nice to know that I haven't changed at all in those nine intervening years. The same maps I tried to make back then, the one-unit or small-squad adventures, have emerged again and again out of the strategy games with editors. This begs the question; why do I even buy strategies when I clearly don't care for them at all? I'm an RPG man, an action-adventure man, an FPS man. Maybe I've swapped La Hire for Henrik, maybe I've swapped mediaeval for mediaeval fantasy (and hopefully soon, I will swap that for science fantasy)...

Bitches don't know 'bout my lack of imagination.

Some of you might remember my bunk beds from various video blogs. You might remember how many people asked me, "which one do you sleep in?"

Alas, there shall be no more of that. The beds have been dismantled.

I sit now in the ashes of my bedroom, an empty expanse where once there was a great wooden monument. The boxes that once hid underneath it now lie stacked next to me, awaiting their new home.

Because my sister's gone for good and my brother probably won't be far behind, the attic conversion that was first her room and then his is being turned into a generic guest bedroom.

For some unfathomable reason, this means I get the bed and matress from there and my precious fort is parcelled off to charity.

'Tis a sad day indeed. I marked the end of my 20th year by getting a job for the first time in my entire life; now I mark the beginning of my 21st by bringing a long-standing joke to an end.

No more "Kilbirnie is always on top."

... And that's it. Bunk beds gone, new/old bed in its place.

It's all over. You might, sniff, never hear from me, sob, again.

I turned 21 on Sunday, and so the final age-related barriers are now nothing to me. I can stand for parliament!

Needless to say, Sundays are rubbish for birthdays. Not to mention being the absolute worst night of the week for an outing at the best of times...

The problem I have with birthdays is that there's nothing to get anymore. You know, when you were ten that giant Lego set that you could never afford on your own -- that's what you get for your birthday. The big base with twelve guys and hundreds of pieces and built-in mini-vehicles.

Except that, as a fully-grown adult, it would be a breach of protocol to ask for such a thing, no matter how badly my heart yearns for it.

The only items I concretely asked for this year were Dungeons and Dragons rulebooks; the core Player's Handbook and the supplement Martial Power. Since we've been playing DnD for quite a while now (not to mention my owning of two sets of polydice committing me to the game as it is), I felt that now was as good a time as any to get my own books (so I don't have to ask "Jack, how does stealth work? Oh-Em-Gee that's so under-powered!" every five minutes).

I picked Martial Power as my supplement of choice because I'm all about the fighters and the rogues and none of that magical nonsense these days. I've already played as a "beastmaster ranger" in two previous mini-adventures, and that's been pretty good banter (when I can get both my character and his pet into position for combo-kills, that is, instead of spending all my time just missing every damn attack). Then there's some kind of acrobatic rogue build in there, and since we love our cunning stunt bonuses during combat, that sounds like something amusing to aim at for the next adventure.

Otherwise, miscellaneous items abound (including the obligatory new long-sleeved T-shirts). And monies.

In other news, my summer placement drew to a close on Friday. So now I have six weeks of summer in which to fart about, lying in until the unearthly hour of 9am...

Sadly, despite working above a "healthcare centre" for ten weeks, I ultimately did not manage to get a massage during lunch hour.

Yes, personal project time. On the cards are making This Wreckage work with the new Warcraft patch (plus additional content, miscellaneous bug-fixing and other improvements), Dazzle Mechs (the audio-visual OMD covers // RDZ Industries 3D animation project) and accepting all mid-week outing invitations (because I couldn't do that with three hours a day of commuting).

So yeah.