>>Nostalgia For Infinity

Fans of avant-garde punk rock radicals the Blood Brothers may be pleased to hear that Johnny Whitney and Cody Votolato, along with a chap called Jason Clark (according to Wikipedia, this is Jay Clarke ex Pretty Girls Make Graves), have formed Jaguar Love. They have two songs up on their MySpace page, which are (a)typically experimental hardcore punk with Whitney’s unique vocals laid over the top. They’re a bit closer to the Blood Brothers than Neon Blonde (Whitney and Votolato’s other collaboration) but that’s not really saying much.

I say “may be pleased to hear” because we’re still not sure what’s actually happening with The Blood Brothers themselves. Here’s hoping they haven’t split, because that would make Baby Jesus cry… or a kitten kill a domo-kun… or some retarded intarnet shit, for sure.

Oh, and I should also mention another gonzo project, Wild Orchid Children, who have one song up so far, which sounds like the Beastie Boys squealing over weird organ music. It’s great. Apparently this is also ex-Blood Brothers, according to PunkNews, but by the looks of my 30-second research this is because Mark Gajadhar briefly drummed for them. He’s not listed on Wild Orchid Children‘s MySpace page any more.

A particularly tasteful glimpse of British culture in this week’s story. I thought I might be the first to (word)press this week, but it seems that writing demon Gareth L. Powell has again beaten me to it with ‘Snowball’.

[ Update: the rest of the club has joined us: Gareth D. Jones 'The Last Adam', Neil Beynon 'SCL69', Paul Raven 'Diplomacy', and Martin McGrath 'Eskragh'. And now I'm off to follow Joseph's lead and enjoy some fine British Friday drinking. Stay safe, nightwalkers... ]

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I hope I hope I hope I hope that my copy of this game is waiting for me, mewling desperately for me from the cradle of my doormat. Please, do not have failed me, Royal Mail.

It’s occurred to me that there are some things I can say about what I’ve seen of BioShock in the 360 demo that are neither here nor there, and some of them are moderately amusing to boot. I’ve jotted some of these down in list format, because Lists Are Fun.

• You can get drunk on whiskey. More games would benefit from this feature! The best case is when you find a bottle in a toilet next to a corpse. Mmm… now that’s a gentleman’s tipple. Lost in a strange underwater city? Drink from the bog.
• BioShock drunkenness lasts for just a few seconds, but comes with some significant vision blurring. No doubt a side effect of extended plasmid abuse.
• In a nod to our modern enlightened era – quite at odds with the isolated 1940′s community of Rapture – smoking reduces your health. Admittedly burning through a whole pack at once would leave the best of us a little wheezy, but what I like most is that it’s theoretically possible to smoke so many fags in-game that you’d instantly keel over dead.
• Despite the generally excellent level of thought that has been put into the game, there are some inconsistencies. Right after your first plasmid experience (see below) you blearily witness a pair of Splicers and then a Daddy and Sister prodding at you. But where do they go? The room in which this occurs has a sealed (broken) door at one end, and the other leads back to the bathysphere port and a dead end. The Splicers and Sister can crawl out, but there’s no way that Daddy could’ve gotten in or out.
• Your first encounter with plasmids comes when Jack finds a syringe in a broken vending machine. Without being prompted, he decides that it would be great idea to plunge this housecat-sized needle into his forearm and shoot up. I guess there’s a lot about this guy that we’re not being told. Sure enough, right after this experience Jack passes out on the floor. Classy.
• Speaking of inconsistencies, I knew where a Splicer was hiding on my second playthrough, but no amount of hammering on the door would entice him out until the game’s script triggered him. Shooter 2.0, eh?
• Hacking security systems makes things a lot easier. And the hacking minigame is fun. BioShock’s very fun in general, actually. I may have neglected to mention this amidst my enthusiasm.
• The music is excellent. The score is tremendously atmospheric, the use of 50s jazz in certain areas is spot on, and the initial section of the game features Django Reinhardt.

In late 2004 Ken Levine of Irrational Games, a games development company formed by refugees from Looking Glass Studios, announced the team’s latest project: BioShock, in many ways a spiritual sequel to Looking Glass’s cult System Shock and Irrational’s own System Shock 2. Fast forward almost three years and we now know much more about this title, which has become one of the most hotly anticipated games of 2007, and has already begun to garner significant critical acclaim. This is an impressive achievement in a year glutted with high quality titles, particularly given that BioShock is, at heart, a first person shooter that teeters between action-adventure and survival horror.

In BioShock gamers adopt the role of Jack, who in 1960 barely survives a plane crash over the Atlantic. A lighthouse situated near the sinking aircraft proves to be the entry point to an underwater metropolis named Rapture. The bathysphere journey down to the bottom of the ocean includes an animated tour of Rapture’s conception and construction, providing a rapid introduction to the game concept’s background and ideological underpinning. Built in 1946 by the Objectivist Andrew Ryan, Rapture was intended as a haven in which the best and brightest humanity had to offer could excel by the “sweat of their own brow”.

Predictably, something went wrong, and now the player – as Jack – finds themselves flung into a dying city ravaged by conflict. Broken men and women are roaming the corridors, some still wearing the shell of their humanity, and others yet more strange.

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UK genre newcomer Hub lasted two print issues before shifting to an online-only format due to the cost of dead tree publication. Fortunately they didn’t let this hard-learned lesson faze them, and since April 20th 2007 have produced an issue containing one story and several non-fiction pieces every week, almost without fail. They even found room for a special (just after #12, which unfortunately I’ve neglected to include in this review – apologies to Hub and to author Alasdair Stuart, whose story ‘Connected’ appeared therein).

Since Hub’s editors have now had a few months to settle into their stride, I feel it’s a good time to examine how well they’ve performed. I’ll disclaim at this point that Hub is the only fiction ezine I read. There are some webzines that I periodically check up on, but most of my short fiction reading is done from traditional formats, primarily due to the time I have available for reading. There’s also the fact that I spend my workdays in front of a TFT monitor looking at little words, and thus sitting at home staring at more little words on my CRT holds little appeal for me.

So! With my ineligibility to locate Hub amidst its digital contemporaries established, let us proceed.

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Thanks to the generosity of Eurogamer.net, I got in on the closed beta action for ncSoft’s forthcoming SF MMORPG, Tabula Rasa. The setting of the game sounded promising. Avoiding the usual high fantasy guff peddled in competing products such as LOTR Online, World of Warcraft, Lineage, Overlord, Everquest, RuneScape (etcetera ad infinitum), the game billed you as a new recruit in the Allied Free Sentient Forces. The AFSF is a coalition of species (though you can only play as a human) defending themselves from the encroaching war machine of the near-unstoppable Bane. It’s as hackneyed as they come but sometimes a computer game can get away with that sort of backdrop, provided the game itself is entertaining enough to allow you to slip into a comfort zone of immersion and suspension of disbelief.

And the game has promised much. Archlord Richard Garriott, most famous for his landmark Ultima series of CRPGs – not to mention popularising the nascent MMORPG genre with Ultima Online – had spoken of a blend between traditional MMORPG dice-rolling combat mechanics and the immediate vicerality of the FPS genre. Tabula Rasa, we were also promised, would be a dynamic and persistent universe, in which the conflict between the Bane and the AFSF ebbed and flowed, with various bases and map areas falling under the control of different forces. To gain access to the rewards of a certain area, you might have to work together with various other players and AI squads to capture command points and drive out the defending Bane. This sounded promising, particularly when applied to a huge swathe of the game world (or worlds – Tabula Rasa boasts several planets), and was something I’d previously only seen as a recently-introduced high-level game subtype in City of Heroes/Villains, and as a promised feature in 2008′s Warhammer Online.

So this beta is quite significant. Although nominally it’s an attempt to weed out bugs and streamline quests and gameplay in advance of the game’s imminent October 2nd launch date, it was also an opportunity for several thousand fans to have a crack and see what they thought. Speaking as someone who’s had their eye on this title since mid-2006, I was quite eager to give it a try.

Perhaps inevitably, I’ve come away somewhat disappointed.

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Another old one (late 2006) as I’m currently hosting a “throat infection party”, and some of the revellers are refusing to leave.

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Neil Beynon tagged me for this meme, which is handy as I’m currently feeling under the weather and unable to focus on writing anything of substance. Hooray for memes.

So, this one requires me to type my name into Google Image Search and post the most interesting folk who share it with me. This is pretty easy when your name is common as muck. Okay, “Shaun” is more unusual than “Green”, at least here in the UK, but it’s fairly common in the USA. As a result I had a wide range of professional and semi-professional athletes to choose from, like the basketball player, the major league baseball player, the “soccer” coach and the intimidating Linebacker.

However, what with sports being boring and dull and generally a non-nerdy endeavour (I play drinking games, pool, and squash, in that order; I also ski and board, but they’re not competitive) I looked further afield.

Number one is Shaun Green the Winnipeg biker and web designer. This is the picture next to his bio. Sadly, he admits it isn’t him. What a rip, Shaun! You spoiled GIS. Oh well: I have a soft spot for bikers, as my parents both ride and my Dad competes in pre-65 scrambling competitions. Maybe one day Shaun G of Winnipeg will be able to rip wild stunts, or possibly beat my Dad in a race.

Next up is this chap (guess the name) of Bundaberg, Australia. He’s into land cruisers, which by the looks of it is one of those hobbies where you do the utmost you can to fuck your suspension and carbon footprint simultaneously. You know, like rallying! It sounds fun. There’s a whole range of pictures on that page, so I won’t embed any – go goggle at the gear I Googled instead.

An honourable mention is due to this Shaun Green, who was 23 in 2006 (making him very close to my age). The photo’s pretty good, isn’t it? Apparently he was found “slumped over a rock and unresponsive.” Apart from the hypothermia (and, okay, being up a mountain), that sounds like a pretty normal night out for us Shaun Greens. Fortunately I believe he made a full recovery, so I can get away with making light of my doppelganger’s adventure-gone-wrong.

By this point I’d almost run out of Shaun Greens, and so I needed a new tack.

Fortunately, by tweaking the search strings a bit, I was able to happen across Shawn Green (right), the first (near-)namesake of mine I came across. I first spotted him in the credits for iD Software’s classic Doom. He’s also worked on Wolfenstein 3D, Quake, Hexen, the Doom sequels and ports, 007: Nightfire, Halo, the Brothers in Arms series, and, um, Ion Storm’s notorious flops Daikatana and Anachronox. Speaking as a gamer, sharing a name with this guy is pretty fucking sweet. Certainly a bit cooler than the indie games maker Shaun Green (I’ve not tried any of his games, but I don’t think I’m missing much).

You’re supposed to tag other people, so on the off chance that they’re interested here are my nominees:

James Bloomer (Big Dumb Object)
Paul Raven (Velcro City Tourist Board)
Ben Boffey (Gamenian Ranten – update your blog, Ben!)
Justin Pickard (Nostalgia for the Future)
Steve Wilson (My Elves Are Different)

…and of course anyone else who wants a go. Now leave me to my lemsip (“hot lemon powders”, actually – I don’t tend to buy branded).

It’s late. There were mitigating circumstances (that is, I’m fairly unreliable).

This was a quick jobby written whilst reading Our Biotech Future by Freeman Dyson.

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Bands: Silent Front / Chick Peas / Zettasaur
Date: 30th July 2007
Venue: The Greenhouse Effect, Brighton
Promoter: Tatty Seaside Town

This was an unexpected gig: partway through the day I was sent a text asking if I was up for coming down. Cue a quick poke about MySpace and an ensuant “yeah, sure.” How bloody ace is that – for all the MySpace-spawned shit that we endure, it’s still utterly brilliant that almost every band in the country has a song or two on there.

The Greenhouse Effect is a new venue for me. I know they’ve been doing gigs for a little while now, downstairs in their tiny basement bar, but what with it being in Hove, actually, it’s a bit more hassle to get to than my usual haunts. That said I was quite impressed and will probably find myself here again in the near future.

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